Somehow I have the deja-vu of when Theresa May (as a Home Secretary) tried to ban personal encryption altogether. Let me remind everyone this is in a country that already has a law that says you're legally required to give your encryption key to the police and if you do not, even if there is no other crime you can get 2 years in jail...
This told me all I needed to know about her level of understanding of complex topics. It only went downhill from there.
Even low-grade encryption was actually forbidden in France for a while in the mid 90s. I remember snickering about the whole thing back then, in a much smaller but also quite similar forum.
> Until 1996 anyone wishing to encrypt any document had to first receive an official sanction or risk fines from F6000 to F500,000 ($1000 to $89,300) and a 2-6 month jail term. Right now, apart from a handful of exemptions, any unauthorised use of encryption software is illegal.
These two former empires seem/seemed to have an over-inflated sense of importance and ability to control the world.
There was also in the 90s the weird period of export control of encryption software from the US, leading to the "this tshirt is a munition" shirts with the algorithm printed on them. And the (thankfully failed) "clipper chip" mandate.
Apple made an advertisement about the PowerMac G4 as a "supercomputer" because of onerous export controls related to encryption way back. It's more cheeky, I think, than serious. But then again, I haven't looked into it beyond just remembering that it happened.
From Minitel to the telecomms irrelevance against the US and UK. I'd guess the French investors's would love to kick the nuts of the whole parliament members signing that crap.
Why do you think it's an issue or understanding or intelligence? It's a matter of power and control. Protesting the intelligence of these leaders won't result in any structural change.
If anything, greater intelligence would only accelerate the damage and persuasiveness behind its public consent.
Why can't these measures be handled via parental control?
Children are using mobiles and tablets almost exclusively, both major providers of which supply tools for parental administration.
Content filtering is already facilitated by existing parental control. Mobile browsers could be made to issue a header if the user is under a certain age. Mobile apps could have access to a flag.
Parents should be responsible for parenting their child - not big tech. Why does it need to be any more complicated than that?
That's what blows my mind anytime I hear someone complain about all the vile content on the internet today and that we need to protect children. What about "be a parent" is so impossible to do today? Every device and OS has parental controls for a reason. Yeah they aren't perfect but they will prevent 99% of the content from getting to your kids.
It does feel like the online environment is pretty adversarial and hard for parents to deal with. In particular, it seems hard to pick and choose something reasonable. It doesn’t seem totally unreasonable to want some kind of state action to help represent the many parents and encourage creating better reasonable options.
Lots of things that feel relatively common online feel like they would be very alien and weird situations if they happened offline.
There's a cognitive dissonance to the opposition to this:
a) Content controls don't work, what are the government thinking?
b) This is parents' problem, they should use content controls.
Individual action doesn't work because it only takes one kid in the class who doesn't have parental controls then everyone loses. There's also obvious workarounds such as VPNs and a teenager walking into a pawn shop with £50 for a second hand smartphone without parental controls.
It also makes no sense that parents can't be bothered to turn on parental controls yet can be bothered to run a national grassroots campaign for this stuff (see e.g. http://smartphonefreechildhood.org)
Although your idea of an OS-level age flag is also being pushed by the Anxious Generation's Jonathan Haidt, so definitely has merit/traction as an alternative.
I like to point out in these threads that my first exposure to "pornography" was a cunnilingus scene in Al Franken's political tirade Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. I was eleven.
I don't think my parents had realized that scene was in the book. But I don't think it matters that much. Kids are going to encounter sex. In a pre-industrial society, it's pretty likely that children would catch adults having sex at some point during their childhood -- even assuming they didn't see their own parents doing it at a very young age. Privacy used to be more difficult. Houses often had one bedroom.
I don't mean to say that content controls are useless. I think it was probably for the better that I wasn't watching tons of porn in middle school. But I don't think that content controls need to be perfect; we don't need to ensure that the kids are never exposed to any pornographic content. As long as it isn't so accessible that the kid is viewing it regularly, it probably isn't the end of the world. Like in the one story, PornHub didn't even have a checkbox to ask if you were eighteen. Just don't do that. I didn't end up downloading porn intentionally myself until about five years after reading that book.
> Individual action doesn't work because it only takes one kid in the class who doesn't have parental controls then everyone loses.
The response to this, of course, is that many kids will be educated by their responsible parents.
They will know Santa isn't real or what sex is or why sometimes girls and boys kiss other girls and boys.
Are we going to outlaw teaching your own children about life next? Because they might "spread" the knowledge of... The real world they are about to experience and navigate?
Is there better evidence to the harms of porn than “dopamine” and “lost innocence”? That article written by a 17 year old, I’m old enough to be her parent and I saw hardcore internet porn in 5th grade. This isn’t new. Personally I don’t think it harmed me. But I’m open to hearing studies showing otherwise, not just hand waving.
For that matter, how many kids manage their parents' devices. Maybe less so today, but for a long time, a lot of children were far more tech savvy than their parents. The contrast between my grandmothers when they were still around was stark. One never fell for anything... the other, I was cleaning malware it felt like quarterly.
My parents for a long time used their neighbor's wifi, despite having their own, because they didn't remember the password.
That said, having the carrier assign certain devices marked as "child" or "adult" or even with a DoB stamp that would change the flag when they became an adult might not be a bad thing. While intrusive would still be better than the forced ID path that some states and countries are striving towards.
This is because these measures are not about protecting children.
It's a distraction.
Real objective is to further increase the barrier of entry for SMEs to compete (try start your own forum or any kind of challenger to Facebook et al). Government on the other hand gets a tidy surveillance tool as a sweetener.
So whenever time comes to turn a screw on dissent, the law is ready to be used.
Yes, it is a pretense and the point of mentioning "the children" is to mobilize the child-worshipping demographic who believe, in all cases, that anything that raises any risk to children should be banned, and that this should not be discussed by decent people. The successful child-worshippers also instantly burst into hysterics and aggressive personal attacks when spoken to about the subject (hysterics and tears when they agree, the latter otherwise.) Their success lies in never lowering themselves to discuss anything with anybody. They're here to tell you.
