531–540 of 887 posts
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The current leaders of both the Conservatives and Reform are on record as being against the Act. While this doesn't preclude them changing their mind, it does make it more difficult for them to reverse course.
They will reverse it when politicians visiting pron sites are exposed through a leak or something. Everybody else uses VPNs.
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The OSA is already written such that only very large sites are potentially caught by the most onerous rules (at least 7 million MAU for Category 1; at least 3 million MAU for Category 2B). Smaller sites are automatically exempted. This isn't to say that the OSA is a universally good thing, or that smaller sites won't be affected by it. However, this request for judicial review wasn't looking to carve out any special…
>Smaller sites are automatically exempted. No, they're not. I don't know why people keep repeating this "7 million active users limit" idea, it's nowhere to be found in the actual rules. Tiny forums have already had to close because they didn't want to deal with the legal risk: https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/in_memoriam/
Page 64 defines a Large Service as "A service which has more than 7 million monthly active United Kingdom users".
The first two forums in your "in memoriam" list I tried looking at (Sinclair QL Forum & Red Passion Forum) are both still up.
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> Isn't it better than UK legislation? Not at all, because SIM cards are bound to your real identity. So the government knows exactly which websites you visit.
I don't understand your comment, the government knows which sites you visit anyway because it can see the SNI field in HTTPS traffic. The main point is that the verification is done on the device. The device has a digitally signed flag, saying whether it is owned by an adult user or not. And the OS on the device without the flag allows using only safe apps and websites sending a "Safe: yes" HTTP header. User doesn't…
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It's the foundation who are involved in this court action and who is the topic of this thread. The code uploaded to GitHub wouldn't change the geographic basis of Microsoft either... But that said I want to be clear that I have no issue with the Foundation's current actions or position in the court system. I was responding only very specifically to the suggestion above that they "should" block Wikipedia access immedi…
I agree that wikipedia going dark in the uk would -as yet- be premature at this juncture.
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As I said in my first comment: if it makes doing business in the UK unpalatable then they are of course free to halt their operations. I was specifically responding to the suggestion above that they should do so as a bargaining move to force the government's hand.
The Wikimedia Foundation isn't "doing business" in the UK, they're a nonprofit. Their mission statement is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally." Part of fulfilling that mission is opposing laws that restrict free knowledge and open access, so why should they not use their…
It's funny, I'm coming up on my citizenship application and I sure as fuck won't ever be voting for Labour. I would rather create my own party and fail then vote for them (or conservatives or Reform). It's amazing how accurate The Thick Of It is.
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> Wikimedia should block UK access. That will get the attention of media and popularity contest politicians might change their mind. Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in? I'm quite critical of the implementation of this legislation but the idea of an American company throwing their weight around trying to influence policy decisions in the UK gives me the ick. Fair enough…
> Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in? They do that by staying out of such countries. Many US companies don't want to work with EU GDPR and just block all european IPs, wikipedia has full right to leave UK. They are under no obligations to provide service to them in the same was as pornhub is under no obligation to provide services in eg. a country that would require th…
And parliamentary representative democracy is still very much democratic even without referenda on every little issue.
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There are any number of criticisms I would happily join you in directing at the British parliamentaey system but I don't think relying on American businesses to pressure the government would actually be the win for democracy you seem to suggest?
None of this is responsive to the specific criticisms made, and nor are the follow-up replies.
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…
Nah, politicians understand it, they just understand it differently than us do - and they make laws in accordance to that understanding.
Don't give them the same excuse you give to children, they are adults.
Kind of funny after the authors of the law complained service providers were interpreting it overzealously. No, if Wikipedia falls under it anything meaningful does. You have once again failed to understand the internet.
The difficulty of compliance depends on both how big the size is and the kind of site it is. Many small site overlooked both of those factors.