Live data from Hacker News

Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

express.co.uk

191–200 of 735 posts

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#191
post #175
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTTP responses (website contents) are data that the web servers you are paying for are sending. People can’t download anything from your site without your servers sending the data. Nothing forces you to send that data when you receive an HTTP request. Indeed, geoblocking is a common way to prevent sending data to jurisdictions whose laws the sending of the data might be in violation of.

HTTP GET is pull, not push. The user is pulling data, not the server is pushing data. Government doesn't care though. It intentionally have chosen not to understand that detail.

It’s the server’s choice to send or not to send the data. The fact that the server is receiving a request for the data in no way implies that it has to obey it. If someone places an order for a product whose distribution violates a law, the distributor is still responsible for sending it. Someone selling drugs is still responsible even if the buyer requested the drug. Someone distributing unlicensed material is still responsible even when that material was specifically requested.

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#192
imgur itself is an empty husk of its former self. Last time I visited their site, they had fired all their moderators and replaced them with AI. They were bought at some point by .. media labs? I don't recall their name, but I recall that they are moneygrubbing bastards, to phrase it in neutral terms. I don't intend to visit their site again. Instead, I have made an AI agent that can do it for me.

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose in their defense, culturally, the UK hasn't respected many borders apart from their own so this really isn't anything new. Zing aside, I'd be thrilled to see whatever prosecutor or litigator or whatever they call them over there bring a case against a US based company for hosting content in the US, geoblocking the UK, a UK resident using a VPN to bypass that block, and making the case that that is somehow t…

The UK also is trying the same stunt against 4Chan. The article is from a month ago, but the gears of "justice" rotate slowly: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyjq40vjl7o One thing to note is that UK government officials also seem to be masquerading and submitting reports to try to ToS these websites.

The response from 4chan's lawyers sums it up:

American citizens do not surrender our constitutional rights just because Ofcom sends us an e-mail

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#194
post #177

WhatsApp, Telegram and everyone else should pull out of EU in protest of Chat Control. Then EU will be forced to make its own chat app, UX will be terrible, and citizens will finally feel enough pain to contact their representatives ;)

People who write this stuff still don't understand that big tech IS THE ENEMY. They are quite happy to implement this, even up into the OS Level. It's called Regulatory capture. Now your legal Moat to a true European Alternative has become even bigger.

Even if, for the sake of argument, we grant the premise “big tech IS THE ENEMY”, it does not necessarily follow that the vast mass surveillance national security apparatus is our friend.

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> am I accountable? If you travel to their jurisdiction, yes.

Many countries countries witch apply their laws outside there jurisdiction and borders USA (Kim dotcom) Russia (Skripals) China (Teng Bio) Israel (Mordechai Vanunu)

USA BetonSports / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Carruthers

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#196
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who write this stuff still don't understand that big tech IS THE ENEMY. They are quite happy to implement this, even up into the OS Level. It's called Regulatory capture. Now your legal Moat to a true European Alternative has become even bigger.

Even if, for the sake of argument, we grant the premise “big tech IS THE ENEMY”, it does not necessarily follow that the vast mass surveillance national security apparatus is our friend.

I would never argue that and i hope that doesn't follow from my comment. To be absolutely clear: Any service that doesn't actively work for your privacy against any outside actor to the fullest extend of the law and technical possibility is to be considered an enemy of freedom.

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#197
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that imgur USED TO provide services in the UK Meaning that the servers were located in the UK, or that the users were, or both?

It's so ambiguous. Let's say I'm a citizen of country A, currently residing in country B. I'm using a VPN headquartered in country C to make my traffic appear to originate from country D. I access a web site with servers physically located in country E, that uses a load balancer / cache hosted in country F. The company that runs the web site is headquartered in country G but has employees in countries H, I, and J. Wh…

Seems like B and G. Then if you do business with A (what the GPDR calls "UK Establishment") and A has laws governing its citizens abroad like the UK GPDR then also A.

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "It will be of no loss if it were to fail entirely." That's decades of the public internet that would be permanently erased; billions of dead links pointing nowhere. HN alone would lose ~32,000 images from its archives, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... Is it not hubris to call it "no loss" if, say, 3 hours ago, "Design of a LISP-based microprocessor / Page 22 has a map of the processo…

> Is it not hubris to call it "no loss" if, say, 3 hours ago, "Design of a LISP-based microprocessor / Page 22 has a map of the processor layout:" was forever lost to humanity, as collateral damage to some techbros' dispute? https://web.archive.org/web/20230427181813/https://i.imgur.c... (link is already dead at Imgur) Wayback will have them, as is tradition. A crawl (non IA) has been kicked off to reconcile to ensur…

This is much less accessible to the average user and there's no guarantee that archive sites will be here in the future https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-loses-hachette-...

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#199
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imgur isn't a person, and the UK gov isn't ICE. The whole point of corporations is that the company is liable, not its employees. also the shareholders are only liable for the money they put in, and not anything else. Convictions in the UK are non-transferable. you can't convict a company, then transfer guilt onto its employees, they need to be tried at the same time.

Are you saying that the Pavel Durov situation wouldn't have been possible in the UK? Seems naive.

> Are you saying that the Pavel Durov situation wouldn't have been possible in the UK

first Durov is a French citizen, so its not like he's immune to french laws

Second france has a totally different legal system to the UK(legal code vs common law)

thirdly, he's the primary owner of telegram, not an employee

Fourthly he was arrested on fraud, money laundering and child porn charges. Those are all criminal charges, not civil(GDPR is mostly Civil, same with the online saftey act, howefver with the OSA "senior managers" could be criminally liable, but again that's for CSAM, of which possession and distribution is a criminal already)

> Seems naive.

I really wish people would actually bother to understand law, because its pretty important. For programmers is much easier, because we are used to reading oddly worded specifically ordered paragraphs to divine logical intent. The law is really similar to programming.

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#200
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imgur recently fired all of their employees, and no longer has any actual staff. No developers, no moderators, no IT guys. An ongoing protest over the state of Imgur has been going on since the first of this month. So, uh, _what_ employees on vacation?

So the company is owned by a mythical no one? Somewhere on a corporate charter there are names.

Its owned by worse than that. Its owned by MediaLab now. That's the same company that owns WorldStarHipHop, the website that encourages children to do dangerous acts to get viral stardom.

You can look up who owns MediaLab, and the things they have done. I don't think the UK is going to kidnap them if they go there. They have money.

Post reply on HN