There's an opportunity for a service like CloudFlare here give people a simple toggle that manages geoblocks on legal liability factors. It's way too much for every organisation to individually track every country's laws day by day in case just by being accessible there you incur a liability. And it sounds like the UK would have just self-selected out of the list of "safe" countries.
If something like this was in widespread use it would have much more impact since countries would see whole swathes of the internet immediately go dark when they make stupid laws.
Wikipedia gets a lot of donations from the uk. I’m not sure how many Brits would continue putting £10-100/mo into a charity that explicitly doesn't operate in their borders.
This has been happening for years but if you're in the US you don't realize. For example I can't access my local Montana newspaper web site from the UK "because GDPR" (even though the UK isn't in the EU).
> in case just by being accessible there you incur a liability.
This is a dangerous precedent though that IMO everyone should fight against.
It's how we get the balkanization of the internet, and the death of it as a global network.
TBH we also shouldn't put the onus on blocking "unsafe" countries on the website owners, nor an intermediary like CloudFlare. If a nation wants to block certain content, let the nation deal with it by getting their own ISPs to block and make sure the citizen's anger gets correctly placed on their government and not the site operators.
> If a nation wants to block certain content, let the nation deal with it by getting their own ISPs to block and make sure the citizen's anger gets correctly placed on their government and not the site operators.
I don’t really understand comments like these. Even if you’re exactly right about how it should work, how would you make this happen in the world we live in? Neither the tech community nor ISPs nor cloud companies decide these things. Just because a matter affects us doesn’t mean we have much of a voice in it especially if it’s legal.
Laws about tech are decided by (idiot) politicians/parties/governments and the consequences are enforced by massive fines, imprisonment, etc. by law enforcement and selective (and often politically motivated) prosecution. In some of the worst places the consequences could include death.
Afghanistan just lost access to the internet almost entirely. China and North Korea are famous for their firewalls. Much of Asia has internet blackouts whenever there are large scale protests. The western world’s government has more legal jurisdiction/economic influence on the companies that run these things and are increasingly leveraging that for their desired censorship.
If the answer to this is democratic influence, the populations of many countries don’t really have that, the majorities in countries that do have it certainly doesn’t know or care about these things and wouldn’t vote for the pro-censorship politicians in the first place if they’d then vote to cut off their nation’s access to uncensored internet while preserving the uncensored variants, and even if the majority ever did care to get the system to work in this way there’s a global trend away from having their opinions on such things matter anyway.
It depends on the kind of website. If you're not advertising, selling anything, or otherwise doing any business through your website you're much more emboldened to not care about every jurisdiction.
But if you're trying to make money through your website... well sorry you're doing business in those countries and I don't have a ton of objection to you needing to follow foreign laws.
I'm fine with "balkanization" (I know some people from the Balkan countries... maybe they'd object to the use of that word) if it means a freedom divide and actual consequences for countries ever eroding freedoms.
It's how we get the balkanization of the internet, and the death of it as a global network.
That ship sailed at least a decade ago.
From small instances like your employer blocking certain web sites (Google Translate, seriously?) to China's Great Firewall to nations restricting access in certain regions (India, many others), to nations restricting access to certain web sites (Turkey, many many others), to entire countries taking themselves entirely offline (Afghanistan, most recently).
The point the parent is making is that you don’t have to manually keep track of the countries you need to block. You just tell Cloudflare what your website does / what type of laws may be problematic, and Cloudflare manages the blocklist automatically.
Makes a lot of sense actually that it’s surprising they don’t have this yet.
Or, just ban children from the internet, same as gun ownership for 12yo's. Fine/imprison parents. This is a parenting problem, not a technical/business problem. Remove the supply of children and things will get better. A business cannot make laws or override laws with ToS and invent their own moral compasses - rather it is the sole responsibility of the parent on what their child gets exposed to (whether politics, porn, weird beliefs, spam, chat/user generated content). The parents have been getting a free pass all this time.
Some parents are awful at parenting, so much so it makes me question why they had kids if they clearly don't care about bringing them up properly.
It's a no brainer that kids should have minimal screen exposure. There's even organisations which specifically state the most ideal screen time (basically none up to 18 months, 1 hour max up to 5 years old). iPad children will be a detriment to the future of any country.
The screen time is bad enough, without the sloppy content you can very easily find online. The best ways to destroy a kid are to saddle them with social media, media consumption and porn/gambling/vices at an early age. Their brain is being fried during development.
I’m consistently shocked at how authoritarian and draconian HN comments can be. Throwing parents in prison if their 12 year old uses the internet? Jail them and send their kids to foster care? This is your plan for improving the lives of children?
> The parents have been getting a free pass all this time
I totally agree but the UK government – particular Labour – doesn't want people to take responsibility really, because that would take from their own 'power'. There's nothing the UK loves more than a stupid population hooked on benefits and devoid of education, critical thinking and financial freedom.
The internet is an extremely useful educational resource. It provides ways of communicating with people you want your kids to communicate with. it needs management by parents.
My kids have learned a huge amount from the internet. I have guided them, discussed what are credible resources, the harms possible etc, who they talk to and what they tell them....
There are solutions that would make it easier for parents - people need tools to manage this. Require that children use child safe SIM cards in their phones (they are available already - EE advertisers them). Home internet connections should be by filtered by default that can then be turned off (or off for particular devices in the ISP supplied router that most people have).
> Or, just ban children from the internet, same as gun ownership for 12yo's. Fine/imprison parents.
It's an interesting idea. I presume that the there would be similar laws to selling guns. So there would need to be the national ID card and checks when selling any internet-enabled device. TVs, phones, cameras etc.
I as, a parent would probably need a phone safe, into which I could place my phone when I wasn't using it (though I suppose conceal-carry would be permissible). I;d probably want to have biometric locks on my TV, Chromecast etc etc and the children wouldn't be able to use the TV unsupervised unless all smart functions were locked down.
I don't think we need to ban kids from the Internet or punish parents that let them use it. It's enough if we make it clear that parents are responsible for what their kids do on the internet, both for harm that comes to the child and for any liabilities the child may incur there.
> Or, just ban children from the internet, same as gun ownership for 12yo's.
wait... wut? Gun ownership for 12yo's? wtf :D
Though the idea of "internet only for adults" is not that bad IMHO. Yes, internet is (well, at least was advertised as) infinite-resource-of-knowledge but we know how it turned out - IMHO minority of underage use it to spend hours reading wikipedia and instead spend hours glued to crap like tiktok (though crap like that should be banned altogether as well :D)
So a service like CloudFlare is the Great firewall of the world and CloudFlare can shut you down if you go against their interests as a supranational gatekeeper.
agreed on that ... I'm not too happy with how CloudFlare tried to flex their influence on AI training, so I certainly wouldn't want them in charge of gatekeeping the whole internet.
But the truth is, we are already there. CloudFlare can already do this, they just won't because the their customers will leave if they violate their trust.
The people turning on the "block UK" button can block the UK regardless of what CDN they use.
Cloudflare just offers a button with fewer false positives than naive GeoIP databases. They're not so much gatekeepers as they are the security guards hired by the stores themselves.
Not really. It's more like Cloudflare is providing an ipset in your iptables config. It's not Cloudflare's decision: they're just making it easier for you to do it.
There are alternatives to cloudflare tho. If the government cuts you off or starts enforcing 24/7 surveillance there's not a lot that can be done other than tossing them out in the next election (if there are elections) or civil disobedience until they renege
Quite the opposite! There's an opportunity for a service like CloudFlare here to give people a simple toggle that manages to circumvent such geoblocks. ;)
Does anyone know what their actual exposure currently is/was in the UK? They actually had offices and staff there?
To your point about the proposed service, isn’t that what cloud providers basically already do in rudimentary ways or could do with finer grain regions?
Also, it seems the internet/WWW is basically being snuffed out right before our eyes as governments start using all manner of specious arguments to censor and control adults… for the children… of course. You as an adult are not allowed to have your rights because children may be harmed if you have your rights. “ No, no, we can’t keep the children from engaging in things that we deem harms them, your rights have to be relinquished instead.”
You can pretty much get rid of the entire internet that way. All across the USA there are "child protection laws" banning pornography (what's pornography? some politicians say it's mentioning that trans people exist!). Countries like China and Russia have legal mandates to store and process data within their borders. China requires a license to even host a website. The UK and EU have the GDPR, and now the UK also has the OSA. Then there are the incompatible privacy laws (for instance, EU courts have considered DNT as a legal measure to deter tracking, while several American states ban explicitly prevent the DNT header from counting). Oh, and of course, any website with any kind of user-submittable content is subject to laws like the DMCA and the recent EU anti-CSAM laws which put site operators in grave legal risk.
I don't even know what laws apply to the Middle East, Africa, or South America, but I'm sure there are enough of them to make most sites culpable in some way.
The UK has been doing this sort of stuff for at least a decade. For example they have the PIPCU which under the guise of copyright threatens 10 years in prison for sites not even in their jurisdiction.
The US has always claimed jurisdiction on foreign-hosted but US-accessible content.
Do people forget the owner of Megaupload being extradited? In many ways this is just catching up to the current US state.
And there's a lot of confusion here between basic consumer data protection laws and (IMHO massively overreaching) "Online Safety" laws. This isn't Imgur making a stand for free speech, this is Imgur wanting to track and sell user data - to which minors cannot consent. Putting on my tinfoil hat you could argue that many of these companies are trying to encourage this misunderstanding intentionally.
> The US has always claimed jurisdiction on foreign-hosted but US-accessible content.
Committing crimes remotely from another country was never a loophole to escape the laws of that country.
When a country requests extradition they’re not claiming jurisdiction over another country. They’re saying that a crime was committed in their country by the person and they’re asking the foreign country for cooperation in prosecuting that person.
The MegaUpload case is not equivalent to what the UK is doing. MegaUpload was operating as a business, taking payments, and exchanging money. Once you start doing explicit paid business in a country you can’t claim you’re not involved with that country.
If a country starts claiming that merely making content accessible globally is a crime in their country, that’s an entirely different issue. Not equivalent to the MegaUpload case.
> Do people forget the owner of Megaupload being extradited? In many ways this is just catching up to the current US state.
Again, false equivalence. MegaUpload was operating as a business with US customers. They also had some hosting in the United States if I recall correctly.
Once you start doing business in a country and have customers there, you’re involved with their laws.
Megaupload is a weird one. He hosted in it the USA, giving USA jurisidction. Also it's still going through the courts in New Zeland and USA and hasn't been proven hes guilty. And if I recall he did alledge he followed the DMCA, which if he ever is extradited might save him if it is in fact true.
> The US has always claimed jurisdiction on foreign-hosted but US-accessible content.
There’s been multiple cases where non-US gambling websites have had their domains confiscated by the American government because they have American users, going back about 20 years.
Europe isn't a cultural monolith. This is an issue of MEP accountability and transparency. Look no further than Chat Control to see how far they're going to ensure that the people in favor of it remain nameless.
> The ICO also confirmed that companies could not avoid accountability by withdrawing their services in the UK.
This is quite a slippery slope. If I host a website in one country, I do not necessarily care where people access my website from. It is not like I actively provide a service to them - they just use internet (decentralised network) to access it. What if I publish a newspaper here, someone takes it where the contents are illegal, am I accountable?