They are an extreme minority of every population (mostly people who aren't interested in politics or civil liberties who enjoy and care about children.) But sensible people are also an extreme minority of the population; we normal people usually aren't so sensible, instead we listen to sensible people and follow their advice.
So the people who want everybody on the internet to identify themselves pit hysterics against measured voices in the media, in order to create a fake controversy that only has to last until the law gets passed. Afterwards, the politicians and commentariat who were directly paid or found personal brand benefit in associating with the hysterics start leaving quotes like: "This isn't what we thought we passed" and "It might be useful to have a review to see if this has gone too far." Then we find out that half the politicians connected with the legislation have connections to an age verification firm which is also an data broker, and has half a billion in contracts with the MoD.
That's how it should work but you will find that a majority of parents cba rearing their children so they want the state to do it for them. And this extends to so many things in life that the authoritarian grip is only going to get tighter with time.
Note: the following is not arguing in favor of the UK policy, but is a general observation.
I seriously doubt that the majority of parents want the state to raise their children for them.
By arguing about irresponsible or lazy parents you are latching on to the first, most convenient thing that seems to make sense to you. But I think that is a mistake because not only does it perpetuate some kind of distorted sense of reality where parents don't care about their children and want to hand off all responsibility for them, but it distracts you from the real causal issues.
The fact is that humans have for millions of years acted in various levels of coordination to raise and look after children as a group. Modern society has made this all sorts of dysfunctional, but it still exists.
To be fair, it is because the state makes it difficult for them to rear children.
Long working hours and both parents working full time means they do not have the time or the energy. Then you have the state offering help, and encouraging parents to drop them off at school first thing for breakfast club, and then keep them there for after school activities.
> 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 challenge focuses solely on the new Categorisation Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (the OSA’s most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia.
Guys, this right here is Wikipedia standing. It is that under the current law, Wikipedia would fall under cat 1 rules, even if by the law own admission it should not.
I'm skeptical this goes anywhere legally speaking.
The categorisation regulations are a statutory instrument rather than primary legislation, so they _are_ open to judicial review. But the Wikimedia foundation haven't presented an argument as to why the regulations are unlawful, just an argument for why they disagree with them.
It should be noted that even if they succeed (which seems a long shot), this wouldn't affect the main thrust of the Online Safety Act which _is_ primary legislation and includes the bit making the rounds about adult content being locked behind age verification.
The problem with the focus being on porn behind age verification as the main effect, is that it ignores all the other effects. Closing community forums and wikis. Uncertainty about blog comments.
It is actually (as noted in many previous discussion about the Online Safety Act) pushing people to using big tech platforms, because they can no longer afford the compliance cost and risk of running their own.
Those sort of sites already had better moderation than big tech because they’d have their own smaller team of volunteer moderators.
I suspect any smaller site that claims the Online Safety Act was a reason they closed, needed to close due to other complications. For example an art site that features occasional (or more) artistic nudes. Stuff that normal people wouldn’t consider mature content but the site maintainers wouldn’t want to take the risk on.
Either way, whether I’m right or wrong here, I still think the Online Safety Act is grotesque piece of legislation.
I am very skeptical that the Online Safety Act forces community forums and wikis to close. By and large the Act forces forums to have strong moderation and perhaps manual checks before publishing files and pictures uploaded by users, and that's about it.
Likewise, I suspect that most geoblocks are out of misplaced fear not actual analysis.
It seems to be a fairly standard judicial review: if OFCOM(?) class them as "category 1", they are under a very serious burden, so they want the categorization decision reviewed in court.
I think it will be very hard to write a definition that excludes wikipedia and includes (and I am quoting the article) "many of the services UK society is actually concerned about, like misogynistic hate websites".
I can't see any language in the statutory instrument suggesting anyone had any intention of applying it to Wikimedia? The most likely outcome is the court will reassure them of that. This might help other people running similar websites by citing the case rather than having to pay for all the experts but isn't going to magically stop it applying to Meta as intended.
I don't like the OSA and associated regulations as much as the next person -- I think we could have gotten a long way by saying you need to include a X-Age-Rating in http responses and calling it a day. The law itself is incoherently long and it's very difficult to know what duties you have.
However, I don't see what the legal basis of Wikimedia's challenge is. The OSA is primary legislation, so can't be challenged except under the HRA, which I don't really see working. The regulations are secondary regulation and are more open to challenge, but it's not clear what the basis of the challenge is. Are they saying the regulations are outside the scope of the statutory authority (doubtful)? You can't really challenge law or regulation in the UK on the basis of "I don't like it".
X-Age-Rating would only work if the server could be sure of the jurisdictions under which the recipient was bound.
To continue the thought experiment though: another implementation would be to list up to N tags that best describe the content being served. You could base these on various agreed tagging systems such as UN ISIC tagging (6010 Broadcasting Pop Music) or UDC, the successor to the Dewey Decimal System (657 Accountancy, 797 Water Sports etc.) The more popular sites could just grandfather in their own tag zoologies.
A cartoon song about wind surfing:
X-Content-Tags: ISIC:6010 UDC:797 YouTube:KidsTV
It’s then up to the recipient’s device to warn them of incoming illegal-in-your-state content.
I think you both have a point. Why not block foreign access to your internet service if the laws of that foreign country are nothing you want to be concerned with?
It might be a bit disruptive in the beginning, but in the long run I think we all benefit from that. It increases the chance of politicians to realize their over-boarding decisions by having public pressure from previous users of those services and it increases the likelihood of local competitors of those services opening.
I hate the Online Safety Act as much as the next person, but:
- Labour have made no plans to ban VPNs.
- One MP wanted to add a clause for a government review into the impact of VPNs on the bill after 6 months, with no direction on what that would mean.
- I have no idea if this clause actually got added, but it'd make sense. If you're going to introduce a stupid law you should at least plan to review if the stupid law is having any impact.
> clause for a government review into the impact of VPNs on the bill after 6 months
thats government speak for deciding to do something about the VPN problem. because there is no way a commission will not find a good reason to ban VPNs when you reach that point, because you could argue they help avoid UK restrictions.
