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Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

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Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#501
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…

The law was passed by the previous government and everyone assumed the next government would take great delight in reversing it. I wouldn’t be so sure that any next government (which, by the way, there is still a non zero chance could be Labour) will necessarily reverse this. Maybe Reform would tweak the topics, but I’m not convinced any party can be totally trusted to reverse this.

Every single Labour politician who voted on this bill voted against it.

Peter Kyle was one such MP, and now he's making statements like:

> I see that Nigel Farage is already saying that he’s going to overturn these laws. So you know, we have people out there who are extreme pornographers, peddling hate, peddling violence. Nigel Farage is on their side.

It's maddening. The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what makes you say that the majority of HN loves porn? I've seen a few random references to it but nothing that would indicate that HN loves porn any more than any other community loves porn.

He didn't say the majority of HN loves porn. He said that male demographic likes porn more than any other, and that demographic is the majority of HN. It doesn't logically follow that the majority of HN supports porn. Fake statistics just to illustrate the difference. Males 18-40 support porn at 60%, which is higher than any other demographic. HN is 60% males 18-40. With these numbers, 36% of HN is males 18-40 who su…

Statistics doesn't work that way, and if OP wanted to say that, they should have specified that, rather than saying the majority of HN is a demographic that likes porn. It may be true in a statistical sense, but that's not how it is read.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, there were defacto political parties in the delightfully misnamed federalist and anti-federalists. It was this divide that led to the first political parties.

> this divide that led to the first political parties Maybe in Britain. Parties were definitely a thing going back to Roman politics.

No, I meant in the newborn US. The OP founding fathers reference is Hamilton and the Federalists who feared the harms of political parties, but ultimately couldn't reconcile with the anti-federalists who ultimately formed the democratic-republican party.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reminds me of Conservapedia, which was a Wikipedia fork with everything that the US religious right disliked removed.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have a constitution. It just isn't a written constitution: > The United Kingdom constitution is composed of the laws and rules that create the institutions of the state, regulate the relationships between those institutions, or regulate the relationship between the state and the individual. These laws and rules are not codified in a single, written document. Source for that quote is parliamentary: https://…

Right of course every state has a "constitution" but the contemporary connotation of the word means an enforceable law that meaningfully constrains the state's power.

In the UK that would probably be the Magna Carta [0] which is a written document that constrains the monarch's power, and the monarch was the state at that time (1215).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#507

To all of the commenters recommending that Wikipedia block UK visitors: This is incredibly short-sighted in the age of LLMs, where Wikipedia does not need to exist in a country in order for the benefit of its existence to be felt. Such a move would likely just drive people to obtain dubious regurgitations of Wikipedia’s (freely available) content via their favorite LLM chatbot, in my opinion.

Option 1: enabling "dubious regurgitations of information"

Option 2: enabling draconian abuse of power, violation of privacy, and mass surveillance

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#508

> If Ofcom permissibly determines that Wikipedia is a Category 1 service, and if the practical effect of that is that Wikipedia cannot continue to operate, the Secretary of State may be obliged to consider whether to amend the regulations or to exempt categories of service from the Act. In doing so, he would have to act compatibly with the Convention. Any failure to do so could also be subject to further challenge. S…

> Wikipedia should voluntarily remove itself from the UK entirely. No visitors, no editors. No, it should remove servers, employees and legal presence from the UK. It's not their job to block UK people from accessing it just because the UK regime want them to. Let the regime censors actually put an effort to block them. Let them make a Great Firewall of the UK, why make it easy for them?

IANAL, but international law precedent has allowed countries to prosecute web services for providing services to a country where that service is illegal. A French NGO successfully sued Yahoo! for selling Nazi memorabilia, a crime in France, despite Yahoo! being a US company [0], and this was upheld by US courts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_v._Yahoo!

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economic infantilisation and the new productised and externalised way of being brought upon by social media. We were an autopilot society that thought it had no need to restate values or keep innovating. The things that used to matter like community bonds and values dont matter literally because we cant see them in an instagram post and they may as well not exist- plus the media and public sphere dysfunction we see t…

>If you've been paying attention to the subtext in news stories for the past couple of years you may have some idea why this is happening. Maybe I'm a bit dramatic here, but the subtext I seem to get is that "legacy media is dying out and we're not going to cede power easily. Even if we burn the country down with us." There's no graceful transfer to the next generation like usual (or perhaps, there never was a gracef…

It's a fire sale on american imperialism, capital and cultural dominance, and everyone wants in. American leadership is geriatric and asleep at the wheel and the dementia vote is dangerous. Everyone sees this as the free for all it is.

There will always be those who seek to create order from chaos for their own benefit. We're seeing multiple groups trying to emotionally stunt this next generation and sow social discord. These are the same groups that have blackmail on the current sitting. China is more of a military threat but russia is far more of a cultural threat because they understand the west, which is nothing to joke about. Hungary is obviously also influential, due to their constant meetings in the us and hungary with the heritage foundation, and their help in formulating the presidential transition project. Our blue "friend" in the middle east is just as malicious, easily scorned and has a passion for retaliation.

Apathy and fatalism is ascendant in western leadership, just look at the culture behind davos and modern american tech start ups. Mass hardcore group sex parties of the wealthy and influential(davos and openai), designer drugs, an underlying humour on selling out the world and killing it with climate change. They don't care about the atomization of the individual or the sancitity of him either.

We need to identify the new poles of power to understand the currents that shape our world if we are to have any hope in fighting them.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#510
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brandolini's Law is relevant. If we havs to carefully point-by-point critique every point our opponent makes, while they get to use ChatGPT to write nonsense at fifty times human reading speed, we lose. To work around this, when a bullshit-producing organization is cited, it's proper to ask for an alternative citation from an organization that produces mostly non-bullshit. If it truly isn't bullshit content, there sh…

Except that in this particular case these were not bullshit articles. I had time to read them and I agree with them. You should read the articles before calling them names….

If they are not bullshit content, then please prove it by citing the same content from a not bullshit source. There should be plenty.

In other words, if your email really isn't a Nigerian prince scam, why did you choose to begin it with the words "I have a business proposal for you - you see, I am a Nigerian prince"?

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