The following paragraph might shed some light on what that means (emphasis mine):
> We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law
In that context it's completely fair to say "leaving doesn't absolve you of past transgressions".
Edit. If Imgur made any revenue from UK users then it becomes impossible to claim plausible deniability on any definition of "providing a service". If the UK can do something about this is a different matter. They could make CEOs/board personally or even criminally liable for the company's failure to pay a fine but probably won't.
Definition of 'Revenue in the UK' is a bit debatable though isn't it?
I sell a advertising package from my US HQ based self serve advertising portal to a British company who use the service to advertise to customers in the UK. Ok - kinda UK revenue. How about 'To advertise to customers in the US' well it's getting highly debatable.
What about I sell advertising packages to a US company from my US HQ but someone in the UK views and advert on my site and therefore generates me 0.001¢ - debatable.
It's not about "hosting a website", it's about providing services.
If you provide services, like selling a newspaper, in the UK, you need to respect their laws, or you will suffer the legal implications of not doing so.
And regarding the accountability, it refers to the fact that imgur USED TO provide services in the UK:
> We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing.
Companies providing services outside the UK can infringe all the UK laws they want, the UK doesn't care.
But as soon as you decide to provide services in the UK, you have to follow the law.
And, as they explain in the article, if you break the law, stopping to provide services in the UK will not absolve you for your past wrongdoings.
Does every single website that exists and is available in UK automatically provides services in UK? Isn't it just simpler to completely block every request from UK by default to "not provide services"?
I think it's a conflict that was baked into the Internet at its conception. A non-geographic service overlaid on top of a world with a huge amount of geography and borders.
Yeah. We had a chance to invent our own governance on the internet. But we abdicated, and made the internet a free for all. As a result, national governments have stepped in to provide the governance we didn’t program in. And they do it - of course - in an inconsistent, ad hoc way.
There was a period a couple hundred years ago when it was all the rage internationally to write constitutions. Lots of countries got constitutions within a few decades, and almost no constitutions have been written since then. I wonder sometimes how the internet would be different if it were implemented in an era or culture in which people believed in that sort of thing.
The bordered nature of geography is just as much of a social construct as the borderless nature of the internet is. It's not a given that this war will be won by the former.
"The ICO also confirmed that companies could not avoid accountability by withdrawing their services in the UK.
Mr Capel said: "We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing."
When read in context, it's obvious the statement quoted in the HN conmment refers to only to accountability for "prior infringement", i.e., acts committed before withdrawing services in the UK
You already need to care depending on what you are serving, and this has been the case for at least 20 years to my knowledge.
The most obvious example of this is websites from the UK or Europe which operate any kind of gambling. [1] This may well be legal (based on licensing) in their jurisdiction, but they still need to restrict access to prevent US people from accessing the service or they will be breaching the US's gambling laws.
Likewise many US firm geofence access for EU residents out of fear of GDPR.
People hosting news sites have often had to geofence to prevent UK residents from accessing their site if they are hosting any kind of reporting of UK court cases that are under embargo or matters that are subject to one of the UK's famous "Super injunctions" [2]
> People hosting news sites have often had to geofence to prevent UK residents from accessing their site if they are hosting any kind of reporting of UK court cases that are under embargo or matters that are subject to one of the UK's famous "Super injunctions" [2]
…and if the site has no UK assets, how enforceable is the injunction?
I agree, but if you sell products or subscriptions to people in a foreign country the situation becomes different. And if you run ads then the situation is more complicated but closer to that than to your personal website.
IMO the question is not if such services should be held accountable by local laws but how they should be held accountable. I think it would make more sense to go after the UK entities profiting from the endeavor: advertizers and financial institutions involved.
This part bothers me. Enforcement seems to be at their discretion. In this case the framing or reality around the fine is very bad, they sort of say it's intentional themselves.
They're leaving and they're getting the fine. Implying if they didn't leave and implemented changes, that there is a chance they may not have been fined.
What they mean, and to take an example that it purposely extreme: If you kill someone in a country you cannot avoid accountability in law by fleeing that country.
If they breached laws and regulations then withdrawing their service from the country afterwards does not change anything regarding those breaches (investigation still ongoing, though).
It's not comparable because the "crime" has been committed in the hosting country (where it's arguably not even a crime) and it's a bad example because there are many incidents of murderers fleeing to non-extradition countries.
> Mr Capel said: “We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing.
It's clear to me, it's a huge risk for any company to allow access to UK visitors at this stage. All companies should be blocking all UK visitors. It's just too much risk for them to take.
The fault is obviously an incompetent and authoritarian UK government, but that's what the UK overlords have agreed.
It's not specific to the UK: many developed countries are cracking down on Internet businesses. There's going to be an awful lot of regulation, and it will be incompatible between different countries. The one-model-fits-the-whole-world style of business is over: you're going to be confined to national borders again.
The opinion polls are clear: the normies want this.
shouldn't it be the other way round? if the UK doesn't like something a non-UK company is doing it should be them that go through the trouble of blocking it.
If I have a website I'm pretty sure I'm bound to break some random country's law without knowing
Answering my own question, I guess it's exceptionalism of the powerful countries where they can just bully you into following their law
It would be much better to not block them rather serve them a single screen that explains why the rest of the site is unavailable to them citing the specific laws that make the action necessary
It is exactly the same with the EU's GDPR, by the way...
That's the funny or hypocritical thing: Both laws have the same reach but people here tend to praise the GDPR for it while being furious about the Online Safety Act.
I don't think these laws are being made with the will of the people.
There's been no groundswell of opinion, no technically minded authority pushing expert opinion.
The same people lobbying for the online safety act were pushing age verification tools. The government is exceptionally unpopular, even by the standards of already deeply unpopular governments in recent years.
I despair of the situation in the UK. How have we ended up here?
The British people always take any new limitations with the classic stiff upper lip. We could very easily become Russia (without the military and natural resources), because the population has the same say nothing, do nothing mentality.
There's also always been a bit of authoritarianism in the British populace. Just look at how enthusiastic people are about banning things that annoy them. During coronavirus lockdowns, the people living around me constantly reported me to the police for going out for runs (which we were perfectly allowed to do).
We have a national crab in bucket mentality, which doesn't help any country. Intelligence, fitness and success are all things that British people love pulling down. Many people here care more about ripping everybody down than building them up. They live completely mediocre lives and are perfectly fine with the government nannying them.
The two main parties policies have converged, so have the older smaller parties.
The only choices we have that are any different are Reform and The Green Party, and possibly Corbyn's new party that seems busy imploding right now. Of those, Reform has some nasty people in it, and is rapidly attracting the worst of the Conservative party (look at the defecting MPs), The Greens and Your Party have some fairly nuts people and ideas too (in different ways).
I think ordinary British people are pretty decent.
> We could very easily become Russia (without the military and natural resources)
We have a much bigger economy than Russia.
> any people here care more about ripping everybody down than building them up. They live completely mediocre lives and are perfectly fine with the government nannying them.
I agree with the last bit.
People are also negative about their follow citizens. A lot of people believe the country is full of untrustowrthy "gammon". and back the government/establishment against the latter.
At least recently[1] most Australians and an overwhelming percentage of under-16s supported the ban. Similarly in the UK[2]. This is a topic in which it appears it is the online discourse that's wildly out of alignment with broader public opinion and I'd argue potentially one of the reasons may be that it will make it harder for bot-nets to mass-manipulate public discourse so easily.
Except that the policy, in the vacuum it is in right now, is very popular in Australia.
It was one of the most agreed with policies at the most recent Federal election.
I hate it as a concept, but at the moment it is all "don't you want children to be protected?", and nothing of substance that people can meaningfully find objectionable (like imgur getting cut off).
I don't think it is particularly a policy of News Corp, although they're happy to run with populist ideas, and more just an issue the Labor party thought they could wedge the Liberals with.
You're describing virtually every policy for virtually every government, certainly since the coalition. Arguably a lot of what we've seen before.
The UK doesn't have governments, it has a public policy unit for global capital, with the Americans calling the shots on foreign policy, and a knee-jerk taste for authoritarianism at home.
Over the years the amount of safety and speech issues that have cropped up have accumulated into a force. The OSA and DSA were announced years in advance, with multiple opportunities for feedback and analysis (I looked into the outcomes at various points but never contributed)
I would say there has been a groundswell of opinion, it’s not something that is covered here on HN much.
WhatsApp, Telegram and everyone else should pull out of EU in protest of Chat Control. Then EU will be forced to make its own chat app, UX will be terrible, and citizens will finally feel enough pain to contact their representatives ;)
Why are we talking about the EU in this thread? I don't see how draconian UK laws relate to a proposed chat control law in the EU that hasn't even been drafted and would likely not survive a judicial challenge if it were to be approved.
I did contacted them. All of them who didn't yet have a referenced public position on fight chat control for France. By phone. Only two responded with a clear alignment. Good that I did it by phone, because apparently for some of them getting several thousand emails per day can only mean they are victim of a spam attack.
Not only they don't represent anything but there own little interests, but they won't even have the decency to express clearly what they are standing for. Even lip service is not assured anymore.
> getting several thousand emails per day can only mean they are victim of a spam attack
I think of calling my representative as being like proof of work. It takes a modicum of effort to look up their phone number, compose some spiel, and make the call, compared to delivering spam by the truckload.
People who write this stuff still don't understand that big tech IS THE ENEMY. They are quite happy to implement this, even up into the OS Level. It's called Regulatory capture. Now your legal Moat to a true European Alternative has become even bigger.
Even if, for the sake of argument, we grant the premise “big tech IS THE ENEMY”, it does not necessarily follow that the vast mass surveillance national security apparatus is our friend.
> Then EU will be forced to make its own chat app, UX will be terrible,
Why? EU can just tell an LLM to build an alternative app, they can just tell it to make it user friendly and make no mistakes. That's the primary use case of Trillions of dollars of investment in GPUs and electricity to power them.
JK(or am I?), a protest will be a boon for EU, which is growing Anti-American each and every day. The EU alternatives don't exist not because Europeans can't code but because EU market is open to US companies and there's no reason for duplicate effort as winner takes it all thanks to network effects. EU capital just invests in USA based companies that operate in EU. It's much easier, lower taxes lower worker protection standards etc. Also, US has much more capital to burn to corner the markets, they also just go ahead and buy anything European i.e. Skype. and not risk competition.
I hate this so bad. You know that the solution will be that EU will block US companies (who do not comply) so EU users will eventually get their own WhatsApp called MsgMeNow. The result is that nobody can talk to people outside their own jurisdiction.
This is effectively what we see in China. They only use WeChat, I was unable to register because it says I need someone to verify my account when I try to do it (this has been happening since 2018)
We (in most EU countries) don't have representatives. Parties have representatives. To be listed on a ballot you need to be with good standings with your party and get chosen by them. Then various method ensure that you can't be elected if you are not a member of a party (anyone from a party below 5% is not getting in for example).
This means officials only care about what their party leaders tell them to do, not what voters think because voters matter very little to them. That's why American "contact your representatives" does very little here - they are not your representatives, they are representatives of party leaders.
