Ask HN: Online activities to be made impossible by the UK Online Safety Bill

A person received a 16 week prison sentence for not disclosing a password. In the context, it’s possible that had he disclosed the password, police would have discovered material that would have attracted a far more severe punishment.

So one might argue that the RIP was too weak, and failed to compel disclosure of the password (four months in jail is light in the circumstances).

Any Non Specified Entity uploading any data which could be accessed by another Non Specified Entity with or without public access is bound by this bill.

Can be used or accessed from the UK. This might be the UK expanding beyond its borders here, because its a given if it not geo restricted it it could be used in the UK. VPN's/Tor may not be able to offer privacy from the state which is my opinion anyway.

Applies to all services with a "significant" number of UK users. No definition of significant so dont know if this is the same use of the word significant found in medical studies or not.

Definition of search engine is a service which can search more than one website or database.

Largest players now have a legal duty to prevent paid-for fraudulent adverts on their service and other regulated content.

Clarification on identifying the users of the service, ie profile pics and other identifying data.

Exempt specified entities:

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Software like antivirus, antispam cloud/online submissions where said data is never likely to be used for communication purposes but might be analysed to improve the performance of said software function, ie reverse engineering stuxnet, latest spam techniques.

Published Content with commenting for the content, ie online newspaper comments. Posting a link, with or with comments, including like, dislike buttons and emojis of Published Content to another Non Specified Entity.

SMS & MMS messaging.

Services solely used for specific tasks like education, childcare and possibly health care.

One to One Aural (realtime speech and sound only guessing telephone) communication with identifying data allowed with no additional data communication functionality like visuals, text messaging. No mention of recording said Aural data.

Any public body carrying out their public duty.

Any internal business resource or tool, like company message boards, company chat facility's in all forms. No mention of recording data, would assume business includes official organisations like charities, but not clear.

No mention of private paid for programming language groups which can be accessed using a password of sorts and costs

Case by case reviews and changes made by the secretary of state so the exemption list will probably grow.

So my opinion on the above is if you are a big (US) tech service, you can self regulate, but little users will be watched by the UK state as no one can be trusted. Other laws apply where applicable.

Or anyone who criticizes those in power

If quality means low latency and low jitter, and you can get T1/E1 digital telephone service, circuit switched end to end, that's almost certainly the lowest practical latency and jitter. It'll cost real money and you might not like the 8000Hz 8-bit sampling. ISDN calling is pretty much the same thing, but you only get two voice lines instead of 24 or 25.

If that's not an option, but low latency is still important, a solid wired connection with g.711 SIP is pretty close, but packets are 20ms of samples, so that adds to your baseline latency. G.711 is basically the same codec as used for t1. And internet jitter is probably not zero, but if your connection is well provisioned it's often not that bad.

If you want a wider audio band, maybe try to get SIP with G.722.2 (AMR-WB), this is the same codec used for 'HD Voice', and I don't think it adds too much delay.

>Legislation is only as powerful as those enforcing it.

While this is generally true, it doesn't necessarily stop the provisions within the bill being used as a political weapon to wield against someone.

In other words, just because it's generally not used against small fry, doesn't mean it won't be used as a club against a particular small fry that's a thorn in the side of someone politically or judicially connected.