You're repeating propaganda from a far right newspaper headline, written misleadingly to make it sound like labour have said something recently about VPNs (they haven't)
I don't care where the headline is from. Other places have the same suspicion. There clearly is _some_ concern in Labour that VPNs could be used to bypass the OSA and it doesn't take much imagination to see where this is going.
'Kyle told The Telegraph last week in a warning: "If platforms or sites signpost towards workarounds like VPNs, then that itself is a crime and will be tackled by these codes."'
"In 2022 when the Online Safety Act was being debated in Parliament, Labour explicitly brought up the subject of VPNs with MP Sarah Champion worried that children could use VPNs to access harmful content and bypass the measures of the Safety Act. "
It may not be recent but it is something that Labour MPs have said before in the context of the OSA.
The Labour think tank Labour Together also recently brought up a manditory goverenment ID called BritCard, ostensibly for government services but to be rolled out else where.
At the same time they've just set up an elite police force to monitor social media.
Labour must know people are rattled by all this, they just published a response to the petiion they recieved.
They're not addressing any concerns though, it's all we know best or shutting down debate with slurs.
In the absence of anything new we just have to take Labour policy on the last things they've said or done.
A lot of people in this thread seem to enjoy the taste of boot and are spending a lot of words trying to say the OSA isn't a big deal. A bit of a sad attitude for a forum called HackerNews. This is massive overreach by the government, we shouldn't have to ID ourselves to message friends on bluesky, read homebrew forums or, soon, use xbox voice chat. The government won't give up this power, it's clearly the thin end of the wedge.
Related: I have just written a brief overview of how I understand the Online Safety Act to apply to owners of forums without 'adult' content, e.g. forums hosted by product companies, about their products.
This is full of contradictions and both-sides-of-the-mouth speech. You can't coherently argue for an "open internet" "for everyone", and simultaneously plead exceptionalism for your own website, due its special virtues[0]. An "open internet" for websites with sterling reputations is a closed internet. It's an internet where censorship segregates the desirable from undesirable; where websites must plead their case to the state, "please let me exist, for this reason: ..." That's not what "open" means!
And moreover: WF's special pleading is[1], paraphrased, "because we already strongly moderate in exactly the ways this government wants, so there's no need to regulate *us* in particular". That's capitulation; or, they were never really adverse in the first place.
Wikimedia's counsel is of course pleading Wikimedia's own interests[2]. Their interests are not the same as the public's interest. Don't confuse ourselves: if you are not a centimillionaire entity with sacks full of lawyers, you are not Wikimedia Foundation's peer group.
[0] ("It’s the only top-ten website operated by a non-profit and one of the highest-quality datasets used in training Large Language Models (LLMs)"—to the extent anyone parses that as virtuous)
[1] ("These volunteers set and enforce policies to ensure that information on the platform is fact-based, neutral, and attributed to reliable sources.")
[2] ("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 challenge focuses solely on the new Categorisation Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (the OSA’s most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia.")
Warn the UK users during the grace period as best as they can.
And after the grace period... yeah, I think blocking UK IPs is the "correct" thing to do. If the government doesn't make them an exception than they'll have to do that, correct or not, anyway.
Yes. This is what every single large company which is subject to this distopian law should do. They should do everything they can to block any traffic from the UK, until the law is repelled.
One of the complaints against OSA is how easy it's proven to circumvent, evidenced by the massive increase in VPN usage.
So it would be interesting to understand if shutting down in the UK would have an impact, now we all had to learn how to circumvent georestrictions this past week.
They can build a solid legal case on their exceptionalism _and_ hope the court uses it as an opportunity to more widely protect the open Internet.
The fact that the letter of the law means you can't have an open Internet isn't their fault.
Can anyone explain how Wikipedia supposedly is in Category 1? [1]
And if it marginally is, how come they cannot just turn off their "content recommender system"? Perhaps an example is the auto-generated "Related articles" that appear in the footer on mobile only?
> In paragraph (1), a “content recommender system” means a system, used by the provider of a regulated user-to-user service in respect of the user-to-user part of that service, that uses algorithms which by means of machine learning or other techniques determines, or otherwise affects, the way in which regulated user-generated content of a user, whether alone or with other content, may be encountered by other users of the service.
Speculating wildly, I think a bunch of the moderation / patroller tools might count. They help to find revisions ("user-generated content") that need further review from other editors ("other users").
Perhaps they genuinely believe the mission of collecting all the world’s knowledge is more important than complying with the draconian moral panic of a likely short lived government in an increasingly irrelevant former great power.
I think one of the most chilling aspects of this roll out has the attempts to shutdown debate about security concerns with handing over biometrics to unknow entities.
That's even to just access mainstream services such as direct messaging on social media sites.
The most high profile example of this is the Technology Secretary Peter Kyle comparing Nigel Farage to a sex offender, specifically Jimmy Saville.
Regardless of what you think of Farrage[1], that's a terrible thing to say. There are ligitimate concerns about this Act.
The ICO is charged with protecting privacy and punishing breaches of personal information due to incompetence. Well they've never prosecuted an organisation for a biometric data breach.
Until the ICO actually has teeth, and uses them, they shouldn't have introduced these restrictions and that's before we even get to the fact that the Act doesn't achieve what it say it will.
1. ...and I have very little positive to say about him but he is still an opposition MP and it is his job to oppose the government.
"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 challenge focuses solely on the new Categorisation Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (the OSA’s most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia."
I believe public policy initiatives are already Wikimedia's second-biggest expenses, after salaries, so I don't see how that would be much more different than usual fundraising except for making it more transparent.
All this is of course bullshit. The only response that would have a chance of succeeding would have been if most websites collectively just blocked everyone from the UK. Imagine if 60-70% of the internet just stopped working for UK People. The law would be toppled tomorrow.
Every Company that implemented any compliance is a traitor to the free internet and should be treated as such.
The UK is the perfect target - globally relevant enough to make the news, small enough that its a financial rounding error. Take action, carry through with the threat and if your product actually matters - attitudes can change globally.
While the law would not be toppled tomorrow, the companies of the internet need to stop being so desperate for small scraps of money and eyeballs.
