Somehow I have the deja-vu of when Theresa May (as a Home Secretary) tried to ban personal encryption altogether. Let me remind everyone this is in a country that already has a law that says you're legally required to give your encryption key to the police and if you do not, even if there is no other crime you can get 2 years in jail...
This told me all I needed to know about her level of understanding of complex topics. It only went downhill from there.
Even low-grade encryption was actually forbidden in France for a while in the mid 90s. I remember snickering about the whole thing back then, in a much smaller but also quite similar forum.
> Until 1996 anyone wishing to encrypt any document had to first receive an official sanction or risk fines from F6000 to F500,000 ($1000 to $89,300) and a 2-6 month jail term. Right now, apart from a handful of exemptions, any unauthorised use of encryption software is illegal.
These two former empires seem/seemed to have an over-inflated sense of importance and ability to control the world.
There was also in the 90s the weird period of export control of encryption software from the US, leading to the "this tshirt is a munition" shirts with the algorithm printed on them. And the (thankfully failed) "clipper chip" mandate.
Apple made an advertisement about the PowerMac G4 as a "supercomputer" because of onerous export controls related to encryption way back. It's more cheeky, I think, than serious. But then again, I haven't looked into it beyond just remembering that it happened.
From Minitel to the telecomms irrelevance against the US and UK. I'd guess the French investors's would love to kick the nuts of the whole parliament members signing that crap.
Why do you think it's an issue or understanding or intelligence? It's a matter of power and control. Protesting the intelligence of these leaders won't result in any structural change.
If anything, greater intelligence would only accelerate the damage and persuasiveness behind its public consent.
Why can't these measures be handled via parental control?
Children are using mobiles and tablets almost exclusively, both major providers of which supply tools for parental administration.
Content filtering is already facilitated by existing parental control. Mobile browsers could be made to issue a header if the user is under a certain age. Mobile apps could have access to a flag.
Parents should be responsible for parenting their child - not big tech. Why does it need to be any more complicated than that?
That's what blows my mind anytime I hear someone complain about all the vile content on the internet today and that we need to protect children. What about "be a parent" is so impossible to do today? Every device and OS has parental controls for a reason. Yeah they aren't perfect but they will prevent 99% of the content from getting to your kids.
It does feel like the online environment is pretty adversarial and hard for parents to deal with. In particular, it seems hard to pick and choose something reasonable. It doesn’t seem totally unreasonable to want some kind of state action to help represent the many parents and encourage creating better reasonable options.
Lots of things that feel relatively common online feel like they would be very alien and weird situations if they happened offline.
There's a cognitive dissonance to the opposition to this:
a) Content controls don't work, what are the government thinking?
b) This is parents' problem, they should use content controls.
Individual action doesn't work because it only takes one kid in the class who doesn't have parental controls then everyone loses. There's also obvious workarounds such as VPNs and a teenager walking into a pawn shop with £50 for a second hand smartphone without parental controls.
It also makes no sense that parents can't be bothered to turn on parental controls yet can be bothered to run a national grassroots campaign for this stuff (see e.g. http://smartphonefreechildhood.org)
Although your idea of an OS-level age flag is also being pushed by the Anxious Generation's Jonathan Haidt, so definitely has merit/traction as an alternative.
I like to point out in these threads that my first exposure to "pornography" was a cunnilingus scene in Al Franken's political tirade Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. I was eleven.
I don't think my parents had realized that scene was in the book. But I don't think it matters that much. Kids are going to encounter sex. In a pre-industrial society, it's pretty likely that children would catch adults having sex at some point during their childhood -- even assuming they didn't see their own parents doing it at a very young age. Privacy used to be more difficult. Houses often had one bedroom.
I don't mean to say that content controls are useless. I think it was probably for the better that I wasn't watching tons of porn in middle school. But I don't think that content controls need to be perfect; we don't need to ensure that the kids are never exposed to any pornographic content. As long as it isn't so accessible that the kid is viewing it regularly, it probably isn't the end of the world. Like in the one story, PornHub didn't even have a checkbox to ask if you were eighteen. Just don't do that. I didn't end up downloading porn intentionally myself until about five years after reading that book.