Signal is AGPL licensed, so they would have to publish whatever crude hack they insert in order to install that back door. (not the keys, of course, but if they're this incompetent about tech legislation, I don't trust their QA competence to be top notch)
Sometimes I wonder who builds this stuff. I appreciate at the end of the day that everyone has bills, but I feel like I'd rather apply for public housing before I work on that. They're not even getting rich, just a wagie. I have never met someone in the tech industry that was ideologically anti-privacy. It's always the lawyers and politicians. But someone builds it.
I might be the only one that’s in support of chat control. I would like the internet to be so walled off that it becomes boring and maybe it will stop all the brainrot.
If the EU or companies within did make a chat app and it got widespread appeal, it would just be exactly the same as WhatsApp. WhatsApp isn't special in any way whatsoever, besides having a critical mass of users.
Chat apps were already so oversupplied as to be free even before AI could vibe code them. Or, indeed, before the US relented on export bans for remotely adequate HTTPS implementations.
> feel enough pain to contact their representatives
It doesn't work like that because the European "Parliament" is a joke. For starters, they can't initiate anything, they can only approve or reject (of course that it's almost always approve) stuff that is being passed to them from higher up, most of the times from the European Commission, if I'm not mistaken. Ah, they can pass/generate "resolutions", which are basically empty words put on a piece of paper.
Second, the people there don't "represent" anyone, at most they represent the political parties that have put them on the lists that got them into the European Parliament, but that's it.
>Second, the people there don't "represent" anyone,
I think that's largely down to people not taking EU elections as seriously as national elections.
The ones elected by my country are always largely the most doldrum people from the main parties that aren't charismatic enough to win in national elections (The b-squad basically)
... and a handful of the kind of people that think windfarms generate wind and that we need to leave NATO.. even though we haven't joined NATO. The kind of people you vote to send to the EU so that you don't have to see them.
> "It will be of no loss if it were to fail entirely."
That's decades of the public internet that would be permanently erased; billions of dead links pointing nowhere. HN alone would lose ~32,000 images from its archives,
Is it not hubris to call it "no loss" if, say, 3 hours ago, "Design of a LISP-based microprocessor / Page 22 has a map of the processor layout:" was forever lost to humanity, as collateral damage to some techbros' dispute?
Good - cause the maximum amount of pain, start pulling services across the board - the more it happens the more painful it becomes for the government to defend it.
Likewise, as a Brit, I hope more mainstream sites do this until people realise how stupid or authoritarian (but I repeat myself) the UK's Online Safety Act is. VPN companies must be enjoying these shenanigans.
It would be more effective if this was about the online saftey act. Ironically Imgur is probably already compliant with it (they already have moderation policies that go above what the OSA requires)
This is about a GDPR violation. I'm not sure that cheering for our right to have our privacy respected by companies revoked is really what we want.
Serious question: why are people siding with Imgur here, instead of blaming the company that chose to ignore the laws of the country it operates in?
Imgur's business model is ad sales and tracking users - that inherently requires collecting and protecting data, including vulnerable groups like children. Even if the UK rules are imperfect or possibly overbroad (I haven't read them), if a company choose to operate where a law applies, it's on the company to follow it or to challenge it through the courts, not to blame the regulator after the fact.
Thanks to OSA, service providers have to collect even more data from users, including face scans and IDs. They usually outsource that process to third party companies, which obviously are registered in Cyprus or another shady country. We can expect a massive leak in a near future, and no one will be prosecuted, though you will receive a letter from the government saying: "We are really sorry for the leak of your data, we weren't able to get in touch with the data processing company, so we kindly ask you to revoke your passport and apply for a new one. Stay vigilant as someone might use your identity for illegal purposes".
> including vulnerable groups like children
The "vulnerable group" is proficient at using VPNs. Ironically, the new law affects older generations the most.
That's a fair point, but you have to take into consideration the relevant laws and countries. You also need to take into consideration what it means to "operate" in a country.
>> Serious question: why are people siding with Imgur here, instead of blaming the company that chose to ignore the laws of the country it operates in?
Because if we've learnt anything from the debate around the Online Safety Act, it's that the majority of people are so unbelievably addicted to porn they feel like it's a human rights violation to put up barriers to their access to it. While there are obvious privacy arguments against sharing your ID to access these sites the alternative is just not viewing porn. It's remarkable how unfathomable that idea is to entire generations of people.
Lots of the top comments talking about how Imgur can stay out of the UK more easily and not about how Imgur can comply with the law and protect children's data.
Why is it always that regulation is the problem, not the company being irresponsible with data.
Why are children on the internet? Why are the parents not being fined for being irresponsible? Give the kids a loaded gun, its the same as giving them access to the internet. The internet is not a place for children to begin with. Why try to bend the internet to conform? It will destroy the internet as it is as well as all it's freedoms. Oh and it probably won't stop/protect them, as thousands of new sites come & go every year, so impossible to control. Its better to try regulate the children than to regulate the internet.
Saying the internet is not a place for children is like saying the street is not for children. Full of drug dealers, cars and danger!
Yet learning how to cross the street is an essential skill in life. They are also filled with flowers, pathways to playgrounds and much more. And that's why children are not forbidden on the streets.
My point being: let's educate instead of regulate. "Regulating the children" is silly and countereffective.
What do you mean by "children's data"? What data? Suppose I'm 11, I'm not registered at Imgur, and I'm only browsing, what sort of vulnerable data they have to protect? Browser's user agent, IP address, screen resolution? Even if I'm registered, it's rather unlikely I will provide all my real details.
The "children's safety" argument is for voters who are technologically illiterate and don't have a tiniest idea how the internet works.
Every "protect the children" law is just a gaslight attempt to push a package of other Orwelian laws. It's been like that for atleast half a century - even Simpsons parodied this with "think of the children" back in 1997.
It's good companies are walking out of jurisdictions where FUD is the basis of a law.
This is a shame, Imgur was a good source of fun. I understand what's the reason behind this decision, the current "implementation" of the Online Safety Act is the worst way to handle this problem. Unfortunately I can't see any way that can be reasonably implemented to check the age of the user.
Pretty soon the only websites accessible from the UK will be phishing sites asking for all your personal info to access the "real internet". Real smart guys making the laws there these days.
I suppose this is a serious question - does this mean that in theory HN should ban UK users? Or is HN likely compliant with this law? It is hard to pierce through the Orwellian language in the article (does "safeguarding children’s personal information" mean retaining or deleting the data?).
It looks like this law (which is unrelated to the Online Safety Act) is concerned with children being subjected to ad-tech tracking and similar indiscriminate data harvesting, so a site like this which doesn't feel the need to share your habits with 2,541 partners is probably out of scope.
I like how it's always "oh just safeguard people's data", oh "just" don't do anything bad with people's data.
Then you look up what the actual regulation says and it's hundreds of pages of pure legaleese (over 100 pages for GDPR, over 300 for Online Safety Act), that you'd need to hire a team of lawyers to parse and interpret to make sure you're not breaking any of the regulations therein.
In theory, HackerNews should be concerned. There is no prevention of children using the site, and potentially "harmful content" could be access either on or through the site. Being an aggregator doesn't seem to be a get-out.
This is GDPR. So long as they conform to the 13 principles then HN will be fine. Its nothing to do with the online safety act.
For the OSA (which I think is very badly drafted, and poorly enforced by OFCOM) so long as there is decent moderation (which there is), a way to report posts (there is) and the site doesn't persistently host actual abuse, then you're mostly fine.
It doesn't help that OFCOM are unwilling to change the scope of guidance to match the size and type of community.
HN has moderation, won't track you without telling you, and will delete your content if you ask. That's literally all it takes, it's really not that Orwellian
HN will restrict how fast you can comment without telling you (unless you figure it out and ask). There's no indicator that your account has this restriction besides being prevented from commenting, there's no indicator what the limit is, and the appeals process involves a subjective judgement by HN leadership
Was it? It did a tremendous amount of harm as well. Future historians may judge us very harshly for how cavalier and flippant we were in unleashing this technology onto the public.
I invite you to search HN for 'libor' and see how many of the American users of this website were affronted by the vast fines dished out by the US government to UK-headquartered banks for manipulating the LONDON Interbank Offered Rate from their offices in London, UK. If you can find a single one I'll eat my hat.
Being a country means you can make your own laws so the authority question has a pretty clear answer. Unless you disaviow national borders and state power and such stuff generally of course. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereignty
Placing the fines is pretty easy; they just go through their legal system, finish up the case and get their judgement. Russia has a giant outstanding fine against Google for example since Google is not censoring things the Kremlin doesn't like, even though Google has no corporate presence in Russia and the fine is iirc now larger than the entire world economy. (So it's an unrealistic amount designed to deter Google more than anything else in practice.)
The difficulty is getting enforcement; in practice, what happens is that the fine is put down as outstanding and if any executive or employee of the company enters the country, they're arrested and held hostage until the company pays up (or are held directly responsible for whatever the company is accused of). Most countries usually have corporate presency laws to avoid this sort of scenario though.
Alternatively, the judgement can be enforced through diplomatic channels, but that's a giant clusterfuck and unlikely to succeed unless it's something that's very blatantly a crime in both countries, since it's effectively retrying the case. (And even then it can depend on if the country just doesn't feel like cooperating for that specific case, for no other reason than spite; France for example is fond of doing this.)
Arresting executives is pretty extreme and not normally done. Generally countries will only go after assets and revenues in the country.
Even for local companies. I had a UK ltd company and it got some fines for not filling in the correct forms but you can just close it down still owing money, which I did, and there's no liability for the director(s).
Right, but the UK is saying they'll fine Imgur even after Imgur blocked access. At that point, what tooth does the fine have? "You must pay this fine if you want to, err, nothing I guess"?
Thanks. That needs to be in an HN guide somewhere, along with: online services cost money to run so don't be surprised that they need either fees or advertising.
Being accessible over the internet from a country can't be the same as having a physical presence there. Otherwise, anyone putting any content on the internet needs to comply with the laws of every single country.
Following this logic, I suppose that, in the future, cars that cannot automatically detect the presence of a child in a wheelchair and prevent the engine from starting will be banned.
Why are you being sarcastic about this. Obviously that will be a legal requirement at some point, just like constantly supervising the driver for tiredness is.
I'm not being sarcastic. I'm predicting a trajectory of never-ending increase of regulatory requirements for any human activity which I don't like. Only big players have deep pocket for lobbyists and lawyers to avoid them or resources to implement them.
>Following this logic, I suppose that, in the future, cars that cannot automatically detect the presence of a child in a wheelchair and prevent the engine from starting will be banned.
You said this like it is a bad thing, which is baffling? Obviously cars should do this. One of the best things about adding self-driving features is we can add features like this (and speed governors) to make cars a lot safer for everyone.
Some may think that harm doesn't matter, but perhaps actual fines are unjustified without the presence of actual harm.
And yes, perhaps the rules should be followed regardless of what they are, but perhaps the government bureaucracy is such that it's just too hard to change rules.
I'm one to think that the UK is generally overregulated, excessively obsessed with safety, and the regulation ethos is inconsistently applied. The government and civil service are also incompetent to the extreme. There also isn't a culture of accountability in government.
I also think that regulation is often simply used as a revenue generation measure, which is not what it is supposed to be about.
