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Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

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Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#141

Post by Beltalowda »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #44
mellavora wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean that's even more explicit in a parliamentary system, where members are nearly always expected to vote the party line or face consequences. yes, that is a feature (not a bug) of a parliamentary system. A complementary feature is that parliamentary systems tend to have representational seat distribution. So a party that wins 35% of the vote gets 35% of the seats. And those seats are expected to vote as a block…

> yes, that is a feature (not a bug) of a parliamentary system. A complementary feature is that parliamentary systems tend to have representational seat distribution. So a party that wins 35% of the vote gets 35% of the seats. Important context since this is about the UK: we don't have a representation seat distribution like that, we have first past the post. In the last election (2019) these are the results for each…

In 2015 UKIP got 12.6% of the votes, making it the third-largest party in terms of votes cast by quite some margin, and they got just one seat.

In 1983 the Conservatives had 1.5% fewer votes compared to the previous 1979 election, but ended up with 7.7% mote seats resulting in the largest majority in decades.

I think it's a real missed opportunity that the Blair government didn't change anything when they had a large majority in the 90s/00s. They said they would, but it fell by the wayside. The problem is that Labour always thinks this time it will be different and this time they will come out on top. And for a while they will, right up to the point they don't.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#142

Post by andai »

HeckFeck wrote: post #104
cowtools wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brits don't have freedom of speech AFIK. it was never in their social contract.

We had it through negative liberty, opposed to positive liberty. The approach was that everything was permitted except that which is forbidden. So, instead of a 'right to' free speech, rather we _would_ have no laws restricting freedom of speech (libel and incitement excepted). This was the understanding that would've permeated Parliament, the courts, the palace, and the hearts and minds of everyone who understood it…

What happened in 1997?

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#143

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

I like how the English write. Maybe it's because it was originally their language and so they teach it well in their schools.

As an American, I rarely see young people able to write like this anymore.

On the topic: are they trying to kill their startups? Because this is how you drive startups out of the UK.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#144

Post by Folcon »

flipbrad wrote: post #105

The worst thing is, with the EU DSA coming in, a lot of this is probably completely unnecessary. So it creates extra bureaucracy, and gives the UK establishment a new boot to place on the necks of those that carry others' speech (and also pose a threat to traditional media), for very limited gain.

What is the current direction of that looking like?

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#145

Post by cowtools »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #114
cowtools wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but there is some limitation to what they could feasibly restrict. Tor with WebRTC bridges?

You could conceivably implement a fully encrypted p2p social network over WebRTC within the browser. You would obtain the app by simply visiting a website that hosts it making it nearly unblockable since anyone could stand up a page. Public key crypto could allow you to verify your identity or send private messages across the network. The hardest part is establishing the initial connection but since this can be done…

I've looked into this the other month. There are a number of obfuscation networks that have tried this to some extent (including IPFS and GNUnet), but I am yet to find a network that works exactly as you've described: where you can just access a "tor web portal" in your browser or something. I think an obstacle would be preventing fingerprinting inside a non-fingerprint-proof browser. You might be able to do this if you ported something like tor's fingerprint-proof browser to emscripten and have it render to an HTML canvas!

So far Tor has implemented WebRTC[0], but that's just for bridging to their main network.

[0] https://snowflake.torproject.org/

P.S. I've also considered the "decentralized p2p social media" idea myself, but mostly because I believe the ideas we have currently behind online voting, ranking and moderation are completely at odds with IRL discussions which are P2P and based on "forwarding" ideas to known peers (friends, family, community members, countrymen) rather than posting and ranking content with anonymous peers (which are susceptible to Sybil attacks). The fact that so much discussion takes place on corporate-owned forums (Including this one, regardless of how benevolent ycombinator may be) presents a major threat to democracy in general.

Instead of "liking" or "upvoting" a post on a centralized forum, why not "rehost" or "forward" a post on a decentralized forum: essentially seeding it like in BitTorrent or "pinning" it in IPFS. "Followers" of a user donate their storage and bandwidth to them, combating bureaucratic attacks like delisting and DDoS against popular users.

If you could port IPFS to run completely in a browser you would have this complete "pseudo-social-media" functionality. They have something called "IPNS" where instead of giving someone the hash of a file like in BitTorrent's DHT, you could give them a public key which you use to sign the latest version of a file that is to be fetched. The Public/Private keypair could represent a user's identity, and the file in this case could be a blog or account page which is updated with new links to the user's posts, or links to other user's posts.