> Individual action doesn't work because it only takes one kid in the class who doesn't have parental controls then everyone loses.
The response to this, of course, is that many kids will be educated by their responsible parents.
They will know Santa isn't real or what sex is or why sometimes girls and boys kiss other girls and boys.
Are we going to outlaw teaching your own children about life next? Because they might "spread" the knowledge of... The real world they are about to experience and navigate?
Is there better evidence to the harms of porn than “dopamine” and “lost innocence”? That article written by a 17 year old, I’m old enough to be her parent and I saw hardcore internet porn in 5th grade. This isn’t new. Personally I don’t think it harmed me. But I’m open to hearing studies showing otherwise, not just hand waving.
For that matter, how many kids manage their parents' devices. Maybe less so today, but for a long time, a lot of children were far more tech savvy than their parents. The contrast between my grandmothers when they were still around was stark. One never fell for anything... the other, I was cleaning malware it felt like quarterly.
My parents for a long time used their neighbor's wifi, despite having their own, because they didn't remember the password.
That said, having the carrier assign certain devices marked as "child" or "adult" or even with a DoB stamp that would change the flag when they became an adult might not be a bad thing. While intrusive would still be better than the forced ID path that some states and countries are striving towards.
This is because these measures are not about protecting children.
It's a distraction.
Real objective is to further increase the barrier of entry for SMEs to compete (try start your own forum or any kind of challenger to Facebook et al). Government on the other hand gets a tidy surveillance tool as a sweetener.
So whenever time comes to turn a screw on dissent, the law is ready to be used.
Yes, it is a pretense and the point of mentioning "the children" is to mobilize the child-worshipping demographic who believe, in all cases, that anything that raises any risk to children should be banned, and that this should not be discussed by decent people. The successful child-worshippers also instantly burst into hysterics and aggressive personal attacks when spoken to about the subject (hysterics and tears when they agree, the latter otherwise.) Their success lies in never lowering themselves to discuss anything with anybody. They're here to tell you.
They are an extreme minority of every population (mostly people who aren't interested in politics or civil liberties who enjoy and care about children.) But sensible people are also an extreme minority of the population; we normal people usually aren't so sensible, instead we listen to sensible people and follow their advice.
So the people who want everybody on the internet to identify themselves pit hysterics against measured voices in the media, in order to create a fake controversy that only has to last until the law gets passed. Afterwards, the politicians and commentariat who were directly paid or found personal brand benefit in associating with the hysterics start leaving quotes like: "This isn't what we thought we passed" and "It might be useful to have a review to see if this has gone too far." Then we find out that half the politicians connected with the legislation have connections to an age verification firm which is also an data broker, and has half a billion in contracts with the MoD.
That's how it should work but you will find that a majority of parents cba rearing their children so they want the state to do it for them. And this extends to so many things in life that the authoritarian grip is only going to get tighter with time.
Note: the following is not arguing in favor of the UK policy, but is a general observation.
I seriously doubt that the majority of parents want the state to raise their children for them.
By arguing about irresponsible or lazy parents you are latching on to the first, most convenient thing that seems to make sense to you. But I think that is a mistake because not only does it perpetuate some kind of distorted sense of reality where parents don't care about their children and want to hand off all responsibility for them, but it distracts you from the real causal issues.
The fact is that humans have for millions of years acted in various levels of coordination to raise and look after children as a group. Modern society has made this all sorts of dysfunctional, but it still exists.
To be fair, it is because the state makes it difficult for them to rear children.
Long working hours and both parents working full time means they do not have the time or the energy. Then you have the state offering help, and encouraging parents to drop them off at school first thing for breakfast club, and then keep them there for after school activities.