Perhaps a good middle ground is for a company that is at threat of investigation is simply asked to leave the UK or pay a fine.
> The government and civil service are also incompetent to the extreme.
As someone who moved to the UK from the states recently, this has not been my experience at all. Any paperwork i've had to do with the government (immigration, NHS, drivers license, car tax) has been incredibly smooth. On top of that, the city council in the area I live seems great -- they put on a ton of events, and have lots of services that seem to get used well.
Most of the incompetence i've seen is from private companies (e.g. banks and real estate).
I remember Imgur as a small project of a Redditor because we needed to share images. It is remarkable how a small project like that can still generate an international news headline more than a decade later.
The UK has started a version of censorship the equivalent can be found in countries many would say are considered dictatorships. It is absolutely shocking as someone who lives here and needs to be fought.
Does anyone ever actually use Imgur as a website though? I generally use it to upload a photo then send someone a link. It's no different than dropbox in my mind, except just limited to photos.
Please use literally any other way of sharing photos, up to and including printing them out and sending them by carrier pigeon. It's got to the point where I just pretend imgur links aren't there.
imgur itself is an empty husk of its former self. Last time I visited their site, they had fired all their moderators and replaced them with AI. They were bought at some point by .. media labs? I don't recall their name, but I recall that they are moneygrubbing bastards, to phrase it in neutral terms. I don't intend to visit their site again. Instead, I have made an AI agent that can do it for me.
Yeah I think no other sites have done this because fundamentally they like money. Imgur have probably only done this because they're making less money from the UK than it would cost to deal with this law.
We desperately need an Antarctica/Moon style extraterritoriality for the internet.
Just tell your citizens that the internet is fair game? Why restrict it to this level and make using the internet the same as having to understand the law in 200 odd countries.
The goal should be to avoid being constantly under attack.
The fight with government is a losing one. We make better protocols, they break the device. We send the data offshore, they make treaties.
Ultimately we need a permanent win before the door shuts completely. The exhaustion in industries and groups that have been fighting this fight for decades is palpable.
How do you "pull out" of the UK if you are not a UK company, you are a US company, hosted in the US, and proxied by Fastly. There's nothing to do? You do not need to abide by UK laws, even if your website is accessible from there.
It means to stop doing business there. For example selling ads targeting UK users to UK advertisers. London banking. Integrating with UK-based data-milking peers.
As the owner of a U.S. based website, I am not sending data anywhere. Some people in the U.K. might request data and download it from my site. I'm not forcing it on them.
I suppose in their defense, culturally, the UK hasn't respected many borders apart from their own so this really isn't anything new.
Zing aside, I'd be thrilled to see whatever prosecutor or litigator or whatever they call them over there bring a case against a US based company for hosting content in the US, geoblocking the UK, a UK resident using a VPN to bypass that block, and making the case that that is somehow the US company's fault.
I'm probably alone in thinking this is ok. According to the statement by the ICO reported by the BBC, this is because imgur has refused to implement some kind of technical verification of users being served pornography or suicide promotion.
Requiring this is not a bad thing
Governments/Regulation is the only tool at our disposal
How else should we approach this problem? Do we just throw our hands in the air? Or do we think that serving pornography and suicide promotion is not something that requires oversight?
If I don't want my child doing something, it's up to me to enforce that. I don't want my kid eating snacks before dinner, have I called upon the UK government to shut down the biscuit aisle at Tesco from 3pm-5pm?
The core of this issue is a kind of backwards notion that the internet needs to be a safe place, that the UK government says it can legislate that everyone on the internet has to verify who is accessing their site and then enforcing the UK's laws around it. It's nuts.
It's also not solving a problem. If you want to control what your kid sees on the internet there are already safeguards you can use, you can set up content restrictions on basically any device today. This law appears to be in place to be the mummy of children whose own mummies don't want to enforce certain restrictions on internet access.
I hear next month the M25 is going to be prosecuted for letting a child walk down the hard shoulder.
While this is a very real concern; I can't help but think it's over exaggerated? Kids will always find ways around blocks. I know, I too was once a child.
They're already using Google Docs as a chat application in class when social media is blocked. So what are we really trying to do here? Much like prohibition, I suspect we'll see the masses annoyed and inconvenienced, and those who want to find alcohol finding it regardless.
Sometimes I miss the old flash, irc, html tables for layouts internet.
The (a?) problem is that only the largest / most profitable players can afford to implement these systems. So while well intentioned they just shut out any company/service without loads of extra cash
FWIW, on old.reddit.com it still shows the cached image view, so no actual need to visit Imgur.com - a site that has had some quite interesting drama for the last few months.
Back in late 90s, 2000s, even 2010s, the internet was truly awesome. Only once governments started to get involved, by increasing the red tape and adding restrictions and whatnot, it became shit.
So I would argue that you are completely wrong. Yes, it might have been a bit of a wild west, but that is a good thing because you needed to have some smarts to navigate it and that filtered out the dumb masses that pollute it today and why we cannot have nice things.
I am not saying people should not have access to it, just that the less people there were, the better it was and the less attention it had by the governments. Which in turn made it much better experience than it is today.
But most people, actually, have not lived through those "early" days and cannot even comprehend how great it was back then and how crappy and restricted it is today.
Pretty much all countries have governments and the internet and I'd say it tends to end in annoyance rather than disaster, such as having to turn on a vpn to see junk on imgur in this case.
The only actual internet caused disaster I can think of - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide - was caused by a lack of regulation and "let's kill them all" stuff on facebook. 25k+ dead.
Everything that Cambridge Analytica did is another good example [1]. Granted that it doesn't rise to the level of a "25k+ dead disaster", but it's not nothing, it's a lot of bad things. And it also stems from lack of regulation, not from the opposite. As will other examples.
UK passed an insanely stupid and dangerous (as well as authoritarian) act called Online Safety Act.
It's essentially because of shitty parents allowing kids unsupervised access to the internet, rather than expecting parents to parent they pushed the cost/risk to companies.
Imgur decided they didn't want to foot the cost/risk and pulled out.
As a brit, I don't blame them, if I was US based I'd geoblock the UK as well.
Not least because it's the only way this will make enough of a stink for the gov to climb down.
> because of shitty parents allowing kids unsupervised access to the internet
>90% of parents allow their kids unsupervised access to the internet. That's reality. We've spent the last 30 years begging them to supervise and it hasn't worked, so proposing to do it again is a nonstarter.
On the other hand, I completely get why. Expecting parents to know how to operate Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, iOS, Android, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, ChatGPT, and school-issued devices is absurd, delusional, obviously never happening. CompTIA A+ Certification, for entry-level help desk work, requires learning about less platforms than what a parent faces. Even then, what about the computers that have minimal filtering at school libraries, or at friend's houses?
Denial of the kids on the internet as a problem, combined with unfair expectations on parents, is how we got here.
In Poland we had no access to "western" electronics since 1989 because we had been part of the "Warsaw Pact" i.e. subordinate to USSR. This was hard, so I pity for you guys in UK
What I mean is that this always starts with the same. First goes draconian laws, full inviligation, "Give me the man and I’ll find the crime". Later goes isolation. Apple already considered BREXIT of their cloud because of UK govt's invigilation programme
Imgur is a joke. They block VPN users with an intentionally obtuse "Imgur is temporarily over capacity. Please try again later.". Most importantly, its value for the average person has plummeted ever since its 2021 acquisition, and when they started deleting inactive content. UK's regulations have no place on a free internet, but the company running it is anything but worthy of praise.
When you receive a request to your website (or any service), that request comes from an IP address. There are databases that can tell you what country an IP address is from. It's not perfect, but it works well enough 99.99% of the time. Then, if the country is blacklisted, you do not allow access.
There is an ongoing ICO investigation about privacy and handling of children's data under data protection laws, rather than this being related to the Online Safety Act:
This is the best possible result I think. Until the regular citizens suffer as a result of tyrannical policies they will never think to vote out the corrupt police state politicians who invoke these insane policies in ever increasing power grabs.
Hopefully many more companies do this and British internet users migrate to use of VPNs. This will apply maximum pressure on the government to reverse these parochial laws.
>This will apply maximum pressure on the government to reverse these parochial laws
Whatever the annual revenue of imgur was is now up for grabs for any British entrepreneur willing to build an image hosting site and unless British people have an innate preference for exporting their data to the US they'll likely stick with that. In other words, it's a good opportunity for the domestic tech sector, that's what happens in most cases when foreign companies tend to be blocked.
The value of imgur isn’t really in being able to upload images there, it’s access to all the images uploaded from the rest of the world. Especially historical uploads, say, a turorial or a travel log using imgur as reliable image host.
Locally created and operated british website aimed at brits makes sense when it’s local news or local services or whatever. Local image hosting site that serves only (primarily?) brits seems of very questionable utility unless you somehow become a big hub for outsiders… at least until $other_country demands UK stop tracking their children or whatever excuse they’ll use.
Yeah let us find random ways, that we never used to care about, to ban all foreign websites so a "brit" can take over haha. This is quite authoritarian and corporatist and worthy of some criticism from more libertarian minded onlookers.
Of course you don't remember - you don't vote on individual laws, you vote for politicians.
Politicians always lie/"break promises", so whatever they say before an election only has a loose correlation with what they actually do. Pay attention to their track record and vote accordingly next time.
What are you suggesting though? That there were clues to herald these changes?
Tbh, I did look at my (new) MP's record on social justice and welfare... They were surprisingly out of Party character on a few issues. But certainly better than the other candidates in aggregate.
That's about the best we can all do.
Like many others, I would like to see a Swiss style vote on anything that gathers enough public support.
Apparently, there are a few sources that suggest a 'silent' majority supports the OSA. I think far reaching laws like these (the assisted death law changes being another) should always be put before the public. That way at least, I can better understand my position, and consider whether I'm in the wrong.
(I feel the OSA should have forced the ISPs to add parental controls, and let each household manage their own patterns of consumption)
Im sorry, if you run a site some where not in the UK. It doesn't give the country jurisdiction over the entire internet.
If a country wants to enforce some kind of rules, they will have to apply them to the countries residents, because its the resident that go out on the net and conduct the behavior, not the other way around.
This has been common sense for a long time now. Everybody is going crazy/mad. Must be some seriously narcissistic people running the UK.
Just a few months ago games built by US-based developers, sold on US-based platform with payments processors also US-based were censored by actions of Australian christian activist group.
Simply by sending some threating letters to payment processor management. It was done by few hundred fanatics who want to censor what content everyone is allowed to access.
Since this is possible, there not enough resistance and UK government have much more resources we'll all have to live with this.
If you are serving the UK market, you follow UK laws. It's that simple. In this case they are misusing UK children's information, that's a no-no in a country that has actual consumer protection laws. I'll wait for the EU to catch up on this too.
While the UK and EU (and US) like to pass stupid laws, in this case it's just an American company misusing citizen's data and not giving a crap. Good riddance.
There's an opportunity for a service like CloudFlare here give people a simple toggle that manages geoblocks on legal liability factors. It's way too much for every organisation to individually track every country's laws day by day in case just by being accessible there you incur a liability. And it sounds like the UK would have just self-selected out of the list of "safe" countries.
