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Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

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Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#801

Post by gambiting »

qcnguy wrote: post #794
phatfish wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK "didn't have much" of all the things it didn't want. But plenty of the things it did want. That is a great deal, Trump would be proud. Plenty of Brits too dumb to understand that though.

The UK didn't want unlimited immigration from the EU, and the EU refused to even consider the possibility of an exception, so the UK left. It's not complicated, it's old history, and the fact that people are still describing this as "brits dumb hurhur" is racist and abusive. The idea that it could have got an exception, by the way, is yet more federalist lying. Cameron did a tour around Europe directly visiting membe…

>>The UK didn't want unlimited immigration from the EU,

It was never unlimited and it's yet another lie peddled by Farage and the Brexit campaign.

UK could have always at the very least enforced the basic of the EU free movement principles in terms of limitations - namely that anyone without a job or means to provide for themselves for over 3 months can be kicked out. That would have solved most of the discontent around the issue. Similarily, UK not being in the schoengen zone could have interviewed everyone arriving from the EU - why are they coming here, do they have funds, do they have a job and turn around people it suspected are coming for benefits etc. It chose not to do that. It was entirely legal at the time and it could have been done. But instead politicians lied about UK being "forced" to accept unlimited immigration, which was never true.

It's not even about exceptions - it could have just used the existing laws that were there.

>>Cameron did a tour around Europe directly visiting member states, begging them to grant such an exception

You and I have a very different understanding of how that visit worked.

>> it was an insult to the concerns of the voters.

It's just really funny to me how after Brexit yes, migration from EU has gone down but it was replaced entirely by migration from former British Empire instead. So I'm not sure if the "concerns of voters" was really respected here either way.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#802

Post by imtringued »

incompatible wrote: post #401
saati wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Fairly easy, just make it a read-only mirror.

It can't be read only because you need infrastructure and editors that review and approve every single change by hand. Even a single accidental violation could get the mirror shut down.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#803

Post by lazide »

terminalshort wrote: post #741
Lerc wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is consistent with my experience that most people seem to not realise that they voted for hard labour. That is indeed the entire theme of this thread, That people can give an answer to a question that in some way does not reflect their honestly held opinion.

> most people seem to not realise that they voted for hard labour This is incredibly anecdotal, a major victim of selection bias, and also there are possibly effects of agreeableness here b/c it seems like you may be part of a vocal minority on this issue (and I mean that with absolutely no negative connotations). That said, I don't automatically reject vibes based determinations like this because often the high band…

Eh, it’s kind of the opposite for me. I’ve never seen any legitimate vote in a democracy > 90%. Even if you put ‘we agree that puppies are cute and fluffy and deserve all the pets’, > 10% will vote the other way purely out contrarian ness. Or because they’re cat people. Or because fuck you, that’s why.

And there is no way you can convince me 91% of New Zealand voters, where this is the common policy stance [https://www.mbie.govt.nz/business-and-employment/employment-...], had any clue they were voting for forced hard labor for prisoners. Especially considering how relatively cushy the current standards are for prisoners.

I’m sure with enough lawyers and PR folks could also write (and pass) a CA popular thingy which calls for all males to be kicked in the groin too.

That said, I’m also a big believer in voters getting what they voted for - only way they’ll learn. Besides, a few kicks to the groin might teach them a lesson!

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#804

Post by jajuuka »

Palmik wrote: post #682

I think UK OSA in its current state is bad, but I also think Wikipedia losing this case is good. Here is Wikipedia's original case: > The Wikimedia Foundation shares the UK government’s commitment to promoting online environments where everyone can safely participate. The organization is not bringing a general challenge to the OSA as a whole, nor to the existence of the Category 1 duties themselves. Rather, the legal…

Wikipedia doesn't have grounds to really challenge this law. It is a principled stance is that everyone should have open access to encyclopedic knowledge. This is Wikipedia protecting that access within the framework they can operate in (as someone subject to this new law) and protecting their contributors from doxing.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#805

Post by Aeolun »

callahad wrote: post #492
djeastm wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you cite said law for us?

It's the Online Safety Act. As the government says about the OSA: "Ofcom is the independent regulator for Online Safety. [...] Ofcom has strong enforcement powers" https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/online-safety-act Okay, so what does Ofcom say? "It doesn’t matter where you or your business is based. The new rules will apply to you (or your business) if the service you provide has a significant number of user…

I’m sure that they can write that. But their actual enforcement mechanism is nonexistent. No country is going to work with the UK to arrest someone that does that when the same thing isn’t illegal under their own law.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#806

Post by immibis »

Henchman21 wrote: post #130
echelon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I’m so tired of this false divide. Its the wealthy vs the rest of us. I don’t want to go right or left. I want to move forward and leave this stupid, stupid mess behind.

Yes, the wealthy and their supporters, a.k.a. the right... the segment of the rest of us who knows about this ideological divide, a.k.a. the left... and the rest of the rest of us who don't take sides.

These words do mean things. The left is the ideology of supporting less tall power hierarchies, and the right is the ideology of supporting taller power hierarchies. Wealthy left-wing people don't stay wealthy for long, hence almost all wealthy people are right-wing.