> The Wikimedia Foundation shares the UK government’s commitment to promoting online environments where everyone can safely participate. The organization is not bringing a general challenge to the OSA as a whole, nor to the existence of the Category 1 duties themselves. Rather, the legal challenge focuses solely on the new Categorisation Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (the OSA’s most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia.
Guys, this right here is Wikipedia standing. It is that under the current law, Wikipedia would fall under cat 1 rules, even if by the law own admission it should not.
I'm skeptical this goes anywhere legally speaking.
The categorisation regulations are a statutory instrument rather than primary legislation, so they _are_ open to judicial review. But the Wikimedia foundation haven't presented an argument as to why the regulations are unlawful, just an argument for why they disagree with them.
It should be noted that even if they succeed (which seems a long shot), this wouldn't affect the main thrust of the Online Safety Act which _is_ primary legislation and includes the bit making the rounds about adult content being locked behind age verification.
The problem with the focus being on porn behind age verification as the main effect, is that it ignores all the other effects. Closing community forums and wikis. Uncertainty about blog comments.
It is actually (as noted in many previous discussion about the Online Safety Act) pushing people to using big tech platforms, because they can no longer afford the compliance cost and risk of running their own.
Those sort of sites already had better moderation than big tech because they’d have their own smaller team of volunteer moderators.
I suspect any smaller site that claims the Online Safety Act was a reason they closed, needed to close due to other complications. For example an art site that features occasional (or more) artistic nudes. Stuff that normal people wouldn’t consider mature content but the site maintainers wouldn’t want to take the risk on.
Either way, whether I’m right or wrong here, I still think the Online Safety Act is grotesque piece of legislation.
I am very skeptical that the Online Safety Act forces community forums and wikis to close. By and large the Act forces forums to have strong moderation and perhaps manual checks before publishing files and pictures uploaded by users, and that's about it.
Likewise, I suspect that most geoblocks are out of misplaced fear not actual analysis.
It seems to be a fairly standard judicial review: if OFCOM(?) class them as "category 1", they are under a very serious burden, so they want the categorization decision reviewed in court.
I think it will be very hard to write a definition that excludes wikipedia and includes (and I am quoting the article) "many of the services UK society is actually concerned about, like misogynistic hate websites".
I can't see any language in the statutory instrument suggesting anyone had any intention of applying it to Wikimedia? The most likely outcome is the court will reassure them of that. This might help other people running similar websites by citing the case rather than having to pay for all the experts but isn't going to magically stop it applying to Meta as intended.
I don't like the OSA and associated regulations as much as the next person -- I think we could have gotten a long way by saying you need to include a X-Age-Rating in http responses and calling it a day. The law itself is incoherently long and it's very difficult to know what duties you have.
However, I don't see what the legal basis of Wikimedia's challenge is. The OSA is primary legislation, so can't be challenged except under the HRA, which I don't really see working. The regulations are secondary regulation and are more open to challenge, but it's not clear what the basis of the challenge is. Are they saying the regulations are outside the scope of the statutory authority (doubtful)? You can't really challenge law or regulation in the UK on the basis of "I don't like it".
X-Age-Rating would only work if the server could be sure of the jurisdictions under which the recipient was bound.
To continue the thought experiment though: another implementation would be to list up to N tags that best describe the content being served. You could base these on various agreed tagging systems such as UN ISIC tagging (6010 Broadcasting Pop Music) or UDC, the successor to the Dewey Decimal System (657 Accountancy, 797 Water Sports etc.) The more popular sites could just grandfather in their own tag zoologies.
A cartoon song about wind surfing:
X-Content-Tags: ISIC:6010 UDC:797 YouTube:KidsTV
It’s then up to the recipient’s device to warn them of incoming illegal-in-your-state content.
I hate the Online Safety Act as much as the next person, but:
- Labour have made no plans to ban VPNs.
- One MP wanted to add a clause for a government review into the impact of VPNs on the bill after 6 months, with no direction on what that would mean.
