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Wikipedia escapes Category 1 designation under the UK Online Safety Act for now

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Re: Wikipedia escapes Category 1 designation under the UK Online Safety Act for now

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wikipedia page implies that all the designated "Category 1" websites will now either have to collect ID from their users worldwide, or remove any presence in the UK. Edit: there's a list of the Category 1 services at https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c... I.e., Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Quora, Reddit, Roblox, Snapchat, TikTok, Whatsapp, X, YouTube. Plus others at the Category 2A or…

How did Discord escape category 1, the most notorious and infamous chat client!? Lmao

Insane Telegram isn't even listed.

I wonder how simplex.chat would fair if it ever got popular enough, they're based in the UK and likely the most private messenger ever made, because the app introduces zero metadata. It's decentralized, but they have servers and the dev is based there...

Re: Wikipedia escapes Category 1 designation under the UK Online Safety Act for now

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because England is very old it has a whole bunch of things which did charge a toll and then that expired, so, nope. It does also have situations where people go "Hey, this toll bridge was built 50 years ago, surely the tolls should be abolished" and the people who built the bridge are like "Nope. See, here's the press about it 50 years ago saying what a great idea it is to have the tolls be slightly lower but perpetu…

The River Severn bridges connecting Wales and England were marked toll free in 2018 after 50 years of collecting tolls: https://www.visitmonmouthshire.com/plan-your-visit/how-to-ge...

The Forth Road Bridge stopped having tolls in 2008 and was effectively replaced more recently by a new bridge, the Queensferry Crossing, that has never had tolls.

Re: Wikipedia escapes Category 1 designation under the UK Online Safety Act for now

#93
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK is the worse for this too. We have a story in the news currently about a foreign child gang rape leader (yes, those are things in the UK) who raped at least 30 children and was released early after serving just 14 years in prison. We have major children sexual abuse scandals in this country basically every year too. Politicians never care about that though.

Andrew Windsor walks around a free man.

What law do you think he's broken?

Re: Wikipedia escapes Category 1 designation under the UK Online Safety Act for now

#94
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So it's true that one level of depth is "enforce the law and unjust laws will be repealed", but the second level is "people prefer to not enforce the law" and "people decide the government" so it's meta-structures that determine outcomes here. The thing about "people" is that they're us. If we don't want a capricious autocracy then we have to make different choices. > The CIA Sabotage Manual offers some techniques…

I'm having a hard time to parse this last part. Care to elaborate? > In a system with rule of law, the rules are already being followed so that stupid/unreasonable rules are reformed as they're encountered and you can't use the massive backlog of them to make everything grind to a halt while people scramble to do all at once the thing they should have been doing continuously over time.

> I'm having a hard time to parse this last part. Care to elaborate?

If you actually have rule of law then rules are enforced even if they're stupid, because that's what rule of law is -- no one is above the law. Which in turn causes stupid rules to promptly get fixed because actually enforcing them causes problems and fixing the rules is necessary to make the problems stop getting caused.

Whereas if you don't have rule of law and just ignore most of the rules then the bad rules keep accumulating until someone nefarious comes in and decides to start enforcing them, either capriciously as an autocrat or systematically as a saboteur. At which point you have a huge emergency because it's hard to instantly reform the enormous backlog of bad rules that have been accumulating while no one was paying attention to them.

Re: Wikipedia escapes Category 1 designation under the UK Online Safety Act for now

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As my dad told us every time we crossed a bridge when we were kids: "Tolls are a ratchet - they only move in one direction."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Former_toll_roads_in_...

Don't make me tap the "you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason into" sign

Re: Wikipedia escapes Category 1 designation under the UK Online Safety Act for now

#96
post #74
post #19

I wonder what the difference in legal traditions is between the US and the Old World. The latter have a lot of "Yes, you're technically in trouble under the guidelines the enforcement authority rules using but they're going to make an exception for you, for now" and the former have a lot of "Yes, the spirit was to block this kind of thing but the letter of the law is that you do get away with it". What informed this…

One is following the law and the other isn't. If the letter of the law doesn't enforce the spirit of the law, it was poorly written or it's out of date and needs to be amended. In theory, the US system allows for those updates. In reality it's a little less clear. Currently we're absolutely moving to the fealty to the crown system and it's not great. Any system that makes specific carve outs for anyone to not follow…

> chronyism (not sure of that spelling)

Since you mentioned you weren't sure: it's "cronyism", no 'h'.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cronyism

This is despite having an etymology that - at least according to etymonline - does come from greek "khronos"

https://www.etymonline.com/word/cronyism

Re: Wikipedia escapes Category 1 designation under the UK Online Safety Act for now

#97
post #77
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the letter of the law doesn't enforce the spirit of the law, it was poorly written or it's out of date and needs to be amended. I think if you rewrite that to, “If the letter of the law is demonstrably out of sync with the public sense of the spirit of the law, then it should be amended,” I’m with you. But I think that’s not what you meant? If you meant “the letter of the law should define prescribed and proscri…

Here is a fun exploration of that concept: https://novehiclesinthepark.com/

Yeah, apparently my views match others 85% of the time, but I thought it was funny about how my views of what is a vehicle differs a lot from other people on ones I thought would be not controversial.

Things like only 15% of people think a wheelchair is a vehicle but people seem evenly split on a bike being a vehicle or not. Even stranger 40% of people think a police car isn't a vehicle.

That to me shows that people aren't answering the question asked "is this a vehicle" but answering the subtext "should this be allowed in the park". Or in other words, they're trying to bend the concept of what is and isn't a vehicle to an inviolable rule rather than saying what is and isn't a vehicle (and some are tricky) and then amending the rule to fit. That is problematic as they're applying their own biases on the intention of the rule rather than understanding what the rule maker thought.

There's also some others where I answered overly literally, e.g. the plane over the park. In my jurisdiction, that wouldn't be considered to be in the park, and so I answered that it wasn't. If that plane had crash landed in the the park, then obviously it would be a vehicle and in the park. So, I wasn't answering based on whether it was a vehicle, but whether it was in the park. Equally, a lot of questions seem designed to include toys where I'd see no possible interpretation for them to be a vehicle, e.g. the toy car. I also happen to know that in my country, skates and foot-powered skateboards aren't legally considered to be vehicles, but bikes are, so I answered that way even if I personally think they should be classified as vehicles. And a tank is still a vehicle, even if it no longer has an engine it's just an inoperable vehicle.

Re: Wikipedia escapes Category 1 designation under the UK Online Safety Act for now

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As my dad told us every time we crossed a bridge when we were kids: "Tolls are a ratchet - they only move in one direction."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Former_toll_roads_in_...

Because as we all know, even if a claim holds in 99.999% of cases, all you have to do is point out the 0.001% extreme outlier cases where it didn't hold true, to completely invalidate the entire claim.

Re: Wikipedia escapes Category 1 designation under the UK Online Safety Act for now

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Former_toll_roads_in_...

Because as we all know, even if a claim holds in 99.999% of cases, all you have to do is point out the 0.001% extreme outlier cases where it didn't hold true, to completely invalidate the entire claim.

If you claim that something only moves in one direction, then one counterexample is enough to invalidate that claim. If you say in 99.999% of cases something only moves in one direction, then that claim can be invalidated by showing that either more or less of cases result as claimed... Isn't that straightforward thinking?

I seriously doubt that 99.999% of all toll roads are "ratchets" that only move in one direction, i.e. have never had the tolls lowered or removed, only increased. Examples of tolls being lowered and removed are also not extreme outliers it's one of the possible directions in which a toll's price can move and everyone and their aunt, but maybe not their dad, knows that.

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