If something like this was in widespread use it would have much more impact since countries would see whole swathes of the internet immediately go dark when they make stupid laws.
I wish Wikipedia would take one for the team, and go dark in the UK. (And I'm in the UK).
Wouldn't work with somewhere like China, but the UK might still be capable of being shamed.
At this point, the UK government is beyond shaming. On the contrary, it shame and record-breaking unpopularity seems to empower them.
I wouldn't put it passed them to require the digital ID to access the internet passed curfew.
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Wikipedia gets a lot of donations from the uk. I’m not sure how many Brits would continue putting £10-100/mo into a charity that explicitly doesn't operate in their borders.
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Never underestimate the power of spite
This has been happening for years but if you're in the US you don't realize. For example I can't access my local Montana newspaper web site from the UK "because GDPR" (even though the UK isn't in the EU).
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> in case just by being accessible there you incur a liability.
This is a dangerous precedent though that IMO everyone should fight against.
It's how we get the balkanization of the internet, and the death of it as a global network.
TBH we also shouldn't put the onus on blocking "unsafe" countries on the website owners, nor an intermediary like CloudFlare. If a nation wants to block certain content, let the nation deal with it by getting their own ISPs to block and make sure the citizen's anger gets correctly placed on their government and not the site operators.
> If a nation wants to block certain content, let the nation deal with it by getting their own ISPs to block and make sure the citizen's anger gets correctly placed on their government and not the site operators.
I don’t really understand comments like these. Even if you’re exactly right about how it should work, how would you make this happen in the world we live in? Neither the tech community nor ISPs nor cloud companies decide these things. Just because a matter affects us doesn’t mean we have much of a voice in it especially if it’s legal.
Laws about tech are decided by (idiot) politicians/parties/governments and the consequences are enforced by massive fines, imprisonment, etc. by law enforcement and selective (and often politically motivated) prosecution. In some of the worst places the consequences could include death.
Afghanistan just lost access to the internet almost entirely. China and North Korea are famous for their firewalls. Much of Asia has internet blackouts whenever there are large scale protests. The western world’s government has more legal jurisdiction/economic influence on the companies that run these things and are increasingly leveraging that for their desired censorship.
If the answer to this is democratic influence, the populations of many countries don’t really have that, the majorities in countries that do have it certainly doesn’t know or care about these things and wouldn’t vote for the pro-censorship politicians in the first place if they’d then vote to cut off their nation’s access to uncensored internet while preserving the uncensored variants, and even if the majority ever did care to get the system to work in this way there’s a global trend away from having their opinions on such things matter anyway.
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The balkanization is being caused by the UK. No technical solutions prevent this.
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It depends on the kind of website. If you're not advertising, selling anything, or otherwise doing any business through your website you're much more emboldened to not care about every jurisdiction.
But if you're trying to make money through your website... well sorry you're doing business in those countries and I don't have a ton of objection to you needing to follow foreign laws.
I'm fine with "balkanization" (I know some people from the Balkan countries... maybe they'd object to the use of that word) if it means a freedom divide and actual consequences for countries ever eroding freedoms.
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It's how we get the balkanization of the internet, and the death of it as a global network.
That ship sailed at least a decade ago.
From small instances like your employer blocking certain web sites (Google Translate, seriously?) to China's Great Firewall to nations restricting access in certain regions (India, many others), to nations restricting access to certain web sites (Turkey, many many others), to entire countries taking themselves entirely offline (Afghanistan, most recently).
https://dash.cloudflare.com/?to=/:account/:zone/security/sec...
then take action "Block". i know what you mean by a simpler option though
The point the parent is making is that you don’t have to manually keep track of the countries you need to block. You just tell Cloudflare what your website does / what type of laws may be problematic, and Cloudflare manages the blocklist automatically.
Makes a lot of sense actually that it’s surprising they don’t have this yet.
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Or, just ban children from the internet, same as gun ownership for 12yo's. Fine/imprison parents. This is a parenting problem, not a technical/business problem. Remove the supply of children and things will get better. A business cannot make laws or override laws with ToS and invent their own moral compasses - rather it is the sole responsibility of the parent on what their child gets exposed to (whether politics, porn, weird beliefs, spam, chat/user generated content). The parents have been getting a free pass all this time.
I completely agree with your argument.
Some parents are awful at parenting, so much so it makes me question why they had kids if they clearly don't care about bringing them up properly.
It's a no brainer that kids should have minimal screen exposure. There's even organisations which specifically state the most ideal screen time (basically none up to 18 months, 1 hour max up to 5 years old). iPad children will be a detriment to the future of any country.
The screen time is bad enough, without the sloppy content you can very easily find online. The best ways to destroy a kid are to saddle them with social media, media consumption and porn/gambling/vices at an early age. Their brain is being fried during development.
> imprison parents.
I’m consistently shocked at how authoritarian and draconian HN comments can be. Throwing parents in prison if their 12 year old uses the internet? Jail them and send their kids to foster care? This is your plan for improving the lives of children?
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> The parents have been getting a free pass all this time
I totally agree but the UK government – particular Labour – doesn't want people to take responsibility really, because that would take from their own 'power'. There's nothing the UK loves more than a stupid population hooked on benefits and devoid of education, critical thinking and financial freedom.
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The internet is an extremely useful educational resource. It provides ways of communicating with people you want your kids to communicate with. it needs management by parents.
My kids have learned a huge amount from the internet. I have guided them, discussed what are credible resources, the harms possible etc, who they talk to and what they tell them....
There are solutions that would make it easier for parents - people need tools to manage this. Require that children use child safe SIM cards in their phones (they are available already - EE advertisers them). Home internet connections should be by filtered by default that can then be turned off (or off for particular devices in the ISP supplied router that most people have).
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> Or, just ban children from the internet, same as gun ownership for 12yo's. Fine/imprison parents.
It's an interesting idea. I presume that the there would be similar laws to selling guns. So there would need to be the national ID card and checks when selling any internet-enabled device. TVs, phones, cameras etc.
I as, a parent would probably need a phone safe, into which I could place my phone when I wasn't using it (though I suppose conceal-carry would be permissible). I;d probably want to have biometric locks on my TV, Chromecast etc etc and the children wouldn't be able to use the TV unsupervised unless all smart functions were locked down.
Doesn't sound particularly cool.
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I don't think we need to ban kids from the Internet or punish parents that let them use it. It's enough if we make it clear that parents are responsible for what their kids do on the internet, both for harm that comes to the child and for any liabilities the child may incur there.
> Or, just ban children from the internet, same as gun ownership for 12yo's.
wait... wut? Gun ownership for 12yo's? wtf :D
Though the idea of "internet only for adults" is not that bad IMHO. Yes, internet is (well, at least was advertised as) infinite-resource-of-knowledge but we know how it turned out - IMHO minority of underage use it to spend hours reading wikipedia and instead spend hours glued to crap like tiktok (though crap like that should be banned altogether as well :D)
So a service like CloudFlare is the Great firewall of the world and CloudFlare can shut you down if you go against their interests as a supranational gatekeeper.
Smart thinking Batman.
> CloudFlare can shut you down if you go against their interests as a supranational gatekeeper
They already can.
> Smart thinking Batman.
“Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Only if you want to keep using CloudFlare. You can make your site available without.
agreed on that ... I'm not too happy with how CloudFlare tried to flex their influence on AI training, so I certainly wouldn't want them in charge of gatekeeping the whole internet.
But the truth is, we are already there. CloudFlare can already do this, they just won't because the their customers will leave if they violate their trust.
The people turning on the "block UK" button can block the UK regardless of what CDN they use.
Cloudflare just offers a button with fewer false positives than naive GeoIP databases. They're not so much gatekeepers as they are the security guards hired by the stores themselves.
Cloudflare just provides the tools, ultimately it’s the website owner’s decision how to use them.
Not really. It's more like Cloudflare is providing an ipset in your iptables config. It's not Cloudflare's decision: they're just making it easier for you to do it.
There are alternatives to cloudflare tho. If the government cuts you off or starts enforcing 24/7 surveillance there's not a lot that can be done other than tossing them out in the next election (if there are elections) or civil disobedience until they renege
Quite the opposite! There's an opportunity for a service like CloudFlare here to give people a simple toggle that manages to circumvent such geoblocks. ;)
They call it warp
>There's an opportunity for a service like CloudFlare
i don't think "compliance" in a micropennies per click market like imgur is a full on "opportunity"
Does anyone know what their actual exposure currently is/was in the UK? They actually had offices and staff there?
To your point about the proposed service, isn’t that what cloud providers basically already do in rudimentary ways or could do with finer grain regions?
Also, it seems the internet/WWW is basically being snuffed out right before our eyes as governments start using all manner of specious arguments to censor and control adults… for the children… of course. You as an adult are not allowed to have your rights because children may be harmed if you have your rights. “ No, no, we can’t keep the children from engaging in things that we deem harms them, your rights have to be relinquished instead.”
> for a service like CloudFlare
Not Claudflare though, let's not feed another monster monopoly :)
what's wrong with a vpn?
mullvad basically allows me to go around all the censorship in my country: https://mullvad.net/en
I was going to say, had this happened back when reddit was still using imgur exclusively, then the UK would have really suffered.
Maybe they can tell the countries where they are anyway not going to do any business anymore - no, you block it.
CF already provides this
You can pretty much get rid of the entire internet that way. All across the USA there are "child protection laws" banning pornography (what's pornography? some politicians say it's mentioning that trans people exist!). Countries like China and Russia have legal mandates to store and process data within their borders. China requires a license to even host a website. The UK and EU have the GDPR, and now the UK also has the OSA. Then there are the incompatible privacy laws (for instance, EU courts have considered DNT as a legal measure to deter tracking, while several American states ban explicitly prevent the DNT header from counting). Oh, and of course, any website with any kind of user-submittable content is subject to laws like the DMCA and the recent EU anti-CSAM laws which put site operators in grave legal risk.
I don't even know what laws apply to the Middle East, Africa, or South America, but I'm sure there are enough of them to make most sites culpable in some way.
The UK has been doing this sort of stuff for at least a decade. For example they have the PIPCU which under the guise of copyright threatens 10 years in prison for sites not even in their jurisdiction.
https://torrentfreak.com/uk-police-launch-campaign-to-shut-d...
And with that, they have at the least gotten registrars not located in their jurisdicrion to transfer domains
https://easydns.com/blog/2013/10/08/whatever-happened-to-due...
The US has always claimed jurisdiction on foreign-hosted but US-accessible content.
Do people forget the owner of Megaupload being extradited? In many ways this is just catching up to the current US state.
And there's a lot of confusion here between basic consumer data protection laws and (IMHO massively overreaching) "Online Safety" laws. This isn't Imgur making a stand for free speech, this is Imgur wanting to track and sell user data - to which minors cannot consent. Putting on my tinfoil hat you could argue that many of these companies are trying to encourage this misunderstanding intentionally.
> The US has always claimed jurisdiction on foreign-hosted but US-accessible content.
Committing crimes remotely from another country was never a loophole to escape the laws of that country.
When a country requests extradition they’re not claiming jurisdiction over another country. They’re saying that a crime was committed in their country by the person and they’re asking the foreign country for cooperation in prosecuting that person.