- I have no idea if this clause actually got added, but it'd make sense. If you're going to introduce a stupid law you should at least plan to review if the stupid law is having any impact.
> clause for a government review into the impact of VPNs on the bill after 6 months
thats government speak for deciding to do something about the VPN problem. because there is no way a commission will not find a good reason to ban VPNs when you reach that point, because you could argue they help avoid UK restrictions.
You're repeating propaganda from a far right newspaper headline, written misleadingly to make it sound like labour have said something recently about VPNs (they haven't)
I don't care where the headline is from. Other places have the same suspicion. There clearly is _some_ concern in Labour that VPNs could be used to bypass the OSA and it doesn't take much imagination to see where this is going.
'Kyle told The Telegraph last week in a warning: "If platforms or sites signpost towards workarounds like VPNs, then that itself is a crime and will be tackled by these codes."'
"In 2022 when the Online Safety Act was being debated in Parliament, Labour explicitly brought up the subject of VPNs with MP Sarah Champion worried that children could use VPNs to access harmful content and bypass the measures of the Safety Act. "
It may not be recent but it is something that Labour MPs have said before in the context of the OSA.
The Labour think tank Labour Together also recently brought up a manditory goverenment ID called BritCard, ostensibly for government services but to be rolled out else where.
At the same time they've just set up an elite police force to monitor social media.
Labour must know people are rattled by all this, they just published a response to the petiion they recieved.
They're not addressing any concerns though, it's all we know best or shutting down debate with slurs.
In the absence of anything new we just have to take Labour policy on the last things they've said or done.
A lot of people in this thread seem to enjoy the taste of boot and are spending a lot of words trying to say the OSA isn't a big deal. A bit of a sad attitude for a forum called HackerNews. This is massive overreach by the government, we shouldn't have to ID ourselves to message friends on bluesky, read homebrew forums or, soon, use xbox voice chat. The government won't give up this power, it's clearly the thin end of the wedge.
Readit News
This told me all I needed to know about her level of understanding of complex topics. It only went downhill from there.
"The Home Secretary's husband has said sorry for embarrassing his wife after two adult films were viewed at their home, then claimed for on expenses."
The follow up article has some fun nuggets too http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8145935.stm
https://www.theregister.com/1999/01/15/france_to_end_severe_...
> Until 1996 anyone wishing to encrypt any document had to first receive an official sanction or risk fines from F6000 to F500,000 ($1000 to $89,300) and a 2-6 month jail term. Right now, apart from a handful of exemptions, any unauthorised use of encryption software is illegal.
These two former empires seem/seemed to have an over-inflated sense of importance and ability to control the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoxvLq0dFvw
If anything, greater intelligence would only accelerate the damage and persuasiveness behind its public consent.
Children are using mobiles and tablets almost exclusively, both major providers of which supply tools for parental administration.
Content filtering is already facilitated by existing parental control. Mobile browsers could be made to issue a header if the user is under a certain age. Mobile apps could have access to a flag.
Parents should be responsible for parenting their child - not big tech. Why does it need to be any more complicated than that?
Lots of things that feel relatively common online feel like they would be very alien and weird situations if they happened offline.
a) Content controls don't work, what are the government thinking? b) This is parents' problem, they should use content controls.
Individual action doesn't work because it only takes one kid in the class who doesn't have parental controls then everyone loses. There's also obvious workarounds such as VPNs and a teenager walking into a pawn shop with £50 for a second hand smartphone without parental controls.
It also makes no sense that parents can't be bothered to turn on parental controls yet can be bothered to run a national grassroots campaign for this stuff (see e.g. http://smartphonefreechildhood.org)
See also- I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway: https://www.thefp.com/p/why-are-our-fourth-graders-on-pornhu... 8-year old watches violent porn on friend’s iPad: https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/32857335/son-watched-viole...
Although your idea of an OS-level age flag is also being pushed by the Anxious Generation's Jonathan Haidt, so definitely has merit/traction as an alternative.
