Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act • Hacker News Board

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#821

Post by 3acctforcom » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 6:29 PM UTC

joncrocks wrote: post #782

yard2010 wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not working. A few decades later the biggest party is like 50% of the politicians. My theory is that power accumulates like money so you end up having few people with all the power. It's not that original, I must've read it somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law - in political systems with single-member districts and the first-past-the-post voting system, only two powerful political parties tend to control power.

In parliamentary systems we see fractures and reformation all the time, including in the current political climate in the UK.

Duverger's Law is only really parroted by Americans, who's ballot access and districting is determined by a coalition of two political parties instead of an constitutionally defined apolitical government institution. Don't forget to vote Green or Libertarian! Oh wait, you can't because the dems and repubs struck them from the ballot :(

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#822

Post by 3acctforcom » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 6:41 PM UTC

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #610

pastage wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was, repeatedly. It's a very important historical document that defined negative rights (congress shall pass no law) and inspired most modern constitutions.

The problem is the US never bothered to address it's technical debt, so it's patch on patch on patch. An updated constitution would probably cut through a lot of the bullshit in American politics, e.g. the interstate commerce clause being the entire justification for the federal government lol.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#823

Post by anigbrowl » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 7:07 PM UTC

mytailorisrich wrote: post #590

anigbrowl wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the nice-sounding theory, but I don't see any metrics on how well it works in practice. MPs aren't required to share the input from the public or publish lists of how they voted on every issue prior to elections. Representative democracy really includes very little accountability for the legislators.

It certainly works better than to govern according to whoever shouts the louder. Petitions have a place, which is to inform of a point of view and of the opinion of a portion of the public. That's a form of lobbying. But that's it, we should certainly not expect that a law be repelled because of a petition, and rightly so.

Incumbents in a bad system always argue that it's better than their worst characterization of the alternative. The reality is that elected officials still have very little accountability. They're only subject to re-election once every few years and it's virtually impossible to get rid of one mid-term unless they get themselves arrested.

I get your point about petitions and direct democracy being a form of who shouts louder (in the media, advertising, # of campaign events etc), but this is equally true of regular elections. It's even more so in a first-past-the-post system like the UK, whose two major parties have no interest in shifting to a proportional representation system because it would advantage smaller parties at their expense, even though the result would more closely reflect public preference.

In my view, parliamentary systems developed a few centuries ago have their advantages but also come with a great deal of historical baggage (systems that benefit a particular class of candidate and so forth), and they're buckling under the pressures of a real-time information society where people know transparency and timely publication of information are technically possible but such goods are systematically withheld from the public.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#824

Post by anigbrowl » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 7:08 PM UTC

xvector wrote: post #661

anigbrowl wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's unnecessarily wordy, but I still don't think it's deceptive. If your brain is bailing out that fast maybe it's better not to vote.

Hard disagree. Systems must be designed with typical human fallibilities in mind. Anyone that phrases a referendum like that ought to be sentenced to hard labor themselves for attempting to subvert democracy.

This isn't a system, it's a sentence. It's not that hard to read 13 more words.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#825

Post by anigbrowl » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 7:14 PM UTC

Lerc wrote: post #480

anigbrowl wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would probably not vote for it on principle, but my specific question was how the text as quoted could be considered deceptive.

In many respects I agree with you there, I almost went with softer language. The fact remains that it appears people were deceived. All of the advocacy pushing the referendum only focused on the first part. To this day I find people who are amazed that it mentioned hard labour and and that they voted for it. [edit] I guess think of it in terms of a vote that you had discussed and decided upon before you voted. Could…

Could you honestly say that you would read every word of the question

Yes?? It's not like a school exam where the questions are secret until you see it in the voting booth, and even if it were, you should still read the question carefully. I'm all for things being written as clearly as possible but at some point you have to acknowledge that voters have a responsibility to think about what they're voting for.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#826

Post by codedokode » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 7:34 PM UTC

_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?

Proprietary closed-sourced OS, the same thing that prevents you from installing Debian on your phone (unless it is Google Pixel).

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#827

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 7:39 PM UTC

subscribed wrote: post #633

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't any technology that can prevent sharing of age verification with third parties without tying your uses to your identity. To unmask someone in order to uncover sharing, you would require the ability to do it in general, which is incompatible with privacy/anonymity.

And yet homomorphic encryption is a thing. It's possible to process the encrypted request and be unable to see it. Similarly we could easily devise many solutions that can prove the age in the privacy - respecting ways (like inserting the age-confirming token inside the pack of cigarettes which an adult could then purchase with cash, etc) Many ways.