The internet might be free if companies instead of trying to skirt laws and regulations just operated where they are welcome. Good for the internet but bad for the VCs so it wont happen.
I live in the UK. Please for the love of all that is sweet and holy DO THIS! The only way our politicians will learn is if the public outcry is so fierce it makes them fear for their jobs.
The issue here is that the internet is dominated by large companies that have a huge incentive to use this as a way to ensure regulatory capture of the free internet.
I think that's kind of the joke as well, because WhatsApp (being totally unmoderated and opaque) is probably the exact place you'd want to enact age controls, especially in groups.
It's like the government thought long and hard about how to make the restrictions the most inconvenient and with the largest number of gaps in the approach.
On a legal level? None. On a personal level? Don't give them money or your business. Avoid them completely or ensure you use ad blockers on their sites and throw away accounts if necessary. Do not contribute to their content.
In short: you take whatever they give you, and you give nothing in return.
The headline seems a little misleading. From the article:
> 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 challenge focuses solely on the new Categorisation Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (the OSA’s most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia.
How is "algorithmic feed" related to safety? Or is it, along with seemingly arbitrary numbers like 7 or 34 millions, a way to target a specific platform for those who are afraid to spell the name explicitly?
This is a failure of Operating System Vendors, in my opinion.
If Operating Systems had a way for parents to adequately monitor/administer the machines of their children, this would not be such a huge, massive hole, in which to pour (yet more) human rights abuses.
Parents have the right to have an eye on their children. This is not repressive, it is not authoritarian, it is a right and a responsibility.
The fact that I can't - easily, and with little fuss - quickly see what my kids are viewing on their screens, is the issue.
Sure, children have the right to privacy - but it is their parents who should provide it to them. Not just the state, but the parents. And certainly, the state should not be eliminating the rest of society's privacy in the rush to prevent parents from having oversight of - and responsibility for - the online activities of their children.
The fact is, Operating System Vendors would rather turn their platforms into ad-vending machines, than actually improve the means by which the computers are operated by their users.
It would be a simple thing to establish parent/child relationship security between not just two computers, but two human beings who love and trust each other.
Kids will always be inquisitive. They will always try to exceed the limits imposed upon them by their parents. But this should not be a reason for more draconian control over consenting adults, or indeed individual adults. It should be a motivating factor to build better computing platforms, which can be reliably configured to prevent porn from having the detrimental impact many controllers of society have decided is occurring.
Another undeniable fact, is that parents - and parenting - get a bad rap. However, if a parent and child love and trust each other, having the ability to quickly observe the kids computing environment in productive ways, should be being provided, technologically.
When really, we should be building tools which strengthen parent/child relationships, we are instead eradicating the need for parents.
I'm a parent, I have researched it, and found it not great because it still involves third parties and doesn't promote local control/anonymity without involving some external entity - i.e. Apple requires accounts, Google still gets its metrics, etc.
Somehow I have the deja-vu of when Theresa May (as a Home Secretary) tried to ban personal encryption altogether. Let me remind everyone this is in a country that already has a law that says you're legally required to give your encryption key to the police and if you do not, even if there is no other crime you can get 2 years in jail...
This told me all I needed to know about her level of understanding of complex topics. It only went downhill from there.
I'm always reminded of this http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7970731.stm
"The Home Secretary's husband has said sorry for embarrassing his wife after two adult films were viewed at their home, then claimed for on expenses."
The follow up article has some fun nuggets too http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8145935.stm
Even low-grade encryption was actually forbidden in France for a while in the mid 90s. I remember snickering about the whole thing back then, in a much smaller but also quite similar forum.
https://www.theregister.com/1999/01/15/france_to_end_severe_...
> Until 1996 anyone wishing to encrypt any document had to first receive an official sanction or risk fines from F6000 to F500,000 ($1000 to $89,300) and a 2-6 month jail term. Right now, apart from a handful of exemptions, any unauthorised use of encryption software is illegal.
These two former empires seem/seemed to have an over-inflated sense of importance and ability to control the world.
There was also in the 90s the weird period of export control of encryption software from the US, leading to the "this tshirt is a munition" shirts with the algorithm printed on them. And the (thankfully failed) "clipper chip" mandate.
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Apple made an advertisement about the PowerMac G4 as a "supercomputer" because of onerous export controls related to encryption way back. It's more cheeky, I think, than serious. But then again, I haven't looked into it beyond just remembering that it happened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoxvLq0dFvw
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From Minitel to the telecomms irrelevance against the US and UK. I'd guess the French investors's would love to kick the nuts of the whole parliament members signing that crap.
Why do you think it's an issue or understanding or intelligence? It's a matter of power and control. Protesting the intelligence of these leaders won't result in any structural change.
If anything, greater intelligence would only accelerate the damage and persuasiveness behind its public consent.
Why can't these measures be handled via parental control?
Children are using mobiles and tablets almost exclusively, both major providers of which supply tools for parental administration.
Content filtering is already facilitated by existing parental control. Mobile browsers could be made to issue a header if the user is under a certain age. Mobile apps could have access to a flag.
Parents should be responsible for parenting their child - not big tech. Why does it need to be any more complicated than that?
That's what blows my mind anytime I hear someone complain about all the vile content on the internet today and that we need to protect children. What about "be a parent" is so impossible to do today? Every device and OS has parental controls for a reason. Yeah they aren't perfect but they will prevent 99% of the content from getting to your kids.
It does feel like the online environment is pretty adversarial and hard for parents to deal with. In particular, it seems hard to pick and choose something reasonable. It doesn’t seem totally unreasonable to want some kind of state action to help represent the many parents and encourage creating better reasonable options.
Lots of things that feel relatively common online feel like they would be very alien and weird situations if they happened offline.
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There's a cognitive dissonance to the opposition to this:
a) Content controls don't work, what are the government thinking? b) This is parents' problem, they should use content controls.
Individual action doesn't work because it only takes one kid in the class who doesn't have parental controls then everyone loses. There's also obvious workarounds such as VPNs and a teenager walking into a pawn shop with £50 for a second hand smartphone without parental controls.