I don't think my parents had realized that scene was in the book. But I don't think it matters that much. Kids are going to encounter sex. In a pre-industrial society, it's pretty likely that children would catch adults having sex at some point during their childhood -- even assuming they didn't see their own parents doing it at a very young age. Privacy used to be more difficult. Houses often had one bedroom.
I don't mean to say that content controls are useless. I think it was probably for the better that I wasn't watching tons of porn in middle school. But I don't think that content controls need to be perfect; we don't need to ensure that the kids are never exposed to any pornographic content. As long as it isn't so accessible that the kid is viewing it regularly, it probably isn't the end of the world. Like in the one story, PornHub didn't even have a checkbox to ask if you were eighteen. Just don't do that. I didn't end up downloading porn intentionally myself until about five years after reading that book.
The response to this, of course, is that many kids will be educated by their responsible parents.
They will know Santa isn't real or what sex is or why sometimes girls and boys kiss other girls and boys.
Are we going to outlaw teaching your own children about life next? Because they might "spread" the knowledge of... The real world they are about to experience and navigate?
That would be the ideal. Unfortunately, many parents do not have the skills and/or motivation to manage their children's devices.
My parents for a long time used their neighbor's wifi, despite having their own, because they didn't remember the password.
That said, having the carrier assign certain devices marked as "child" or "adult" or even with a DoB stamp that would change the flag when they became an adult might not be a bad thing. While intrusive would still be better than the forced ID path that some states and countries are striving towards.
This is nothing to do with children, those utterances are just bare faced cover for increased surveillance and control.
It's a distraction.
Real objective is to further increase the barrier of entry for SMEs to compete (try start your own forum or any kind of challenger to Facebook et al). Government on the other hand gets a tidy surveillance tool as a sweetener.
So whenever time comes to turn a screw on dissent, the law is ready to be used.
Welcome to British corporate fascism.
They are an extreme minority of every population (mostly people who aren't interested in politics or civil liberties who enjoy and care about children.) But sensible people are also an extreme minority of the population; we normal people usually aren't so sensible, instead we listen to sensible people and follow their advice.
So the people who want everybody on the internet to identify themselves pit hysterics against measured voices in the media, in order to create a fake controversy that only has to last until the law gets passed. Afterwards, the politicians and commentariat who were directly paid or found personal brand benefit in associating with the hysterics start leaving quotes like: "This isn't what we thought we passed" and "It might be useful to have a review to see if this has gone too far." Then we find out that half the politicians connected with the legislation have connections to an age verification firm which is also an data broker, and has half a billion in contracts with the MoD.
Because the government is lying and this is about spying on the populace, not about parental control.
I seriously doubt that the majority of parents want the state to raise their children for them.
By arguing about irresponsible or lazy parents you are latching on to the first, most convenient thing that seems to make sense to you. But I think that is a mistake because not only does it perpetuate some kind of distorted sense of reality where parents don't care about their children and want to hand off all responsibility for them, but it distracts you from the real causal issues.
The fact is that humans have for millions of years acted in various levels of coordination to raise and look after children as a group. Modern society has made this all sorts of dysfunctional, but it still exists.
And THAT is the problem that they should be tackling.
Long working hours and both parents working full time means they do not have the time or the energy. Then you have the state offering help, and encouraging parents to drop them off at school first thing for breakfast club, and then keep them there for after school activities.
This is normal and what public education is for. Teaching online safety and sex ed should be considered no different than teaching history
Guys, this right here is Wikipedia standing. It is that under the current law, Wikipedia would fall under cat 1 rules, even if by the law own admission it should not.
The categorisation regulations are a statutory instrument rather than primary legislation, so they _are_ open to judicial review. But the Wikimedia foundation haven't presented an argument as to why the regulations are unlawful, just an argument for why they disagree with them.
It should be noted that even if they succeed (which seems a long shot), this wouldn't affect the main thrust of the Online Safety Act which _is_ primary legislation and includes the bit making the rounds about adult content being locked behind age verification.