The MegaUpload case is not equivalent to what the UK is doing. MegaUpload was operating as a business, taking payments, and exchanging money. Once you start doing explicit paid business in a country you can’t claim you’re not involved with that country.
If a country starts claiming that merely making content accessible globally is a crime in their country, that’s an entirely different issue. Not equivalent to the MegaUpload case.
> Do people forget the owner of Megaupload being extradited? In many ways this is just catching up to the current US state.
Again, false equivalence. MegaUpload was operating as a business with US customers. They also had some hosting in the United States if I recall correctly.
Once you start doing business in a country and have customers there, you’re involved with their laws.
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Megaupload is a weird one. He hosted in it the USA, giving USA jurisidction. Also it's still going through the courts in New Zeland and USA and hasn't been proven hes guilty. And if I recall he did alledge he followed the DMCA, which if he ever is extradited might save him if it is in fact true.
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> The US has always claimed jurisdiction on foreign-hosted but US-accessible content.
There’s been multiple cases where non-US gambling websites have had their domains confiscated by the American government because they have American users, going back about 20 years.
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Don't nations have some right to enforce their copyright laws (civil and criminal) outside their own territory, via treaty?
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The notion that a 17 year old cannot consent to user tracking is absurd
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So has alot of Europe to be fair, I think it's a cultural thing honestly.
Europe isn't a cultural monolith. This is an issue of MEP accountability and transparency. Look no further than Chat Control to see how far they're going to ensure that the people in favor of it remain nameless.
Wait, so you can host a torrent site in the USA and not get your domain ceased by the FBI?
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> The ICO also confirmed that companies could not avoid accountability by withdrawing their services in the UK.
This is quite a slippery slope. If I host a website in one country, I do not necessarily care where people access my website from. It is not like I actively provide a service to them - they just use internet (decentralised network) to access it. What if I publish a newspaper here, someone takes it where the contents are illegal, am I accountable?
The following paragraph might shed some light on what that means (emphasis mine):
> We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law
In that context it's completely fair to say "leaving doesn't absolve you of past transgressions".
Edit. If Imgur made any revenue from UK users then it becomes impossible to claim plausible deniability on any definition of "providing a service". If the UK can do something about this is a different matter. They could make CEOs/board personally or even criminally liable for the company's failure to pay a fine but probably won't.
Definition of 'Revenue in the UK' is a bit debatable though isn't it?
I sell a advertising package from my US HQ based self serve advertising portal to a British company who use the service to advertise to customers in the UK. Ok - kinda UK revenue. How about 'To advertise to customers in the US' well it's getting highly debatable.
What about I sell advertising packages to a US company from my US HQ but someone in the UK views and advert on my site and therefore generates me 0.001¢ - debatable.
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how can you be charged after you leave if you leave before the law goes into effect? doesn't the UK have ex post facto protections?
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It appears that you are mixing things here.
It's not about "hosting a website", it's about providing services.
If you provide services, like selling a newspaper, in the UK, you need to respect their laws, or you will suffer the legal implications of not doing so.
And regarding the accountability, it refers to the fact that imgur USED TO provide services in the UK:
> We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing.
Companies providing services outside the UK can infringe all the UK laws they want, the UK doesn't care.
But as soon as you decide to provide services in the UK, you have to follow the law. And, as they explain in the article, if you break the law, stopping to provide services in the UK will not absolve you for your past wrongdoings.
Does every single website that exists and is available in UK automatically provides services in UK? Isn't it just simpler to completely block every request from UK by default to "not provide services"?
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> that imgur USED TO provide services in the UK
Meaning that the servers were located in the UK, or that the users were, or both?
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What service is Imgur providing in the UK specifically?
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It’s you who are mixing things. Putting up a website outside the UK and “deciding to provide services in the UK” are two decidedly different things.
UK legal imperialism is self centered and unrealistic and undermines speech the world over.
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I think it's a conflict that was baked into the Internet at its conception. A non-geographic service overlaid on top of a world with a huge amount of geography and borders.
Yeah. We had a chance to invent our own governance on the internet. But we abdicated, and made the internet a free for all. As a result, national governments have stepped in to provide the governance we didn’t program in. And they do it - of course - in an inconsistent, ad hoc way.
There was a period a couple hundred years ago when it was all the rage internationally to write constitutions. Lots of countries got constitutions within a few decades, and almost no constitutions have been written since then. I wonder sometimes how the internet would be different if it were implemented in an era or culture in which people believed in that sort of thing.
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The bordered nature of geography is just as much of a social construct as the borderless nature of the internet is. It's not a given that this war will be won by the former.
"The ICO also confirmed that companies could not avoid accountability by withdrawing their services in the UK.
Mr Capel said: "We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing."
When read in context, it's obvious the statement quoted in the HN conmment refers to only to accountability for "prior infringement", i.e., acts committed before withdrawing services in the UK
You already need to care depending on what you are serving, and this has been the case for at least 20 years to my knowledge.
The most obvious example of this is websites from the UK or Europe which operate any kind of gambling. [1] This may well be legal (based on licensing) in their jurisdiction, but they still need to restrict access to prevent US people from accessing the service or they will be breaching the US's gambling laws.
Likewise many US firm geofence access for EU residents out of fear of GDPR.
People hosting news sites have often had to geofence to prevent UK residents from accessing their site if they are hosting any kind of reporting of UK court cases that are under embargo or matters that are subject to one of the UK's famous "Super injunctions" [2]
[1] eg this guy was on the board of a listed UK company operating as far as they were concerned entirely legally who was arrested in NYC https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/sep/14/gambling.mo...
[2] eg In the "Ryan Giggs" super injunction case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_British_privacy_injunctio...
> People hosting news sites have often had to geofence to prevent UK residents from accessing their site if they are hosting any kind of reporting of UK court cases that are under embargo or matters that are subject to one of the UK's famous "Super injunctions" [2]
…and if the site has no UK assets, how enforceable is the injunction?
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> but they still need to restrict access to prevent US people from accessing the service or they will be breaching the US's gambling laws.
Why not just avoid travel to the US?
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I agree, but if you sell products or subscriptions to people in a foreign country the situation becomes different. And if you run ads then the situation is more complicated but closer to that than to your personal website.
IMO the question is not if such services should be held accountable by local laws but how they should be held accountable. I think it would make more sense to go after the UK entities profiting from the endeavor: advertizers and financial institutions involved.
This part bothers me. Enforcement seems to be at their discretion. In this case the framing or reality around the fine is very bad, they sort of say it's intentional themselves.
They're leaving and they're getting the fine. Implying if they didn't leave and implemented changes, that there is a chance they may not have been fined.
This situation here is what I sort of implied when lfgss shut down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42444354
What they mean, and to take an example that it purposely extreme: If you kill someone in a country you cannot avoid accountability in law by fleeing that country.
If they breached laws and regulations then withdrawing their service from the country afterwards does not change anything regarding those breaches (investigation still ongoing, though).
This is neither comparable nor a good example.
It's not comparable because the "crime" has been committed in the hosting country (where it's arguably not even a crime) and it's a bad example because there are many incidents of murderers fleeing to non-extradition countries.
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> am I accountable?
If you travel to their jurisdiction, yes.
Many countries countries witch apply their laws outside there jurisdiction and borders
USA (Kim dotcom)
Russia (Skripals)
China (Teng Bio)
Israel (Mordechai Vanunu)
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In the example given the answer is "no" but that's not the same as Imgur's case.
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> Mr Capel said: “We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing.
Block UK access now just in case.
As somebody from the UK, I think this is a great form of protest against the government.
Same - frankly google/alphabet should just HTTP 451 the UK (and I say that as a brit/someone in the UK).
It'd be interesting to see how fast the policy would get reversed then.
This was always a stupid policy and so protesting it by pulling services is one way to draw attention to that.
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How about officially starting one on HN? If we could gather a list of sites to join.
Wait you're against GDPR?
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It's clear to me, it's a huge risk for any company to allow access to UK visitors at this stage. All companies should be blocking all UK visitors. It's just too much risk for them to take.
The fault is obviously an incompetent and authoritarian UK government, but that's what the UK overlords have agreed.
It's not specific to the UK: many developed countries are cracking down on Internet businesses. There's going to be an awful lot of regulation, and it will be incompatible between different countries. The one-model-fits-the-whole-world style of business is over: you're going to be confined to national borders again.
The opinion polls are clear: the normies want this.
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shouldn't it be the other way round? if the UK doesn't like something a non-UK company is doing it should be them that go through the trouble of blocking it.
If I have a website I'm pretty sure I'm bound to break some random country's law without knowing
Answering my own question, I guess it's exceptionalism of the powerful countries where they can just bully you into following their law
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It would be much better to not block them rather serve them a single screen that explains why the rest of the site is unavailable to them citing the specific laws that make the action necessary
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So GDPR, which protects people from companies abusing personal data (which this case is about, not the online safety act) should be repealed?
(no, its not the cookie law either.)
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It is exactly the same with the EU's GDPR, by the way...
That's the funny or hypocritical thing: Both laws have the same reach but people here tend to praise the GDPR for it while being furious about the Online Safety Act.
I don't think these laws are being made with the will of the people.
There's been no groundswell of opinion, no technically minded authority pushing expert opinion.
The same people lobbying for the online safety act were pushing age verification tools. The government is exceptionally unpopular, even by the standards of already deeply unpopular governments in recent years.
I despair of the situation in the UK. How have we ended up here?
The population has allowed this to happen.
The British people always take any new limitations with the classic stiff upper lip. We could very easily become Russia (without the military and natural resources), because the population has the same say nothing, do nothing mentality.
There's also always been a bit of authoritarianism in the British populace. Just look at how enthusiastic people are about banning things that annoy them. During coronavirus lockdowns, the people living around me constantly reported me to the police for going out for runs (which we were perfectly allowed to do).
We have a national crab in bucket mentality, which doesn't help any country. Intelligence, fitness and success are all things that British people love pulling down. Many people here care more about ripping everybody down than building them up. They live completely mediocre lives and are perfectly fine with the government nannying them.
I think we have a lack of choice.
The two main parties policies have converged, so have the older smaller parties.
The only choices we have that are any different are Reform and The Green Party, and possibly Corbyn's new party that seems busy imploding right now. Of those, Reform has some nasty people in it, and is rapidly attracting the worst of the Conservative party (look at the defecting MPs), The Greens and Your Party have some fairly nuts people and ideas too (in different ways).
I think ordinary British people are pretty decent.
> We could very easily become Russia (without the military and natural resources)
We have a much bigger economy than Russia.
> any people here care more about ripping everybody down than building them up. They live completely mediocre lives and are perfectly fine with the government nannying them.
I agree with the last bit.
People are also negative about their follow citizens. A lot of people believe the country is full of untrustowrthy "gammon". and back the government/establishment against the latter.
And how has Australia ended up in a similar situation[1] - coming this December?
My guess is that the common factor is News Corporation pushing an agenda on behalf of the very, very wealthy.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AustralianPolitics/comments/1nu68je...
At least recently[1] most Australians and an overwhelming percentage of under-16s supported the ban. Similarly in the UK[2]. This is a topic in which it appears it is the online discourse that's wildly out of alignment with broader public opinion and I'd argue potentially one of the reasons may be that it will make it harder for bot-nets to mass-manipulate public discourse so easily.