You're not understanding the dichotomy. It doesn't matter what kind of encryption you use, the system you're asking for can be made much simpler than this: Just use the same token for everyone and only give it to adults. It needs no cryptography at all, it just needs to be a random string that children don't have. You don't need anything to do with cigarettes, just print it on the back of every adult's ID or allow any adult to show their ID at any government office.

But then anyone can post the token on the internet where anyone can get it, the same as they could do with anything cryptographic that you put on the back of cigarettes or whatever. Unless you have a way of tracing it to the person who did it in order to impose penalties, which is precisely the thing that would make it not private/anonymous, which is why they're incompatible.

If you're going to do one then do the first one -- just make it actually untraceable -- but understand that it won't work. It would never work anyway because there are sites outside of your jurisdiction that won't comply with whatever you're proposing regardless, so the thing that fails to work while not impacting privacy is better than the thing that fails to work while causing widespread harm, but then people are going to complain about it and try to impose the thing that does cause widespread harm by removing privacy. Which is why the whole thing should be abandoned instead.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#828

Post by foldr » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 7:48 PM UTC

phatfish wrote: post #786

foldr wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Brexit referendum ought to have shut up the “your vote doesn’t make any difference” folks forever (regardless of whether or not they were in favor of Brexit). But they tend to have short memories.

Someone doesn't know the difference between a simple majority referendum and a parliamentary election result.

>elections don't change anything no matter who wins [not you, but who I was responding to]

The Brexit referendum was in the 2015 Conservative party manifesto [1]. If Labour had won the 2015 election then there would have been no referendum and the UK would still be in the EU. Or if people had voted differently in the referendum, the UK would still be in the EU.

The person I was responding to suggests that elections have never changed anything in the UK within their lifetime. Unless they are less than 10 years old, this is clearly false.

[1] https://www.theresavilliers.co.uk/files/conservativemanifest... (p. 30)

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#829

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 7:58 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #557

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If that is the case, and where suspicious means automatically rejecting anything that doesn’t agree with your vibes, then yes, that is a deep and flawed bias and statistical illiteracy. What if you're suspicious of all polling regardless of whether it agrees with your preferences or not? It's well-understood that leading questions and phrasing will get you any response to a poll that you want. That being the case,…

> What if you're suspicious of all polling regardless of whether it agrees with your preferences or not? I’d still call that statistical illiteracy. Polling, as a cohort, contains information. It’s dispersed across polls and concentrated among quality pollsters. It’s never definitive. But someone concluding that all polling is useless because the statistics are hard is sort of analogous to someone rejecting cosmology…

> If I want to know, today, who will be in power tomorrow and what policies they could pass that would be popular, polling is useful. If I want to know what issues I can build a coalition around, and which to abandon because the people most passionate about them cannot bother to vote, polling is helpful.

That's fair in the context of, you're a political operative who is trying to enact specific policies as your occupation and you therefore have the time to go through and carefully inspect numerous polls to derive a well-rounded understanding. But that's also quite disconnected from how polls are typically used in the public discourse.

Ordinary people don't have time to do that, so instead political operatives will commission a poll to get the result they want, or find one from a reputable pollster who unintentionally made a phrasing error in their favor, or just cherry pick like this: https://xkcd.com/882/

And then use the result to try to convince people that the public is actually on their side and it would be ineffective or costly to oppose them. Which, unless you have the time to go carefully read a hundred different polls to see whether the result is legitimate, means that the sensible strategy is to give polls no weight.

Or to put it another way, on any politically contentious issue there will always be at least one poll saying X and another saying not-X, which means that in the absence of a more thorough analysis that exceeds the resource availability of most members of the public (and even many legislators), neither has any information content because the probability of a poll existing with that result was already ~100%.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#830

Post by foldr » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 8:00 PM UTC

Chris2048 wrote: post #800

traceroute66 wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UK retained full autonomy in almost every area, it could have always limited immigration or how bananas are shaped if it wanted to. And not only that, but within the EU it is no secret that the UK had the very best seat at the table. The UK had so many carve-outs and exemptions, far more than any other member.

> the UK had the very best seat at the table. > The UK had so many carve-outs and exemptions The EU had many things that didn't benefit the UK, which happens when you don't share a mainland with the rest of Europe. e.g. Schengen area didn't make as much sense for UK, The UK got to not adopt the euro, but then it's currency was particularly strong in the first place. The Rebate is usually what is spin as the great adv…

The Schengen area is only loosely connected to the EU. Not all EU member states are in the Schengen area, and not all Schengen area member states are in the EU.