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Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

bbc.com

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Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#601
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…

> People will use VPNs and any other available methods to avoid restrictions placed on them

Yeah, its hilarious if you watch or listen to BBC output you would think VPNs don't exist the way the BBC promote it as some sort of amazing new "think of the children" protection.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's not necessarily a position you have to fight. You can also take the standpoint that if the UK government can't protect your private data, then how can a data provider. There are many such cases:

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-08-06/hacker...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/nov/21/immigration...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/britains-nh...

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#603
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin... It may not make sense to you, but they've been arguing constitutional law there for hundreds of years. Plenty of monarchies also have modern single-document constitutions, like Norway, Spain and Thailand.

And a significant part of the Canadian constitution is now codified and entrenched in ways that no single one of the federal or provincial parliaments across Canada can freely amend, albeit not in a single document, even though Canada shares the same King as the UK. No reason the UK couldn’t do it - the UK Parliament itself even enacted the fundamental constitutional structure that Canada now has, at Canada’s request, and in the same act removed its own power to legislate for Canada going forward.

(Canada had previously deferred its assumption of the power to amend its own constitution without asking the UK to do it until it figured out what replacement arrangement it wanted, which took half a century and the requesting Canadian government still very controversially did not win the assent of or even consult Quebec before proceeding.)

With that said, there is an important structural difference: Canada is a true federal state rather than a unitary one like the UK which merely has some nonexclusive and constrained devolution to three subordinate parliaments within specific scopes. Every single bit of the Canadian constitution is indeed freely amendable by enough of the eleven Canadian federal or provincial parliaments working together. Certain specific parts can indeed be amended unilaterally by one parliament, but many parts need a much larger level of consensus, up to and including unanimity.

This means that the Canadian situation is not really a counterexample to the claim that the UK parliament would necessarily retain full amendment rights if it did codify a constitution, since the UK parliament is most similar in authority not to the Canadian federal parliament but to all eleven federal or provincial Canadian parliaments combined, which collectively do retain full amendment flexibility if they can all agree as required.

However, some provinces refuse to ratify amendments without a referendum, and the country has a lot of trauma from past failed attempts to make major constitutional amendments such that they mostly don’t attempt them any more, so the eleven parliaments have de facto lost some of their collective parliamentary supremacy even if they have not lost it de jure.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Wiki had the guts it'd leave the UK. Nothing will happen unless there's a backlash from the citizenry.

The way this works is that the backlash would be directed at Wikipedia. Your average citizen neither knows nor cares about the legislative landscape - they just know that the daily mail says Wikipedia hates the U.K. and is staffed by communists.

Can't they make it so that anyone from that geographical location is required to prove their identity and log in to view the articles? That seems like it'd be sufficient and sure I'd be annoyed at Wikipedia but if they linked to the law I feel like people would get it.

Of course now no one needs to visit Wikipedia because Google has already scraped them with AI so you can just see the maybe accurate summary. Seems risky, as if you should have to log in to use Google since the AI might have forbidden information.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I feel like there is a cognitive dissonance somewhere in there. On one thread about social media and internet affecting young people negatively, you have people saying parents should control their kids' exposure to the internet. And in another thread about ID laws, you have people saying kids should have privacy to roam the internet.

Parents have plenty of capacity to exercise control over their children. For example, how about a law that says websites have to restrict access to pornographic content if the client's user agent sets an HTTP header indicating they don't want to see it? Now you don't have any privacy problems because the header contains no personally identifying information -- you don't even have to be under 18 to opt into it. But th…

We're discussing Wikipedia here so unless you're calling them porn peddlers, it's getting more and more bizarre.

This discussion started from the categorisation error. Technical means should be irrelevant here.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#606
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to support the speech of all groups we detest - baby eaters, satanists, polygamists, racists, sexists, murderers, capitalists, Marxists, televangelists, etc. - in order to champion free speech for all. Except that, in practice the defense of self styled free speech advocates did not extended to left, gay, radical feminists, progressives anyone not far right. In what world is NY times left leaning. > If you'…

> Except that, in practice the defense of self styled free speech advocates did not extended to left, gay, radical feminists, progressives anyone not far right. It absolutely has. LGBT rights: https://www.aclu.org/legislative-attacks-on-lgbtq-rights-202... NAMBLA: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-statement-defending... HIV: https://www.aclu.org/cases/outmemphis-v-lee BLM: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/i…

That is all aclu which is (per articles posted in this thread) too much left and therefore not free speech by definition.

The hill article even articulated exactly that position openly.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#607

I was just vacationing in the UK last week and ran into this ridiculous thing trying to browse (entirely non-pornographic, fwiw) Reddit threads. Which I opted not to read rather than going through the hassle and privacy breach. Also got to experience the full force of the cookie law, which I hadn't realized I was only seeing a fraction of here in Canada.

Why not just get a cheap VPN for traveling or set up tailscale to your home router?

Cheap VPNs are only a temporary solution. I doubt that the EU and the UK will abstain from following China's and Russia's example in slowly locking down means of anonymization / obfuscation.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#609
Coming back to London for a spell having lived abroad, I see speech supporting a non violent protest group banned, and find my myself firing up a VPN to avoid dragnet data collection.

Terrorism Act 2000 and 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 Investigator Powers Act 2016 Online Safety Act 2023

There has been a raft of legislation both permitting and mandating digital monitoring while increasingly prohibiting types of speech. Many of these laws with overly broad definitions and large amounts of discretion.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#610
post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biggest mistake the Americans did was codify their constitution. I'll probably be pilloried for that but look at the evidence: - US is about to have military on the streets during peacetime with no terror threat within a codified constitution - UK has had military on the streets in response to terrorism in Northern Ireland (a real threat) and not for decades. The UK constitution is uncodified and spread over many (10…

While the US consitition is not agile a like a git log of a popular js project it does have over 10k declined PRs, I think the record is 100 years waiting for review. It does change, it has to change.

If it were a public repo it would have been forked a long time ago.
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