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How the UK's online safety bill threatens Matrix

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101–110 of 165 posts

Re: How the UK's online safety bill threatens Matrix

#101
post #74

This appears to be the thing that will finally take my sites offline. I'm an individual who runs 300 forums. I do this because I believe that forums organised around an interest bring people together and help address loneliness. Further I believe that if you do that, you also help minimise the impact of depression and things like the suicide rate for middle aged men. The forums are things like this: https://www.lfgss…

Transfer them to the United States and simply ban European members?

or better, transfer them to Europe and simply ban UK.

Re: How the UK's online safety bill threatens Matrix

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government's camera network in London is very small, only 23708 cameras (15516 of which are from Transport of London across the tube network)[0]. It's a fairly small network for an authoritarian government. [0] https://www.cctv.co.uk/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-there-in-lo... .

In what way is that a "very small" network? In fact, given how small London is that's a huge network.

Small London?

London's population: 8.982 million

Area: 8,382 km2.

How is that small?

Re: How the UK's online safety bill threatens Matrix

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transfer them to the United States and simply ban European members?

or better, transfer them to Europe and simply ban UK.

There is a good chance a significant portion of those forums have UK members. You can't just hollow out a community like that and expect it to survive.

Re: How the UK's online safety bill threatens Matrix

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you have someone directly sentenced for not disclosing their password: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-45365464

I mean, we can be doing this back and forth for a while, but again, to quote from the article: "Judge Christopher Parker did not accept Nicholson's "wholly inadequate" excuse that providing his password would expose information relating to cannabis." So basically he said "I know the password, but I'm not going to tell you". That's obstructing justice. My point is if you say you don't remember and maintain saying you…

Ok I see you point - I have read an solicitor opinion that this may be a valid defense, however, you could likely be expected to prove that you have a medical condition or history of forgetting things. I am pretty sure you cannot just say "oh I forgot, my bad, sorry."

Re: How the UK's online safety bill threatens Matrix

#105
post #12
post #3

> Forcing a “duty of care” responsibility on organisations which operate online will not only drown small and medium sized companies in administrative tasks and costs, it will further accentuate the existing monopolies by Big Tech. I often wonder about this. I mean, just the other day there was an article[1] here about sending GDPR requests to a health non-profit in order to sequence your genes for free. The costs of…

GDPR, or CCPA, isn't all that costly as long as you stop thinking of user data as something for you to harvest, mine, resell and profit from. If you instead treat user data like a security liability, system designs and trade-offs will flow from there. They'll help ensure you design systems that minimise collection and anonymise things early, remove data promptly when no longer needed, and make it easy to audit what d…

My grandma runs an online web store. She wants to know how many customers are converting and what products are popular, so I put Google Analytics on the site. Despite the issues with having to collect data, it's all she can afford to do (and quite frankly, cannot afford not to).

The infrastructure to do analytics this easily does not exist - unless you expect a 65 yr old to trawl through Apache logs on the command line? Extrapolate that to everything from audits, logging, anonymization of data and of course it's going to push people to use centralized solutions.

From my perspective open source communities seem to have an ideological issue against analytics and business data, so very few solutions exist outside of big tech. What am I to do?

Re: How the UK's online safety bill threatens Matrix

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is that a "very small" network? In fact, given how small London is that's a huge network.

Small London? London's population: 8.982 million Area: 8,382 km2. How is that small?

Oh this is going to be fun.

I see you're referring to the "Metro area of London". when referring to that size. The size of London proper is 1,572 km2 (Wikipedia, as well)

So now, the fun question is "what area is the camera count referring to?"

Further, the quantity of cameras matters less than the areas the cameras can see that is covered.

Even further-further is how easy it is for the government to acquire the footage off those cameras.

Re: How the UK's online safety bill threatens Matrix

#107

One of the most frustrating things about this legislation is that it's set up so that the only outfits with the resources to do the requested censorship would be a GAFAM. Which is utterly perverse, as on one hand the UK govt is despairing about the extent to which the UK is dependent on Big Tech social media and the control they exert on society... whilst simultaneously pushing through legislation which effectively e…

It's the same with GDPR. When I worked for a large enterprise, we had a legal/compliance team of dozens of people and a huge outsourced legal budget. When I worked in the startup of my wife, it was me implementing GDPR compliance.

I'm not sure I understand. A large company has a whole team and a small start-up has one person assign the task? That sounds entirely reasonable.

Re: How the UK's online safety bill threatens Matrix

#108

We have a little forum with a niche community. Few months ago we have closed the registration, because of spam and also because we had people posting questionable stuff and then reporting it to the hosting provider. There is not much money from ads, it barely covers the servers. Moderators do not always have time to react quickly to something stupid. Probably many other communities will be forced to close with either…

> we would have to boot them out or create a legal entity in the EU to process content removal requests as I understand, in a year or so.

Have you considered just ignoring them? Provided you're not an (international) business, you can likely afford to ignore foreign governments, and if they want to block you, that's up to them.

Re: How the UK's online safety bill threatens Matrix

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cameras tracking everything everywhere in UK would say that it's long been an authoritarian country. Authoritarianism is a sliding scale. From what I can gather, lots of humans that have any political pull at all tend to be authoritarian (against the kinds of people they don't like, of course).

If your definition of authoritarianism is ubiquitous video surveillance you'll have to come to terms with the fact that not only every politician is authoritarian but just about every citizen, because there's pretty strong support for these security measures. The word authoritarianism appears to have lost all meaning in internet circles. What authoritarianism actually is, is a people being governed without their cons…

[deleted]

Re: How the UK's online safety bill threatens Matrix

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cameras tracking everything everywhere in UK would say that it's long been an authoritarian country. Authoritarianism is a sliding scale. From what I can gather, lots of humans that have any political pull at all tend to be authoritarian (against the kinds of people they don't like, of course).

If your definition of authoritarianism is ubiquitous video surveillance you'll have to come to terms with the fact that not only every politician is authoritarian but just about every citizen, because there's pretty strong support for these security measures. The word authoritarianism appears to have lost all meaning in internet circles. What authoritarianism actually is, is a people being governed without their cons…

I'm speaking of Authoritarianism in the way that the Political Compass refers to it: https://www.politicalcompass.org/
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