It also makes no sense that parents can't be bothered to turn on parental controls yet can be bothered to run a national grassroots campaign for this stuff (see e.g. http://smartphonefreechildhood.org)
See also- I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway: https://www.thefp.com/p/why-are-our-fourth-graders-on-pornhu... 8-year old watches violent porn on friend’s iPad: https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/32857335/son-watched-viole...
Although your idea of an OS-level age flag is also being pushed by the Anxious Generation's Jonathan Haidt, so definitely has merit/traction as an alternative.
I like to point out in these threads that my first exposure to "pornography" was a cunnilingus scene in Al Franken's political tirade Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. I was eleven.
I don't think my parents had realized that scene was in the book. But I don't think it matters that much. Kids are going to encounter sex. In a pre-industrial society, it's pretty likely that children would catch adults having sex at some point during their childhood -- even assuming they didn't see their own parents doing it at a very young age. Privacy used to be more difficult. Houses often had one bedroom.
I don't mean to say that content controls are useless. I think it was probably for the better that I wasn't watching tons of porn in middle school. But I don't think that content controls need to be perfect; we don't need to ensure that the kids are never exposed to any pornographic content. As long as it isn't so accessible that the kid is viewing it regularly, it probably isn't the end of the world. Like in the one story, PornHub didn't even have a checkbox to ask if you were eighteen. Just don't do that. I didn't end up downloading porn intentionally myself until about five years after reading that book.
> Individual action doesn't work because it only takes one kid in the class who doesn't have parental controls then everyone loses.
The response to this, of course, is that many kids will be educated by their responsible parents.
They will know Santa isn't real or what sex is or why sometimes girls and boys kiss other girls and boys.
Are we going to outlaw teaching your own children about life next? Because they might "spread" the knowledge of... The real world they are about to experience and navigate?
Is there better evidence to the harms of porn than “dopamine” and “lost innocence”? That article written by a 17 year old, I’m old enough to be her parent and I saw hardcore internet porn in 5th grade. This isn’t new. Personally I don’t think it harmed me. But I’m open to hearing studies showing otherwise, not just hand waving.
>Why can't these measures be handled via parental control?
That would be the ideal. Unfortunately, many parents do not have the skills and/or motivation to manage their children's devices.
For that matter, how many kids manage their parents' devices. Maybe less so today, but for a long time, a lot of children were far more tech savvy than their parents. The contrast between my grandmothers when they were still around was stark. One never fell for anything... the other, I was cleaning malware it felt like quarterly.
My parents for a long time used their neighbor's wifi, despite having their own, because they didn't remember the password.
That said, having the carrier assign certain devices marked as "child" or "adult" or even with a DoB stamp that would change the flag when they became an adult might not be a bad thing. While intrusive would still be better than the forced ID path that some states and countries are striving towards.
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Taking tyrants' words at face value is collaboration in their tyranny.
This is nothing to do with children, those utterances are just bare faced cover for increased surveillance and control.
This is because these measures are not about protecting children.
It's a distraction.
Real objective is to further increase the barrier of entry for SMEs to compete (try start your own forum or any kind of challenger to Facebook et al). Government on the other hand gets a tidy surveillance tool as a sweetener.
So whenever time comes to turn a screw on dissent, the law is ready to be used.
Welcome to British corporate fascism.
Yes, it is a pretense and the point of mentioning "the children" is to mobilize the child-worshipping demographic who believe, in all cases, that anything that raises any risk to children should be banned, and that this should not be discussed by decent people. The successful child-worshippers also instantly burst into hysterics and aggressive personal attacks when spoken to about the subject (hysterics and tears when they agree, the latter otherwise.) Their success lies in never lowering themselves to discuss anything with anybody. They're here to tell you.
They are an extreme minority of every population (mostly people who aren't interested in politics or civil liberties who enjoy and care about children.) But sensible people are also an extreme minority of the population; we normal people usually aren't so sensible, instead we listen to sensible people and follow their advice.
So the people who want everybody on the internet to identify themselves pit hysterics against measured voices in the media, in order to create a fake controversy that only has to last until the law gets passed. Afterwards, the politicians and commentariat who were directly paid or found personal brand benefit in associating with the hysterics start leaving quotes like: "This isn't what we thought we passed" and "It might be useful to have a review to see if this has gone too far." Then we find out that half the politicians connected with the legislation have connections to an age verification firm which is also an data broker, and has half a billion in contracts with the MoD.
>Why can't these measures be handled via parental control?
Because the government is lying and this is about spying on the populace, not about parental control.
That's how it should work but you will find that a majority of parents cba rearing their children so they want the state to do it for them. And this extends to so many things in life that the authoritarian grip is only going to get tighter with time.
Note: the following is not arguing in favor of the UK policy, but is a general observation.
I seriously doubt that the majority of parents want the state to raise their children for them.
By arguing about irresponsible or lazy parents you are latching on to the first, most convenient thing that seems to make sense to you. But I think that is a mistake because not only does it perpetuate some kind of distorted sense of reality where parents don't care about their children and want to hand off all responsibility for them, but it distracts you from the real causal issues.
The fact is that humans have for millions of years acted in various levels of coordination to raise and look after children as a group. Modern society has made this all sorts of dysfunctional, but it still exists.
> parents cba rearing their children
And THAT is the problem that they should be tackling.
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To be fair, it is because the state makes it difficult for them to rear children.
Long working hours and both parents working full time means they do not have the time or the energy. Then you have the state offering help, and encouraging parents to drop them off at school first thing for breakfast club, and then keep them there for after school activities.
"but you will find that a majority of parents cba rearing their children so they want the state to do it for them"
This is normal and what public education is for. Teaching online safety and sex ed should be considered no different than teaching history
> 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 challenge focuses solely on the new Categorisation Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (the OSA’s most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia.
Guys, this right here is Wikipedia standing. It is that under the current law, Wikipedia would fall under cat 1 rules, even if by the law own admission it should not.
I'm skeptical this goes anywhere legally speaking.
The categorisation regulations are a statutory instrument rather than primary legislation, so they _are_ open to judicial review. But the Wikimedia foundation haven't presented an argument as to why the regulations are unlawful, just an argument for why they disagree with them.
