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IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

prestonbyrne.com

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Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#371

Post by imtringued »

gpm wrote: post #92
landl0rd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, one has chosen to make something available for contact within one country. One is not actively himself reaching across borders to do so. One cannot reasonably be required to take any affirmative action to fulfill the whims of a foreign government. Also, Britain isn't important enough to make this stick against e.g. an American. If someone writes me a letter asking a question about material that is prohibited in h…

What is having your web server send IP packets with an IP address addressed to an overseas address to your ISP who you have signed a contract with to have them deliver those packets to the designated address if not actively reaching across borders? That's what happens when you respond to a request after all. (Up to very minor nits, e.g. you might be paying a cloud provider instead of an ISP).

You seem grossly misinformed about how the internet works. The server isn't located in the country that made the request. There is an entire network between the server and the client. A part of that network exists in the US and another part of it exists in the UK.

The network infrastructure is the thing that is performing the delivery that is actively reaching across borders. Not the webserver.

The entire HN submission is full of people saying that it is the UK networks responsibility to make sure that their laws are upheld and that anything happening inside US borders is simply people going above and beyond in assisting the UK in the pursuit of the enforcement of its laws. The geoblocks on the side of the webserver are a form of optional assistance and a sign of goodwill.

Meanwhile Ofcom seems to be of the opinion that this isn't enough yet they simultaneously do nothing about the violators physically located in the UK. This means they are going out of their way to make an unenforceable and impossible to implement law so that they can manufacture probable cause.

Website operators can give the UK a list of IPs to block, which would make it very easy for the UK to enforce their own laws even against VPNs, but it is only the UK that is capable of doing that, and they are shirking their responsibility onto those who can't do it on their behalf.

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#372

Post by imtringued »

gpm wrote: post #113
landl0rd wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a reply. I am not responsible for checking the locality of an IP address. Indeed, I can never do so with one hundred per cent accuracy. It is Not My Problem. Governments that expect some content or other blocked can damn well do it themselves, in their own legal system. They cannot compel someone else to spend his time, talent, or treasure to enforce their petty rules. If they go after one of their own for requ…

It is a reply... that you chose to send despite being fully aware that by doing so you might be reaching out across borders because that's how the internet and your contracts with your service providers works. Governments can do whatever they damn well please in their own territory. Including arresting you if you ever visit because you violated some law that they wrote that applies to people in the rest of the world,…

>that you chose to send despite being fully aware that by doing so you might be reaching out across borders because that's how the internet and your contracts with your service providers works.

As mentioned in my previous reply, this isn't how the internet works. There is no teleportation or ICBM delivering the packets. There is infrastructure spanning borders and the infrastructure is the thing that is ignoring the laws. The infrastructure has accurate geographic knowledge about the physical connections. The webserver doesn't have that information at all and must infer it. From the perspective of the webserver, the physical world might not exist at all. There is no such thing that can be described as awareness from the website operators perspective. IP addresses do not encode geographic information. The entire point of the OSI layer model is that the higher layers know nothing about the lower layers nor do they know anything about the physical location of the nodes.

Again, only the operator of the network has that information and the operator is located inside the UK. It is those network operators in the UK that are wilfully ignorant and aware of the things you claim a website operator from a far away country should be aware of.

Just think about how ridiculous your comment is if you sued someone in the US from the UK and brought up their awareness. How would you prove that they knew the location of every single router and fiber cable the packets are traveling through? That's what you're arguing here. You're arguing that there is full and complete awareness.

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#373

Post by Tuna-Fish »

HPsquared wrote: post #343
Hizonner wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a matter of UK law and, I'd bet, many countries, that they have the sovereign right to legislate about matters in and outside their borders. Basically all countries take that position legally. But there are norms and customs about how often you exercise it (as well as practical questions of power). Extraterritorial regulation of Web sites is unfortunately in the process of being established as normal, but it's…

What happens if two foreign countries try to impose mutually exclusive laws?

If they both are able to enforce their laws on you, you get to choose which prison you go to.

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#374

Post by nine_k »

nine_k wrote: post #216
Hizonner wrote: post #55

You shouldn't even be expected to geoblock. If I'm operating a Web site in country A, I should not have to care about country B's laws unless I am taking specific action intended to attract users in country B in particular . That's doesn't mean just to target the whole world, either. If you don't want your citizens to access something in another country, take it up with your citizens. It was obvious from the minute t…

If you operate a website outside UK and that's it, you may not care. But if you offer paid servies, collect money from UK citizens, you must have a business representation in the UK, which is bound by UK laws, can be fined, dragged to a court, etc. If you have this vulnerability, or you don't but your holding company has other web properties that do, the UK government has a way to make you listen and comply.