[1]https://au.yougov.com/politics/articles/51000-support-for-un...
[2]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gen-z-social...
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In a vacuum, the policy had really high opinion polling.
In reality, the technical implementation will undoubtedly be a privacy and surveillance disaster.
In a vacuum, people thought "social media" meant "Instagram and TicToc and Facebook etc."
In reality, the eSafety commissioner thinks "social media" includes platforms like GitHub. Yes, really.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-24/digital-dilemna-socia...
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Except that the policy, in the vacuum it is in right now, is very popular in Australia.
It was one of the most agreed with policies at the most recent Federal election.
I hate it as a concept, but at the moment it is all "don't you want children to be protected?", and nothing of substance that people can meaningfully find objectionable (like imgur getting cut off).
I don't think it is particularly a policy of News Corp, although they're happy to run with populist ideas, and more just an issue the Labor party thought they could wedge the Liberals with.
You're describing virtually every policy for virtually every government, certainly since the coalition. Arguably a lot of what we've seen before.
The UK doesn't have governments, it has a public policy unit for global capital, with the Americans calling the shots on foreign policy, and a knee-jerk taste for authoritarianism at home.
Over the years the amount of safety and speech issues that have cropped up have accumulated into a force. The OSA and DSA were announced years in advance, with multiple opportunities for feedback and analysis (I looked into the outcomes at various points but never contributed)
I would say there has been a groundswell of opinion, it’s not something that is covered here on HN much.
I’ll take your relative minor concerns over privacy over the freedom less, police state the US is becoming.
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WhatsApp, Telegram and everyone else should pull out of EU in protest of Chat Control. Then EU will be forced to make its own chat app, UX will be terrible, and citizens will finally feel enough pain to contact their representatives ;)
Why are we talking about the EU in this thread? I don't see how draconian UK laws relate to a proposed chat control law in the EU that hasn't even been drafted and would likely not survive a judicial challenge if it were to be approved.
This is not about the EU, and it's also not about chat control, or encryption.
The only connection I see is "I don't like UK Internet policy"
Well, it relates in that the UK also hates encryption and is extremely likely to get their own Chat Control anytime this decade.
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I did contacted them. All of them who didn't yet have a referenced public position on fight chat control for France. By phone. Only two responded with a clear alignment. Good that I did it by phone, because apparently for some of them getting several thousand emails per day can only mean they are victim of a spam attack.
Not only they don't represent anything but there own little interests, but they won't even have the decency to express clearly what they are standing for. Even lip service is not assured anymore.
> getting several thousand emails per day can only mean they are victim of a spam attack
I think of calling my representative as being like proof of work. It takes a modicum of effort to look up their phone number, compose some spiel, and make the call, compared to delivering spam by the truckload.
Was it a Green and a Nazi?
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People who write this stuff still don't understand that big tech IS THE ENEMY. They are quite happy to implement this, even up into the OS Level. It's called Regulatory capture. Now your legal Moat to a true European Alternative has become even bigger.
Even if, for the sake of argument, we grant the premise “big tech IS THE ENEMY”, it does not necessarily follow that the vast mass surveillance national security apparatus is our friend.
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> Then EU will be forced to make its own chat app, UX will be terrible,
Why? EU can just tell an LLM to build an alternative app, they can just tell it to make it user friendly and make no mistakes. That's the primary use case of Trillions of dollars of investment in GPUs and electricity to power them.
JK(or am I?), a protest will be a boon for EU, which is growing Anti-American each and every day. The EU alternatives don't exist not because Europeans can't code but because EU market is open to US companies and there's no reason for duplicate effort as winner takes it all thanks to network effects. EU capital just invests in USA based companies that operate in EU. It's much easier, lower taxes lower worker protection standards etc. Also, US has much more capital to burn to corner the markets, they also just go ahead and buy anything European i.e. Skype. and not risk competition.
If you think that's a lot of electricity, you're going to be amazed how much they can spend on bureaucracy before they even start building anything.
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I hate this so bad. You know that the solution will be that EU will block US companies (who do not comply) so EU users will eventually get their own WhatsApp called MsgMeNow. The result is that nobody can talk to people outside their own jurisdiction.
This is effectively what we see in China. They only use WeChat, I was unable to register because it says I need someone to verify my account when I try to do it (this has been happening since 2018)
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We (in most EU countries) don't have representatives. Parties have representatives. To be listed on a ballot you need to be with good standings with your party and get chosen by them. Then various method ensure that you can't be elected if you are not a member of a party (anyone from a party below 5% is not getting in for example).
This means officials only care about what their party leaders tell them to do, not what voters think because voters matter very little to them. That's why American "contact your representatives" does very little here - they are not your representatives, they are representatives of party leaders.
This article is about an existing UK law and Imgur, an image hosting site (although, it does have some social features).
signal is open source, so they'll just download the source, build it, add a backdoor and push it to the app store
same as that weird official USgov version hosted by israel
Signal is AGPL licensed, so they would have to publish whatever crude hack they insert in order to install that back door. (not the keys, of course, but if they're this incompetent about tech legislation, I don't trust their QA competence to be top notch)
Sometimes I wonder who builds this stuff. I appreciate at the end of the day that everyone has bills, but I feel like I'd rather apply for public housing before I work on that. They're not even getting rich, just a wagie. I have never met someone in the tech industry that was ideologically anti-privacy. It's always the lawyers and politicians. But someone builds it.
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> Sending message...
> Sending to your local police dept... OK
> Sending to intended recipient... Failed
> This phone is now locked
> Please open the door
I might be the only one that’s in support of chat control. I would like the internet to be so walled off that it becomes boring and maybe it will stop all the brainrot.
This is nothing to do with Chat Control or the EU.
> Then EU will be forced to make its own chat app
We'll make our own Chat App! With blackjack! And...
Why would the UX be terrible necessarily?
If the EU or companies within did make a chat app and it got widespread appeal, it would just be exactly the same as WhatsApp. WhatsApp isn't special in any way whatsoever, besides having a critical mass of users.
This 100%. There would be a lot more pushback in the EU against this nonsense if, overnight, EU users found the majority of their apps no longer work.
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>Then EU will be forced to make its own chat app
When did the US government make a chat app? Signal?
Chat apps were already so oversupplied as to be free even before AI could vibe code them. Or, indeed, before the US relented on export bans for remotely adequate HTTPS implementations.
In other words: What pain?
Good luck with that!
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> feel enough pain to contact their representatives
It doesn't work like that because the European "Parliament" is a joke. For starters, they can't initiate anything, they can only approve or reject (of course that it's almost always approve) stuff that is being passed to them from higher up, most of the times from the European Commission, if I'm not mistaken. Ah, they can pass/generate "resolutions", which are basically empty words put on a piece of paper.
Second, the people there don't "represent" anyone, at most they represent the political parties that have put them on the lists that got them into the European Parliament, but that's it.
>Second, the people there don't "represent" anyone,
I think that's largely down to people not taking EU elections as seriously as national elections.
The ones elected by my country are always largely the most doldrum people from the main parties that aren't charismatic enough to win in national elections (The b-squad basically)
... and a handful of the kind of people that think windfarms generate wind and that we need to leave NATO.. even though we haven't joined NATO. The kind of people you vote to send to the EU so that you don't have to see them.
There was an election in 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_European_Parliament_elect...
For people unfamiliar with it https://elections.europa.eu/en/
The parliament is elected by people in each country, those elected them elect the commission. So a form of indirect elections.
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Imgur only has yearly revenues of around $30m. The money they make in the UK specifically likely doesn't justify wasting resources on compliance.
It is an image storage service masquerading as a business. It will be of no loss if it were to fail entirely.
> image storage service masquerading as a business
…
> service
Money is good for goods and services…
If people give them money or cough ad revenue and get the service they want, that’s called a business.
> "It will be of no loss if it were to fail entirely."
That's decades of the public internet that would be permanently erased; billions of dead links pointing nowhere. HN alone would lose ~32,000 images from its archives,
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Is it not hubris to call it "no loss" if, say, 3 hours ago, "Design of a LISP-based microprocessor / Page 22 has a map of the processor layout:" was forever lost to humanity, as collateral damage to some techbros' dispute?
Decentralization can't arrive soon enough.
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I highly doubt if they will fail just because they block UK IP addresses?
As a Brit.
Good - cause the maximum amount of pain, start pulling services across the board - the more it happens the more painful it becomes for the government to defend it.
Likewise, as a Brit, I hope more mainstream sites do this until people realise how stupid or authoritarian (but I repeat myself) the UK's Online Safety Act is. VPN companies must be enjoying these shenanigans.
It would be more effective if this was about the online saftey act. Ironically Imgur is probably already compliant with it (they already have moderation policies that go above what the OSA requires)
This is about a GDPR violation. I'm not sure that cheering for our right to have our privacy respected by companies revoked is really what we want.
There was a fair bit of pain in 2014 when ISPs proxied non-https Imgur to do IWF filtering (and broke it). Yet here we are!
Serious question: why are people siding with Imgur here, instead of blaming the company that chose to ignore the laws of the country it operates in?
Imgur's business model is ad sales and tracking users - that inherently requires collecting and protecting data, including vulnerable groups like children. Even if the UK rules are imperfect or possibly overbroad (I haven't read them), if a company choose to operate where a law applies, it's on the company to follow it or to challenge it through the courts, not to blame the regulator after the fact.
Stupid laws mustn't be followed.
> requires collecting and protecting data
Thanks to OSA, service providers have to collect even more data from users, including face scans and IDs. They usually outsource that process to third party companies, which obviously are registered in Cyprus or another shady country. We can expect a massive leak in a near future, and no one will be prosecuted, though you will receive a letter from the government saying: "We are really sorry for the leak of your data, we weren't able to get in touch with the data processing company, so we kindly ask you to revoke your passport and apply for a new one. Stay vigilant as someone might use your identity for illegal purposes".
> including vulnerable groups like children
The "vulnerable group" is proficient at using VPNs. Ironically, the new law affects older generations the most.
> why are people siding with Imgur here, instead of blaming the company that chose to ignore the laws of the country it operates in?
Because the law is dumb and it is our moral imperative to not just ignore but break dumb laws
That's a fair point, but you have to take into consideration the relevant laws and countries. You also need to take into consideration what it means to "operate" in a country.
HN always sides with web operators. There's probably a vc joke in there.
>> Serious question: why are people siding with Imgur here, instead of blaming the company that chose to ignore the laws of the country it operates in?
Because if we've learnt anything from the debate around the Online Safety Act, it's that the majority of people are so unbelievably addicted to porn they feel like it's a human rights violation to put up barriers to their access to it. While there are obvious privacy arguments against sharing your ID to access these sites the alternative is just not viewing porn. It's remarkable how unfathomable that idea is to entire generations of people.
Are you arguing that people who are against this law and its implementation in the UK are against it because they're addicted to porn?
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Lots of the top comments talking about how Imgur can stay out of the UK more easily and not about how Imgur can comply with the law and protect children's data.
Why is it always that regulation is the problem, not the company being irresponsible with data.
