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Lobsters blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act

lobste.rs

81–90 of 90 posts

Re: Lobsters blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act

#81
post #56
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still be fined for 'failing to comply' with the legislation even if no objectionable content has been posted. To be in compliance there is a whole list of things you need to do, some of which are expensive.

Which things are expensive?

Hiring lawyers, attending compliance training courses, writing software to scan for CSAM, modifying your website so that it can verify the identity and age of every poster.

Re: Lobsters blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act

#82
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why Brave was blocked [1.]. I'd have felt the same way, and people are entitled to their grudges. I think the grudge is reasonable. [1.] https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/issues/45#issue...

There's millions of much stronger reasons to hold grudges against Google and Microsoft, yet their browsers are somehow fine? It's incredibly arbitrary. For what it's worth I think crypto has been a scourge on society so I'm not making this point for any crypto shilling reasons.

Not only is not "incredibly arbitrary" for lobsters to respond in kind to Brave's specific, targeted action against lobsters -- it's not arbitrary whatsoever.

Re: Lobsters blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act

#84

ELI5: Why should a US-based site, hosted on US soil and run by a US citizen, care about laws in all the hundreds of other random countries located thousands of miles away?

Because they can be arrested and extradited to UK. Not a high chance, but not zero. And a realistic one is to be arrested while traveling in Europe and extradited to UK.

Idk about you but I tend to avoid travel to police states and places where being rude is a crime.

Extraditing someone because their website uses encryption would force them to prosecute so many people and organizations it would be a joke. You would have to really piss them off.

Re: Lobsters blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act

#85
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least HN allows you to come back under another name and with that is less at risk of totally succumbing to the echo chamber mentality. It also does not tie new users to existing ones nor are existing users who happen to invite new users who are deemed to be 'problematic' punished for those invitations.

> At least HN allows you to come back under another name You can also come back under the same account, which is what I did. I emailed dang, and promised to respect the site's guidelines this time. Lobste.rs on the other hand has terrible moderation, with moderators arguably being from one political clique. You can find details about the ridiculous ban they issued on my account in this X thread: https://x.com/sridca/…

Yes, well, I probably would be lying if I did so so I just reincarnate instead. All my bans have been over the same thing, this me not following the 'west coast narrative' in some clearly political discussions. I can't promise to say what I consider to be closer to the truth and I do think sites like these are better off with a more diverse [1] group of participants so I'll just settle for a short lifespan while I wait for the place to become more accepting to different viewpoints.

[1] diverse in the only way which really matters, this being diversity of opinion. On the internet nobody knows you're a dog after all.

Re: Lobsters blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act

#86
post #55

I don't know anything about lobste.rs, but they mention lfgss and when that was discussed on HN a couple months ago the person that runs lfgss mentioned these as things they would have to do to comply: > 1. Individual accountable for illegal content safety duties and reporting and complaints duties > 2. Written statements of responsibilities > 3. Internal monitoring and assurance > 4. Tracking evidence of new and inc…

I'd like to make a prediction:

The requirements will be modified to include a larger number of sites whenever the government may find this to be convenient. The MAU will limit will be reduced, and/or the scope of "illegal/harmful content" will be expanded.

Re: Lobsters blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act

#87
post #38

I definitely get the proactive response here, as I’ve considered the same for my small platform. The biggest issue is the definitions of who the majority of the requirements apply to is quite hard to find. It’s buried on page 65 of this pdf: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onli... It defines “large service” as “a service that has more than 7 million monthly active United Kingdom users”. This i…

Many of the requirements apply to services of any size. This is why I will be blocking UK access to my little service (hosted in my home in the UK) when the act comes into force.

Re: Lobsters blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act

#88
post #81
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which things are expensive?

Hiring lawyers, attending compliance training courses, writing software to scan for CSAM, modifying your website so that it can verify the identity and age of every poster.

The compliance training requirement isn't that you attend training. It is that when you hire people to design or operationally manage your site you train then in how the site handles compliance. It also only applies to large sites or multi-risk sites.

The scanning for CSAM only applies to (1) large sites that are at medium or high risk for image-based CSAM and (2) services that are at high risk of image-based CSAM and either have more than 700k monthly UK users or are file-storage or file-sharing services.

I might have missed it but the only age verification requirement I'm seeing is that if the site is a large service that has a medium risk for grooming or it has a high risk for grooming and it already has a means to determine the age of users, then the site has to do some things like when recommending new contacts not recommend connections between adults and children and not allowing adults to send unsolicited DMs to children.

A small to medium sized forum site that is already doing to kind of monitoring and moderation that you have to do to keep your site from being completely overrun with spam and off topic material shouldn't really have to make many changes. Mostly it will just be writing some documentation.

Re: Lobsters blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any previous cases of the UK intercepting and arresting a US citizen traveling through Europe for something that isn't a crime in the US?

Would you take the risk if it were you hosting the site?

It's probably an order of magnitude smaller than the risk of getting into trouble in more or less any country for not effectively keeping tabs on the kind of content that's being posted in the forum you're hosting.
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