It should be noted that even if they succeed (which seems a long shot), this wouldn't affect the main thrust of the Online Safety Act which _is_ primary legislation and includes the bit making the rounds about adult content being locked behind age verification.
The problem with the focus being on porn behind age verification as the main effect, is that it ignores all the other effects. Closing community forums and wikis. Uncertainty about blog comments.
It is actually (as noted in many previous discussion about the Online Safety Act) pushing people to using big tech platforms, because they can no longer afford the compliance cost and risk of running their own.
> pushing people to using big tech platforms
so big tech platforms will cheerfully embrace it. as expected, major players love regulations.
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Those sort of sites already had better moderation than big tech because they’d have their own smaller team of volunteer moderators.
I suspect any smaller site that claims the Online Safety Act was a reason they closed, needed to close due to other complications. For example an art site that features occasional (or more) artistic nudes. Stuff that normal people wouldn’t consider mature content but the site maintainers wouldn’t want to take the risk on.
Either way, whether I’m right or wrong here, I still think the Online Safety Act is grotesque piece of legislation.
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If you have examples of this happening, please add them to the ORG list: https://www.blocked.org.uk/osa-blocks
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I am very skeptical that the Online Safety Act forces community forums and wikis to close. By and large the Act forces forums to have strong moderation and perhaps manual checks before publishing files and pictures uploaded by users, and that's about it.
Likewise, I suspect that most geoblocks are out of misplaced fear not actual analysis.
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More detail: https://medium.com/wikimedia-policy/wikipedias-nonprofit-hos...
It seems to be a fairly standard judicial review: if OFCOM(?) class them as "category 1", they are under a very serious burden, so they want the categorization decision reviewed in court.
I think it will be very hard to write a definition that excludes wikipedia and includes (and I am quoting the article) "many of the services UK society is actually concerned about, like misogynistic hate websites".
Very interested how this goes.
I can't see any language in the statutory instrument suggesting anyone had any intention of applying it to Wikimedia? The most likely outcome is the court will reassure them of that. This might help other people running similar websites by citing the case rather than having to pay for all the experts but isn't going to magically stop it applying to Meta as intended.
It's in the Medium article.
Scroll to "Who falls under Category 1"
https://medium.com/wikimedia-policy/wikipedias-nonprofit-hos...
Wikimedia hosts what UK puritans consider pornographic content.
A lot of it. Often in high quality and with a permissible license.
I would link to relevant meta pages but I want to be able travel through LHR.
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I'm not sure what you're basing that on?
Have the court filings become available?
Of course, the random PR in the OP isn't going to go through their barrister's arguments.
While I agree that the main thrust of the legislation won't be affected either way, the regulatory framework really matters for this sort of thing.
Plus, win or lose, this will shine a light on some the stupidity of the legislation. Lots of random Wikipedia articles would offend the puritans.
It won't go anywhere because in British jurisprudence, Parliament is supreme.
I don't like the OSA and associated regulations as much as the next person -- I think we could have gotten a long way by saying you need to include a X-Age-Rating in http responses and calling it a day. The law itself is incoherently long and it's very difficult to know what duties you have.
However, I don't see what the legal basis of Wikimedia's challenge is. The OSA is primary legislation, so can't be challenged except under the HRA, which I don't really see working. The regulations are secondary regulation and are more open to challenge, but it's not clear what the basis of the challenge is. Are they saying the regulations are outside the scope of the statutory authority (doubtful)? You can't really challenge law or regulation in the UK on the basis of "I don't like it".
X-Age-Rating would only work if the server could be sure of the jurisdictions under which the recipient was bound.
To continue the thought experiment though: another implementation would be to list up to N tags that best describe the content being served. You could base these on various agreed tagging systems such as UN ISIC tagging (6010 Broadcasting Pop Music) or UDC, the successor to the Dewey Decimal System (657 Accountancy, 797 Water Sports etc.) The more popular sites could just grandfather in their own tag zoologies.
A cartoon song about wind surfing:
It’s then up to the recipient’s device to warn them of incoming illegal-in-your-state content.
There actually was a proposal/standard for this back in the day: https://www.w3.org/PICS/
> X-Age-Rating would only work if the server could be sure of the jurisdictions under which the recipient was bound.
That's no different to the current legislation.
The twitter API used to have a "illegal in France or Germany" field, which was used for known Nazi content.
They should just block all UK gov IPs in protest
As a Brit, ultimately I think this is the only thing that's going to get through to the government and public.
It may well come to that (and the fact that Wikipedia ends up being banned in the UK will potentially bring people to their senses).
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I think you both have a point. Why not block foreign access to your internet service if the laws of that foreign country are nothing you want to be concerned with?
It might be a bit disruptive in the beginning, but in the long run I think we all benefit from that. It increases the chance of politicians to realize their over-boarding decisions by having public pressure from previous users of those services and it increases the likelihood of local competitors of those services opening.
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Yeah, you should probably try to do something about the rising fascist tendencies in the US? Why wouldn't you?
Rolling over for it isn't going to do the EU or other allies any favors. The administration won't reward loyalty with good deals or whatever
That's not fair,
Everyone hates the Brits.
In related news, the Labour party is already considering banning VPNs. We almost got like two days of Online Safety Act in effect.
https://www.gbnews.com/politics/labour-ban-vpn-online-safety...
I hate the Online Safety Act as much as the next person, but:
- Labour have made no plans to ban VPNs.
- One MP wanted to add a clause for a government review into the impact of VPNs on the bill after 6 months, with no direction on what that would mean.
- I have no idea if this clause actually got added, but it'd make sense. If you're going to introduce a stupid law you should at least plan to review if the stupid law is having any impact.
- GB news is bottom of the barrel propaganda.
> clause for a government review into the impact of VPNs on the bill after 6 months
thats government speak for deciding to do something about the VPN problem. because there is no way a commission will not find a good reason to ban VPNs when you reach that point, because you could argue they help avoid UK restrictions.
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You're repeating propaganda from a far right newspaper headline, written misleadingly to make it sound like labour have said something recently about VPNs (they haven't)
I don't care where the headline is from. Other places have the same suspicion. There clearly is _some_ concern in Labour that VPNs could be used to bypass the OSA and it doesn't take much imagination to see where this is going.
