Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 887 posts

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#221

Post by saati »

owisd wrote: post #117
nickslaughter02 wrote: post #10

Wikimedia should block UK access. That will get the attention of media and popularity contest politicians might change their mind. Remember the "Repeal the Online Safety Act" petition? It has gotten over half a million signatures and the response from the government was a loud "no". > The Government has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and eff…

Problem with Wikipedia specifically going all-in on a UK block is, due to the licence, there's nothing to stop someone circumventing the block to make a OSA-compliant Britipedia mirror with minimal effort.

Except the effort and money needed to be OSA compliant. As the whole enwiki is permissively licensed everyone is welcome to do it though.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#222

Post by mathiaspoint »

bArray wrote: post #194

> The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone". Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for some . > In particular the foundation is concerned the extra duties required - if Wikipedia was classed as Category 1 - would mean it would have to verify the identity of its c…

A British constitution makes no sense, power is delegated from the king not from the member states like in the US or Canada. The only way the UK could end up with a constitution that's meaningful and not performative would be after a civil war.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#223

Post by ljosifov »

US should slap travel bans on UK politicians travelling to Disney parks and similar in Florida with their families. And/or with their older children visiting NYC. The combined pressure of the wives and their children, will knock sense in their thick skulls quickly. In the sense of - being stupid is not cost free. Atm it's cost free for them, and costly for me.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#224

Post by yndoendo »

taraindara wrote: post #191
RobKohr wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that the left and the right are tag teaming on this topic. Both sides want to track who says what on the internet for their own purposes.

I’ll add to this, no politician is on your side unless it means getting your vote to keep them in power. It’s hard to be an actual good person and get too far up in politics, especially in today’s environment. So, yes, I believe they both want tracking to exist, because they both benefit massively from it.

I would add, some politicians are on your side on select matters, most are not.

Sad thing is people ignore a politician's actions and keep applying Yes or No to their marketing statements. They use social engineering wording just to get votes and then they will ignore that standing to support their own action of legislation crafting and voting.

By block and limiting access to information, such as Wikipedia, they are advocating for a dumb populous. Irony is that in order to have a strong national security, an educated populous is needed. They are the ones see beyond the easily deployed social engineering tactics and are better at filtering out misinformation.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#225

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

nemomarx wrote: post #217
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record, I'm not actually against age verification for certain content. But it would have to be: 1) private - anonymous (don't know who is requesting access) and unlinkable (don't know if the same user makes repeated requests or is the same user on other services). 2) widely available and extremely easy to register and integrate. The current situation is that it's not easy, or private, or cheap to integrate. A…

there's some irony that the EU is set to have a fairly anonymous solution like next year. they could have waited or tried to use similar tech for this, in theory

Interesting - do you have a link to it?

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#226

Post by _Algernon_ »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #209
slaymaker1907 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Act like an authoritarian regime, get treated like other authoritarian regimes.

For the record, I'm not actually against age verification for certain content. But it would have to be: 1) private - anonymous (don't know who is requesting access) and unlinkable (don't know if the same user makes repeated requests or is the same user on other services). 2) widely available and extremely easy to register and integrate. The current situation is that it's not easy, or private, or cheap to integrate. A…

Add to that 3) Verifiable to a lay person that the system truly has those properties, with no possibility of suddenly being altered to no longer have those properties without it exceedingly obvious.

This whole concept runs into similar issues as digital voting systems. You don't need to just be anonymous, but it must be verifiably and obviously so — even to a lay person (read your grandma with dementia who has never touched a computer in her life). It must be impossible to make changes to the system that remove these properties without users immediately notice.

The only reason why paper identification has close to anonymous properties is the fallibility of human memory. You won't make a computer with those properties.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#227

Post by flipbrad »

nemomarx wrote: post #217
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record, I'm not actually against age verification for certain content. But it would have to be: 1) private - anonymous (don't know who is requesting access) and unlinkable (don't know if the same user makes repeated requests or is the same user on other services). 2) widely available and extremely easy to register and integrate. The current situation is that it's not easy, or private, or cheap to integrate. A…

there's some irony that the EU is set to have a fairly anonymous solution like next year. they could have waited or tried to use similar tech for this, in theory

This is about the Category 1 duties arriving by 2027, not this year's tranche of rules (such as age gating).

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#228

Post by cm2012 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #202
cm2012 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All polling has problems like this, but YouGov has the same methodology for everything and usually gets within a margin of error of +-8. Even if they have an especially bad sample, the UK probably really does support the law. Think about how many people are less comfortable with porn than tech interested males between age 18 and 40.

>Think about how many people are less comfortable with porn than tech interested males between age 18 and 40 Are you suggesting that techies do not have any sexual appetite? That runs counter to many stereotypes I've encountered

No i awkwardly phrased it. Im saying that demographic (also the majority here on HN) loves porn more than any other demographic.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#229

Post by jimbob45 »

vaylian wrote: post #182

Wikipedia has been introduced as the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Anyone can publish problematic material or false information. But it's also Wikipedia's greatest strength that it has been so open to basically everyone and that gave us a wide range of really good articles that rivaled the Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia is a product of the free internet. It is a product of a world that many politicians still…

Wikipedia has been introduced as the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Anyone can publish problematic material or false information.

But the top articles are always perma-locked and under curation. Considering how much traffic those articles receive relative to the more esoteric articles, the surface area of vandalizable articles that a user is exposed to is relatively low. Also to that end, vandalism has a low effort-to-impact ratio.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#230

Post by notpushkin »

righthand wrote: post #173
freedomben wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there backlash for this sort of thing? When they did their blackout thing some years back, a lot of people who were sympathetic to the cause were also highly annoyed at the disruption to their workflows, to the point that if it had gone on much longer it might have backfired on Wiki. I've seen similar affects with protesters blocking roads and such. I always wonder if it's just a small minority or if it happens mo…

What would the backlash possibly be? Someone in the UK starting their own censored Wikipedia would be a good thing in the long and short run. Backlash but positive backlash.

> Someone in the UK starting their own censored Wikipedia would be a good thing in the long and short run.

I’m seeing that playing out with a Russian Wikipedia (forked as Ruwiki and heavily edited to be in line with Kremlin propaganda), and I don’t like it one bit. There’s not much you can do as it’s free/open content, but it still sucks.

Post reply on HN