Note a common misconception - in the American context, note the Democrats are not left. Trying to contort the definition of left to make the Democrat party fit the definition muddies the meaning severely. However many left-wing Americans do vote for the Democrat party, because game theory makes it the optimal vote if you're left-wing.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#807

Post by imtringued »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #764
codedokode wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, "digital credentials" is an awful idea because it requires to store your ID on your phone and thus make it accessible to Apple and Google and secret courts. What I suggest is simply to store a single "isAdult" bit on device, without revealing any identity, and make apps like browser do the censorship on device, without sending any data to a webite. The algorithm is as follows: if isAdult == 0 and website doesn't…

What stops the under age user from setting isAdult = 1?

Their parents. The alternative is complete government surveillance of literally everything and I mean literally everything, starting from resource extraction and knowledge needed to manufacture electronics and the policing of every planet in the universe that is capable of giving rise to sentient intelligent life.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#808

Post by Gormo »

johnisgood wrote: post #654
ozim wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels utterly demoralizing when you have to vote for lesser evil and not for someone you feel will be better for the future.

http://anthonyflood.com/rothbarddemocracy.htm still gets down-voted here, but perhaps we will finally see more people realizing that it is true, as it always has been. You talk about the lesser evil here, well, it is exactly what is written there. Some parts quoted: > Democracy suffers from many more inherent contradictions as well. Thus, democratic voting may have either one of these two functions: to determine gove…

One of the biggest problems with a lot of the modern theory of democracy is that it sees democratic mechanisms as being not just necessary but sufficient to justify any action undertaken by the state.

Another major problem is the lack of clear bounding principles to distinguish public questions from private ones (or universal public questions from public questions particular to a localized context).

Together these problems result in political processes that (a) treats every question as global problem affecting society an undifferentiated mass, and (b) uses majoritarianism applied to arbitrary, large-scale aggregations of people as means of answering those questions.

This leads to concepts like "one man, one vote" implying that everyone should have an equal say on every question regardless of the stake any given individual might have in the outcome of that question.

And that, in turn, leads to the dominant influence on every question -- in either mode of democracy Rothbard refers to -- being not the people who face the greatest impact from the answer, nor the people who understand its details the best, but rather vast numbers of people who really have no basis for any meaningful opinions in the first place.

Every question comes down to opposing parties trying to win over uninformed, disinterested voters through spurious arguments and vague appeals to emotion. Public choice theory hits the nail on the head here, and this is why the policy equilibrium in every modern political state is a dysfunctional mess of special-interest causes advanced at everyone else's expense.

Democracy is necessary, but not sufficient. And I think the particular genius of the American approach has been to embed democracy within a constitutional framework that attempts to define clear lines regarding what is a public question open to political answers and what is not. The more we erode that framework, the more the reliability of our institutions will fray.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#809

Post by imtringued »

jeroenhd wrote: post #716
codedokode wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> because it can see the SNI field in HTTPS traffic ECH (the successor to eSNI) is becoming more and more common and with Let's Encrypt soon offering IP certificates, any website will be able to hide their SNI. Digital verification exclusively on-device doesn't work because addons and alternative applications make it possible to bypass those checks. There's no credible reason to trust local software to protect the ki…

>Digital verification exclusively on-device doesn't work because addons and alternative applications make it possible to bypass those checks. There's no credible reason to trust local software to protect the kids.

Then nothing will protect the kids.

I don't mean this tongue in cheek or implying that no protection should exist. I literally mean what I wrote. Children can always acquire hardware that will let them bypass any controls.

What pisses me off the most is people like you who pretend to care about things they don't care about. If only perfect solutions are acceptable, but perfect solutions don't exist, but good enough solutions are insufficient because of some theoretical bypass, then you essentially argue for no protection at all, but you do this under the pretense of advocating for protection. That is your stance, not mine.

Children who actively seek out blocked content are simply unstoppable. There is nothing you can do about that, so instead of going on and on about your nirvana fallacy, you should be happy with protecting the children who aren't adversaries to your protection scheme. After all, protecting children is good, so protecting millions of children should be better than protecting no children. The fact that there is a hypothetical fascist police state in which it is possible to protect every single child on the planet through world domination (in the name of protecting children) should play no role in making that decision.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#810

Post by spauldo »

owisd wrote: post #772
spauldo wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Wikipedia continues on without having to worry about UK regulations. What's the downside for Wikipedia?

Anyone suggesting a block doesn't actually want Wikipedia to pull out of the UK, it's a negotiating position to extort concessions.

Is it? If the law would prevent Wikipedia from operating in the UK without adding age verification, blocking the UK is just a method of compliance. Organizations like the EFF want to strike down laws like this, but Wikipedia exists to operate a freely editable encyclopedia.

It's really down to whether Wikipedia feels that compliance would go against the organization's principles. If so, blocking the UK is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. If another organization steps in to mirror Wikipedia in a way that complies with UK law, there's no downside for Wikipedia - they maintain their principles and the UK continues to have at least some access to free information.

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