It is actually (as noted in many previous discussion about the Online Safety Act) pushing people to using big tech platforms, because they can no longer afford the compliance cost and risk of running their own.
so big tech platforms will cheerfully embrace it. as expected, major players love regulations.
I suspect any smaller site that claims the Online Safety Act was a reason they closed, needed to close due to other complications. For example an art site that features occasional (or more) artistic nudes. Stuff that normal people wouldn’t consider mature content but the site maintainers wouldn’t want to take the risk on.
Either way, whether I’m right or wrong here, I still think the Online Safety Act is grotesque piece of legislation.
Likewise, I suspect that most geoblocks are out of misplaced fear not actual analysis.
It seems to be a fairly standard judicial review: if OFCOM(?) class them as "category 1", they are under a very serious burden, so they want the categorization decision reviewed in court.
Very interested how this goes.
Scroll to "Who falls under Category 1"
https://medium.com/wikimedia-policy/wikipedias-nonprofit-hos...
A lot of it. Often in high quality and with a permissible license.
I would link to relevant meta pages but I want to be able travel through LHR.
Have the court filings become available?
Of course, the random PR in the OP isn't going to go through their barrister's arguments.
While I agree that the main thrust of the legislation won't be affected either way, the regulatory framework really matters for this sort of thing.
Plus, win or lose, this will shine a light on some the stupidity of the legislation. Lots of random Wikipedia articles would offend the puritans.
However, I don't see what the legal basis of Wikimedia's challenge is. The OSA is primary legislation, so can't be challenged except under the HRA, which I don't really see working. The regulations are secondary regulation and are more open to challenge, but it's not clear what the basis of the challenge is. Are they saying the regulations are outside the scope of the statutory authority (doubtful)? You can't really challenge law or regulation in the UK on the basis of "I don't like it".
To continue the thought experiment though: another implementation would be to list up to N tags that best describe the content being served. You could base these on various agreed tagging systems such as UN ISIC tagging (6010 Broadcasting Pop Music) or UDC, the successor to the Dewey Decimal System (657 Accountancy, 797 Water Sports etc.) The more popular sites could just grandfather in their own tag zoologies.
A cartoon song about wind surfing:
It’s then up to the recipient’s device to warn them of incoming illegal-in-your-state content.That's no different to the current legislation.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
https://www.gbnews.com/politics/labour-ban-vpn-online-safety...
- Labour have made no plans to ban VPNs.
- One MP wanted to add a clause for a government review into the impact of VPNs on the bill after 6 months, with no direction on what that would mean.
- I have no idea if this clause actually got added, but it'd make sense. If you're going to introduce a stupid law you should at least plan to review if the stupid law is having any impact.
- GB news is bottom of the barrel propaganda.
thats government speak for deciding to do something about the VPN problem. because there is no way a commission will not find a good reason to ban VPNs when you reach that point, because you could argue they help avoid UK restrictions.
'Kyle told The Telegraph last week in a warning: "If platforms or sites signpost towards workarounds like VPNs, then that itself is a crime and will be tackled by these codes."'
https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/vpns/what-does-the-labou... :
"In 2022 when the Online Safety Act was being debated in Parliament, Labour explicitly brought up the subject of VPNs with MP Sarah Champion worried that children could use VPNs to access harmful content and bypass the measures of the Safety Act. "
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vpns-online-s...
Sure. Nothing was said directly right now, but to just take Labour's word for it that they won't go further with these restrictions is really naive.
The Labour think tank Labour Together also recently brought up a manditory goverenment ID called BritCard, ostensibly for government services but to be rolled out else where.
At the same time they've just set up an elite police force to monitor social media.
Labour must know people are rattled by all this, they just published a response to the petiion they recieved.
They're not addressing any concerns though, it's all we know best or shutting down debate with slurs.
In the absence of anything new we just have to take Labour policy on the last things they've said or done.