So if you ported IPFS to work within a web browser, it would just be a matter of implementing a user-interface. Boom, social media solved. You could maintain parity between desktop and web versions by using libraries like libdatachannel[1] and datachannel-wasm[2]

[1] https://github.com/paullouisageneau/libdatachannel [2] https://github.com/paullouisageneau/datachannel-wasm

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#146

Post by causi »

reaperducer wrote: post #140
causi wrote: post #132

who also has skin in the game about being on the receiving end of the most horrific online abuse Do people just not get educated in online literacy anymore? An adult getting abused online is like getting third degree burns because you laid your hand on a hot burner and refused to take it off. If people saying mean things to you is disturbing your groove so much you're calling it "abuse" maybe you should stop reading…

While I don't disagree with you, it's important to remember that these companies spend billions of dollars to literally make their product addictive. In school we teach kids how to be responsible with alcohol and drugs. But some still become addicted. The same applies to social media. The difference is that instead of the pusher being some shady character at the back of the school bus, it's a massive company with mar…

Sure, and doomscrolling, misinformation, and the constant need for external validation are horrific problems. I don't think they're quite on the subject when we're talking about people's refusal to disengage with online hostility. It's like trying to make it illegal for people to flip you the bird in traffic. Is it a nice thing to do? Absolutely not, but letting it ruin your life is completely optional. The same thing applies to people on Facebook telling you to go fuck yourself.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#147

Post by darkhorse222 »

causi wrote: post #132

who also has skin in the game about being on the receiving end of the most horrific online abuse Do people just not get educated in online literacy anymore? An adult getting abused online is like getting third degree burns because you laid your hand on a hot burner and refused to take it off. If people saying mean things to you is disturbing your groove so much you're calling it "abuse" maybe you should stop reading…

You're talking like someone who doesn't live in a hyper-connected, hyper-online society. The same poor argument could made to verbal harassment. "Put in some headphones!"

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#148

Post by yaseer »

causi wrote: post #132

who also has skin in the game about being on the receiving end of the most horrific online abuse Do people just not get educated in online literacy anymore? An adult getting abused online is like getting third degree burns because you laid your hand on a hot burner and refused to take it off. If people saying mean things to you is disturbing your groove so much you're calling it "abuse" maybe you should stop reading…

> An adult getting abused online is like getting third degree burns because you laid your hand on a hot burner and refused to take it off

This analogy is broken on quite a few levels. When did the internet become a hot burner?

The internet is not designed to get hot - it's not a cooking device. If your laptop consistently got so hot it burned your lap, you'd try to fix it, not say "of course it does that".

> If people saying mean things to you is disturbing your groove so much you're calling it "abuse" maybe you should stop reading them

There are laws governing abusive behaviour in person. Our society does not just advice people to "just not listen".

Why would you expect different principles to apply to online and in-person behaviour?

https://www.cps.gov.uk/crime-info/verbal-abuse-and-harassmen...

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#149

Post by timthorn »

timellis-smith wrote: post #61
noduerme wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's something novel, then: I've lived all over the world, but I wouldn't step foot in post-Brexit, xenophobic Britain if you paid me. I'm reading this gleefully thinking of ways to flout whatever implementation is settled upon, while homegrown British companies rot. I am, in fact, rooting for your economy to utterly collapse.

Out of interest, have you seen the list of potential future PMs. I would say it is far more diverse and less xenophobic than most European countries. But yeah believe what makes you happy. Just don't let the hate get to you to much.

At least one of whom has stated that the bill in question would not be taken forward under her leadership.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#150

Post by Thiez »

kodah wrote: post #109
dane-pgp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> parliamentary systems tend to have representational seat distribution > the "first past the post" system locks us into 2 parties. What you say is true, but while we're discussing an article about the UK, it is worth stating, for the avoidance of doubt, that the UK also uses the First Past The Post electoral systems (for its national parliament) and therefore doesn't have a representational seat distribution. Indeed…

It would be nice if those who didn't vote actually affected the power of the parties. Not voting is a valid choice, it says, "All the options you gave me suck. Try again." Otherwise you run into a system where people start trying to calculate the delta between two evils and think we're making progress.

How do you see this work in practice, and wouldn't it just lead to calculating the deltas between three evils, the third being abstention? How would this be better than getting rid of the first-past-the-post system?

We saw this is the Netherlands a while ago. There was a referendum about whether there should be closer relations between the Netherlands and Ukraine, and the options were "agree" and "disagree", but many people who were in favor of closer relations chose not to vote at all, hoping that the referendum would fail to hit the minimum turnout. So the minimum turnout was hit, and afterwards they were all whining about it, because they disagreed with the result, but had intentionally chosen not to vote.

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