'Kyle told The Telegraph last week in a warning: "If platforms or sites signpost towards workarounds like VPNs, then that itself is a crime and will be tackled by these codes."'
https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/vpns/what-does-the-labou... :
"In 2022 when the Online Safety Act was being debated in Parliament, Labour explicitly brought up the subject of VPNs with MP Sarah Champion worried that children could use VPNs to access harmful content and bypass the measures of the Safety Act. "
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vpns-online-s...
Sure. Nothing was said directly right now, but to just take Labour's word for it that they won't go further with these restrictions is really naive.
It may not be recent but it is something that Labour MPs have said before in the context of the OSA.
The Labour think tank Labour Together also recently brought up a manditory goverenment ID called BritCard, ostensibly for government services but to be rolled out else where.
At the same time they've just set up an elite police force to monitor social media.
Labour must know people are rattled by all this, they just published a response to the petiion they recieved.
They're not addressing any concerns though, it's all we know best or shutting down debate with slurs.
In the absence of anything new we just have to take Labour policy on the last things they've said or done.
I think that article references a discussion from 2022 rather than something new as the headline implies.
GB News is about as reliable as Fox News. I suggest you get your news somewhere else.
A lot of people in this thread seem to enjoy the taste of boot and are spending a lot of words trying to say the OSA isn't a big deal. A bit of a sad attitude for a forum called HackerNews. This is massive overreach by the government, we shouldn't have to ID ourselves to message friends on bluesky, read homebrew forums or, soon, use xbox voice chat. The government won't give up this power, it's clearly the thin end of the wedge.
Related: I have just written a brief overview of how I understand the Online Safety Act to apply to owners of forums without 'adult' content, e.g. forums hosted by product companies, about their products.
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/07/29/the-online-safety-...
This is full of contradictions and both-sides-of-the-mouth speech. You can't coherently argue for an "open internet" "for everyone", and simultaneously plead exceptionalism for your own website, due its special virtues[0]. An "open internet" for websites with sterling reputations is a closed internet. It's an internet where censorship segregates the desirable from undesirable; where websites must plead their case to the state, "please let me exist, for this reason: ..." That's not what "open" means!
And moreover: WF's special pleading is[1], paraphrased, "because we already strongly moderate in exactly the ways this government wants, so there's no need to regulate *us* in particular". That's capitulation; or, they were never really adverse in the first place.
Wikimedia's counsel is of course pleading Wikimedia's own interests[2]. Their interests are not the same as the public's interest. Don't confuse ourselves: if you are not a centimillionaire entity with sacks full of lawyers, you are not Wikimedia Foundation's peer group.
[0] ("It’s the only top-ten website operated by a non-profit and one of the highest-quality datasets used in training Large Language Models (LLMs)"—to the extent anyone parses that as virtuous)
[1] ("These volunteers set and enforce policies to ensure that information on the platform is fact-based, neutral, and attributed to reliable sources.")
[2] ("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 challenge focuses solely on the new Categorisation Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (the OSA’s most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia.")
This is a fine sentiment, could you also please provide an alternative approach?
The law has passed, Wikipedia has to enforce that law but don’t wish to because of privacy concerns.
What should Wikimedia now do? Give up? Ignore the laws of the UK? Shutdown in the UK? What exactly are the options for wikimedia?
> "This is a fine sentiment, could you also please provide an alternative approach?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3477966 ("Wikipedia blackout page (wikipedia.org)" (2012))
Wikimedia weren't always a giant ambulating pile of cash; they used to be activists. Long ago.
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Warn the UK users during the grace period as best as they can.
And after the grace period... yeah, I think blocking UK IPs is the "correct" thing to do. If the government doesn't make them an exception than they'll have to do that, correct or not, anyway.
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> Shutdown in the UK?
Yes. This is what every single large company which is subject to this distopian law should do. They should do everything they can to block any traffic from the UK, until the law is repelled.
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Shut down in the UK seems like a reasonable approach.
If UK wants to be more like China: let them.
> Shutdown in the UK?
That might actually be one of the few things that would help.
One of the complaints against OSA is how easy it's proven to circumvent, evidenced by the massive increase in VPN usage.
So it would be interesting to understand if shutting down in the UK would have an impact, now we all had to learn how to circumvent georestrictions this past week.
Laws get challenged and overturned all the time. I doubt it will happen this time, can't have wrongthink.
They can build a solid legal case on their exceptionalism _and_ hope the court uses it as an opportunity to more widely protect the open Internet. The fact that the letter of the law means you can't have an open Internet isn't their fault.
No one asked for this. Don’t blame parents. This is the government using the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse to restrict your personal freedoms.
Can anyone explain how Wikipedia supposedly is in Category 1? [1]
And if it marginally is, how come they cannot just turn off their "content recommender system"? Perhaps an example is the auto-generated "Related articles" that appear in the footer on mobile only?
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2025/226/regulation/3/ma...
The definition is:
> In paragraph (1), a “content recommender system” means a system, used by the provider of a regulated user-to-user service in respect of the user-to-user part of that service, that uses algorithms which by means of machine learning or other techniques determines, or otherwise affects, the way in which regulated user-generated content of a user, whether alone or with other content, may be encountered by other users of the service.
Speculating wildly, I think a bunch of the moderation / patroller tools might count. They help to find revisions ("user-generated content") that need further review from other editors ("other users").
There's not much machine learning happening (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ORES), but "other techniques" seems like it'd cover basically-anything up to and including "here's the list of revisions that have violated user-provided rules recently" (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AbuseFilter).
(Disclaimer: I work for the WMF. I know literally nothing about this court case or how this law applies.)
Perhaps they genuinely believe the mission of collecting all the world’s knowledge is more important than complying with the draconian moral panic of a likely short lived government in an increasingly irrelevant former great power.
Are you saying an algorithmic content recommendation system is an important part of "collecting all the world's knowledge"?
I think one of the most chilling aspects of this roll out has the attempts to shutdown debate about security concerns with handing over biometrics to unknow entities.