PLEASE NOTE: the parent comment, made by me, is largely incorrect.

You only have to have presence in the UK if you do some larger-scale commercial activity there (like X/Twitter), but of course you can easily sell goods and services to UK citizens without all that. But sites like 4cahn and SaSu don't even sell anything at all.

Please downvote the parent comment into oblivion.

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#375

Post by mrlonglong »

chihuahua wrote: post #139
mrlonglong wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, now that's silly of our dear UK Govt. Bit of an overreach there, and oh definitely they'll get bitch slapped.

It would be a lot easier for the UK to just block any site they don't like. Especially when the concern is ostensibly to protect UK citizens from harm.

They already block the pirate bay website. Could have done the same thing with these sites but ...

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#376

Post by estimator7292 »

whatsupdog wrote: post #305
jmward01 wrote: post #279

Let's start with a bang. Passports and strictly enforced borders are dumb and this is a clear example of exactly why. Increasingly the digital world -is- the world and arbitrary geographical boundaries are causing nothing but problems. We are taking the ideas of physical borders and passports and, badly, applying that broken idea to a virtual space with typical results. It blows me away that the real problem with str…

There's at least 2 billion people in the world that would move to North America and Europe in the blink of an eye if all the borders were opened! Can your countries support all of them without collapsing your systems?

"I got mine, fuck everyone else"

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#377

Post by ranger_danger »

greyface- wrote: post #140
ChocolateGod wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You check the country the ASN behind the IP belongs to.

RIRs don't prohibit out-of-region use of IP addresses or ASNs registered in their region. The country an IP is registered in is not necessarily the country it's being used in.

And they are routinely used in exactly this confusing fashion.

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#378

Post by estimator7292 »

pessimizer wrote: post #15
anigbrowl wrote: post #2

When a country transitions from manufacturing to services, it ends up trying to export its legal system.

One of the big things I've been wondering about the decision of the Anglosphere to all switch to a service economy: why would you do that when your population is both smaller and dumber than the populations of other countries? The UK (nor the US) has no advantage in providing services, all it can do is demand that other people be prevented from providing them.

Because capitalism can't accept the inevitable fact that infinite exponential growth is literally impossible. It's not a "service economy" it's a "rent extraction" economy.

Capitalists need more growth and more returns now and since innovating, producing goods, and providing customer service costs money, we simply charge people a monthly fee to use their heated car seats.

This is what the brutal, messy end of capitalism looks like. Relentless self-cannibalization, burning billions of dollars tomorrow to make one cent today.

If nothing makes sense, that's because it doesn't. There is no logic or reason or planning involved. It's more money now, period. Consequences don't matter because we get more money right this second.

Capitalists are apparently unaware of what happens when they've extracted all possible money from the economy.

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#379

Post by majorchord »

hilbert42 wrote: post #241
Hizonner wrote: post #55

You shouldn't even be expected to geoblock. If I'm operating a Web site in country A, I should not have to care about country B's laws unless I am taking specific action intended to attract users in country B in particular . That's doesn't mean just to target the whole world, either. If you don't want your citizens to access something in another country, take it up with your citizens. It was obvious from the minute t…

"You shouldn't even be expected to geoblock." I read the article and I remain confused. I've just come to this story after seeing it on HN so I might have misunderstandings from being unaware of the background. Also, I neither reside in the US nor UK so I'd have not seen local media reports. In short, I gather UK's Ofcom is threatening a US web site for online content that is lawful within the US's jurisdiction and u…

> I am bewildered that Preston Byrne has even bothered

Preston is not a legitimate lawyer and has never actually represented anyone. He only larps as an expert and spends an inordinate amount of time constantly trying to tell other lawyers how wrong they are, using his black-and-white god complex attitude.

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#380

Post by vessenes »

hexbin010 wrote: post #310
vessenes wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preston talks about this in an earlier blog post. It's a matter of UK law and, I'd bet, many countries, that they have the sovereign right to legislate about matters in and outside their borders. "If Parliament says smoking in Paris is illegal, it is illegal." What's different today than when that doctrine was conceived of is: data goes everywhere, communications are decentralized, international cooperation around es…

> "If Parliament says smoking in Paris is illegal, it is illegal." I'm not entirely sure if you yourself understand the context or real meaning of that phrase, but for others at least, it was NOT meant to highlight that Parliament has a burning desire or real ability to legislate outside of its jurisdiction! Just that it has the legal authority to create any such law, and that the legitimacy of a law is not dependent…

I think I got us there, when I mentioned that they had no means of enforcement, and so the statement was meant as you say - to be absurdist in practice underscoring the national sovereignty at the heart of the discussion. Is that what you think it means, out of curiosity?
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