That's even to just access mainstream services such as direct messaging on social media sites.
The most high profile example of this is the Technology Secretary Peter Kyle comparing Nigel Farage to a sex offender, specifically Jimmy Saville.
Regardless of what you think of Farrage[1], that's a terrible thing to say. There are ligitimate concerns about this Act.
The ICO is charged with protecting privacy and punishing breaches of personal information due to incompetence. Well they've never prosecuted an organisation for a biometric data breach.
Until the ICO actually has teeth, and uses them, they shouldn't have introduced these restrictions and that's before we even get to the fact that the Act doesn't achieve what it say it will.
1. ...and I have very little positive to say about him but he is still an opposition MP and it is his job to oppose the government.
"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 challenge focuses solely on the new Categorisation Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (the OSA’s most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia."
I find this a very unprincipled stance.
I'm surprised they haven't deployed a big banner à la Jimmy Wales begging for donations to UK users re this law yet
I think most Wikimedia users would consider it inapropriate to mix fundraising and public policy initiatives.
They previously did a 24 hour blackout to protest SOPA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA...
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I believe public policy initiatives are already Wikimedia's second-biggest expenses, after salaries, so I don't see how that would be much more different than usual fundraising except for making it more transparent.
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All this is of course bullshit. The only response that would have a chance of succeeding would have been if most websites collectively just blocked everyone from the UK. Imagine if 60-70% of the internet just stopped working for UK People. The law would be toppled tomorrow.
Every Company that implemented any compliance is a traitor to the free internet and should be treated as such.
The UK is the perfect target - globally relevant enough to make the news, small enough that its a financial rounding error. Take action, carry through with the threat and if your product actually matters - attitudes can change globally.
While the law would not be toppled tomorrow, the companies of the internet need to stop being so desperate for small scraps of money and eyeballs.
The internet might be free if companies instead of trying to skirt laws and regulations just operated where they are welcome. Good for the internet but bad for the VCs so it wont happen.
I live in the UK. Please for the love of all that is sweet and holy DO THIS! The only way our politicians will learn is if the public outcry is so fierce it makes them fear for their jobs.
A UK internet blockade might just get this going.
The issue here is that the internet is dominated by large companies that have a huge incentive to use this as a way to ensure regulatory capture of the free internet.
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This law could be brought down overnight by Meta if they introduced age-control for WhatsApp and suddenly people couldn't message their own children.
But of course Meta carved out their own exception in the law, so this law benefits Meta at the cost of alternatives.
I think that's kind of the joke as well, because WhatsApp (being totally unmoderated and opaque) is probably the exact place you'd want to enact age controls, especially in groups.
It's like the government thought long and hard about how to make the restrictions the most inconvenient and with the largest number of gaps in the approach.
Most websites, for most people, are big tech. Big tech loves this regulation because imposing compliance costs reduces competition.
The problem is, that both pornhub and facebook also love underage (well, too young) users, because those users will stay there.
Cutting off UK for a few weeks won't cause that much damage but might help them in the long run.
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"Every Company that implemented any compliance is a traitor to the free internet and should be treated as such."
What would be the punishment for that?
> What would be the punishment for that?
On a legal level? None. On a personal level? Don't give them money or your business. Avoid them completely or ensure you use ad blockers on their sites and throw away accounts if necessary. Do not contribute to their content.
In short: you take whatever they give you, and you give nothing in return.
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>Every Company that implemented any compliance is a traitor to the free internet and should be treated as such.
Companies can be fined £18 million pounds or 10% of revenue, whichever is greater. If you feel like being the first test case, be my guest.
All companies could easily just block UK Users instead.
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The headline seems a little misleading. From the article:
> 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 challenge focuses solely on the new Categorisation Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (the OSA’s most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia.
Is Wikipedia actually Category 1?
Seems to require an algorithmic feed to be Category 1 - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2025/9780348267174
How is "algorithmic feed" related to safety? Or is it, along with seemingly arbitrary numbers like 7 or 34 millions, a way to target a specific platform for those who are afraid to spell the name explicitly?
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Is search results 'an algorithmic feed'.
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Their homepage certainly is.
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So the hearing was on 22+23rd, is there a writeup of how it went and when we might hear the outcome?
Yep case was heard last week but no decision returned yet:
https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/uk/online-safety...
This is a failure of Operating System Vendors, in my opinion.
If Operating Systems had a way for parents to adequately monitor/administer the machines of their children, this would not be such a huge, massive hole, in which to pour (yet more) human rights abuses.
Parents have the right to have an eye on their children. This is not repressive, it is not authoritarian, it is a right and a responsibility.
The fact that I can't - easily, and with little fuss - quickly see what my kids are viewing on their screens, is the issue.
Sure, children have the right to privacy - but it is their parents who should provide it to them. Not just the state, but the parents. And certainly, the state should not be eliminating the rest of society's privacy in the rush to prevent parents from having oversight of - and responsibility for - the online activities of their children.
The fact is, Operating System Vendors would rather turn their platforms into ad-vending machines, than actually improve the means by which the computers are operated by their users.
It would be a simple thing to establish parent/child relationship security between not just two computers, but two human beings who love and trust each other.
Kids will always be inquisitive. They will always try to exceed the limits imposed upon them by their parents. But this should not be a reason for more draconian control over consenting adults, or indeed individual adults. It should be a motivating factor to build better computing platforms, which can be reliably configured to prevent porn from having the detrimental impact many controllers of society have decided is occurring.
Another undeniable fact, is that parents - and parenting - get a bad rap. However, if a parent and child love and trust each other, having the ability to quickly observe the kids computing environment in productive ways, should be being provided, technologically.
When really, we should be building tools which strengthen parent/child relationships, we are instead eradicating the need for parents.
Unpopular opinion, I know: but Thats The Point.
Mobile operating systems have very great children controls. You should research the topic yourself and you will see.
I'm a parent, I have researched it, and found it not great because it still involves third parties and doesn't promote local control/anonymity without involving some external entity - i.e. Apple requires accounts, Google still gets its metrics, etc.
Unless you've got some specific better examples?
Too bad they can't prevent fully grown adults from acting like children.
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