Why are children on the internet? Why are the parents not being fined for being irresponsible? Give the kids a loaded gun, its the same as giving them access to the internet. The internet is not a place for children to begin with. Why try to bend the internet to conform? It will destroy the internet as it is as well as all it's freedoms. Oh and it probably won't stop/protect them, as thousands of new sites come & go every year, so impossible to control. Its better to try regulate the children than to regulate the internet.
Saying the internet is not a place for children is like saying the street is not for children. Full of drug dealers, cars and danger!
Yet learning how to cross the street is an essential skill in life. They are also filled with flowers, pathways to playgrounds and much more. And that's why children are not forbidden on the streets.
My point being: let's educate instead of regulate. "Regulating the children" is silly and countereffective.
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What do you mean by "children's data"? What data? Suppose I'm 11, I'm not registered at Imgur, and I'm only browsing, what sort of vulnerable data they have to protect? Browser's user agent, IP address, screen resolution? Even if I'm registered, it's rather unlikely I will provide all my real details.
The "children's safety" argument is for voters who are technologically illiterate and don't have a tiniest idea how the internet works.
> Why is it always that regulation is the problem, not the company being irresponsible with data.
Can you be irresponsible with childrens' data if you don't know whether your users are children?
Have a look at the update for a look at what they are talking about.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
Every "protect the children" law is just a gaslight attempt to push a package of other Orwelian laws. It's been like that for atleast half a century - even Simpsons parodied this with "think of the children" back in 1997.
It's good companies are walking out of jurisdictions where FUD is the basis of a law.
Staying out does both, is also the easiest and costs less.
This is a shame, Imgur was a good source of fun. I understand what's the reason behind this decision, the current "implementation" of the Online Safety Act is the worst way to handle this problem. Unfortunately I can't see any way that can be reasonably implemented to check the age of the user.
Agreed, this is a terrible development.
Pretty soon the only websites accessible from the UK will be phishing sites asking for all your personal info to access the "real internet". Real smart guys making the laws there these days.
And OnlyFans which is headquartered in the UK.
I suppose this is a serious question - does this mean that in theory HN should ban UK users? Or is HN likely compliant with this law? It is hard to pierce through the Orwellian language in the article (does "safeguarding children’s personal information" mean retaining or deleting the data?).
It looks like this law (which is unrelated to the Online Safety Act) is concerned with children being subjected to ad-tech tracking and similar indiscriminate data harvesting, so a site like this which doesn't feel the need to share your habits with 2,541 partners is probably out of scope.
https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/the-children-s-code-what-i...
> a site like this which doesn't feel the need to share your habits with 2,541 partners
How many might there be in this case, one wonders? https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/
I like how it's always "oh just safeguard people's data", oh "just" don't do anything bad with people's data.
Then you look up what the actual regulation says and it's hundreds of pages of pure legaleese (over 100 pages for GDPR, over 300 for Online Safety Act), that you'd need to hire a team of lawyers to parse and interpret to make sure you're not breaking any of the regulations therein.
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In theory, HackerNews should be concerned. There is no prevention of children using the site, and potentially "harmful content" could be access either on or through the site. Being an aggregator doesn't seem to be a get-out.
This has nothing to do with harmful content it’s about managing children’s data you collect.
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Wrong law.
This is GDPR. So long as they conform to the 13 principles then HN will be fine. Its nothing to do with the online safety act.
For the OSA (which I think is very badly drafted, and poorly enforced by OFCOM) so long as there is decent moderation (which there is), a way to report posts (there is) and the site doesn't persistently host actual abuse, then you're mostly fine.
It doesn't help that OFCOM are unwilling to change the scope of guidance to match the size and type of community.
HN is already non-compliant with several data privacy laws
In what way?
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Good
HN has moderation, won't track you without telling you, and will delete your content if you ask. That's literally all it takes, it's really not that Orwellian
Will HN really delete all your content if you ask?
Like, all your posts just disappear?
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HN will restrict how fast you can comment without telling you (unless you figure it out and ask). There's no indicator that your account has this restriction besides being prevented from commenting, there's no indicator what the limit is, and the appeals process involves a subjective judgement by HN leadership
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The global internet sure was fun for a bit.
Was it? It did a tremendous amount of harm as well. Future historians may judge us very harshly for how cavalier and flippant we were in unleashing this technology onto the public.
The internet has been around for decades. We are the future historians.
Yes, and if you can't see that you are a joyless human who will find misery in anything
Can you give us some examples of harm it's done?
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How is one country able to fine businesses in other countries? What legal authority or ability do they have to do anything?
I invite you to search HN for 'libor' and see how many of the American users of this website were affronted by the vast fines dished out by the US government to UK-headquartered banks for manipulating the LONDON Interbank Offered Rate from their offices in London, UK. If you can find a single one I'll eat my hat.
Being a country means you can make your own laws so the authority question has a pretty clear answer. Unless you disaviow national borders and state power and such stuff generally of course. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereignty
Read the question you're replying to again. Its a question about jurisdiction.
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Placing the fines is pretty easy; they just go through their legal system, finish up the case and get their judgement. Russia has a giant outstanding fine against Google for example since Google is not censoring things the Kremlin doesn't like, even though Google has no corporate presence in Russia and the fine is iirc now larger than the entire world economy. (So it's an unrealistic amount designed to deter Google more than anything else in practice.)
The difficulty is getting enforcement; in practice, what happens is that the fine is put down as outstanding and if any executive or employee of the company enters the country, they're arrested and held hostage until the company pays up (or are held directly responsible for whatever the company is accused of). Most countries usually have corporate presency laws to avoid this sort of scenario though.
Alternatively, the judgement can be enforced through diplomatic channels, but that's a giant clusterfuck and unlikely to succeed unless it's something that's very blatantly a crime in both countries, since it's effectively retrying the case. (And even then it can depend on if the country just doesn't feel like cooperating for that specific case, for no other reason than spite; France for example is fond of doing this.)
Arresting executives is pretty extreme and not normally done. Generally countries will only go after assets and revenues in the country.
Even for local companies. I had a UK ltd company and it got some fines for not filling in the correct forms but you can just close it down still owing money, which I did, and there's no liability for the director(s).
It can't, that's why they moved out.
If you do business in a country you have to operate under that country's laws and regulations, regardless of where you are registered.
Most commonly it's the EU fining American tech for GDPR violations and related privacy shenanigans.
Right, but the UK is saying they'll fine Imgur even after Imgur blocked access. At that point, what tooth does the fine have? "You must pay this fine if you want to, err, nothing I guess"?
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Thanks. That needs to be in an HN guide somewhere, along with: online services cost money to run so don't be surprised that they need either fees or advertising.
Being accessible over the internet from a country can't be the same as having a physical presence there. Otherwise, anyone putting any content on the internet needs to comply with the laws of every single country.
In agreement. What's with the fines. They're not in your jurisdiction, block them or leave them.
This update has been provided to give clarity on our investigation, and we will not be providing any further detail at this time.
"No, you can't ask questions. We gave you clarity, don't you understand? Take it and go away."
Following this logic, I suppose that, in the future, cars that cannot automatically detect the presence of a child in a wheelchair and prevent the engine from starting will be banned.
Why are you being sarcastic about this. Obviously that will be a legal requirement at some point, just like constantly supervising the driver for tiredness is.
I'm not being sarcastic. I'm predicting a trajectory of never-ending increase of regulatory requirements for any human activity which I don't like. Only big players have deep pocket for lobbyists and lawyers to avoid them or resources to implement them.
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>Following this logic, I suppose that, in the future, cars that cannot automatically detect the presence of a child in a wheelchair and prevent the engine from starting will be banned.
You said this like it is a bad thing, which is baffling? Obviously cars should do this. One of the best things about adding self-driving features is we can add features like this (and speed governors) to make cars a lot safer for everyone.
why overregulation is baffling to you?
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Some may think that harm doesn't matter, but perhaps actual fines are unjustified without the presence of actual harm.
And yes, perhaps the rules should be followed regardless of what they are, but perhaps the government bureaucracy is such that it's just too hard to change rules.
I'm one to think that the UK is generally overregulated, excessively obsessed with safety, and the regulation ethos is inconsistently applied. The government and civil service are also incompetent to the extreme. There also isn't a culture of accountability in government.
I also think that regulation is often simply used as a revenue generation measure, which is not what it is supposed to be about.
Perhaps a good middle ground is for a company that is at threat of investigation is simply asked to leave the UK or pay a fine.
> The government and civil service are also incompetent to the extreme.
As someone who moved to the UK from the states recently, this has not been my experience at all. Any paperwork i've had to do with the government (immigration, NHS, drivers license, car tax) has been incredibly smooth. On top of that, the city council in the area I live seems great -- they put on a ton of events, and have lots of services that seem to get used well.
Most of the incompetence i've seen is from private companies (e.g. banks and real estate).
>recently
38 years with some brief stints abroad, as discrete entities, and providing you are on a well trodden path the state-run institutions are ~fine~.
QUANGOs are the worst to deal with, private is the best.
And perhaps, we should look at this from the PoV of the user and not defend the "company" (which has the advantage in all cases).
Screaming "bureaucracy" and "overregulation" for every single attempt at limiting the impact of corporations is just silly.
Yes, so from the point of view of the user was there evidence of actual harm?
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I remember Imgur as a small project of a Redditor because we needed to share images. It is remarkable how a small project like that can still generate an international news headline more than a decade later.
The UK has started a version of censorship the equivalent can be found in countries many would say are considered dictatorships. It is absolutely shocking as someone who lives here and needs to be fought.
Good riddance. Imgur is a cancerously awful website. express.co.uk isn't much better for that matter.
Does anyone ever actually use Imgur as a website though? I generally use it to upload a photo then send someone a link. It's no different than dropbox in my mind, except just limited to photos.
Please use literally any other way of sharing photos, up to and including printing them out and sending them by carrier pigeon. It's got to the point where I just pretend imgur links aren't there.
imgur itself is an empty husk of its former self. Last time I visited their site, they had fired all their moderators and replaced them with AI. They were bought at some point by .. media labs? I don't recall their name, but I recall that they are moneygrubbing bastards, to phrase it in neutral terms. I don't intend to visit their site again. Instead, I have made an AI agent that can do it for me.
Yeah I think no other sites have done this because fundamentally they like money. Imgur have probably only done this because they're making less money from the UK than it would cost to deal with this law.
We desperately need an Antarctica/Moon style extraterritoriality for the internet.
Just tell your citizens that the internet is fair game? Why restrict it to this level and make using the internet the same as having to understand the law in 200 odd countries.
We could start with hosting everything on boats first. It worked for radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Caroline
Have them all registered to the Principality of Sealand, just to be safe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealand
There's always distributed web3 type stuff.
The goal should be to avoid being constantly under attack.
The fight with government is a losing one. We make better protocols, they break the device. We send the data offshore, they make treaties.
Ultimately we need a permanent win before the door shuts completely. The exhaustion in industries and groups that have been fighting this fight for decades is palpable.
How do you "pull out" of the UK if you are not a UK company, you are a US company, hosted in the US, and proxied by Fastly. There's nothing to do? You do not need to abide by UK laws, even if your website is accessible from there.
It means to stop doing business there. For example selling ads targeting UK users to UK advertisers. London banking. Integrating with UK-based data-milking peers.
So if a site doesn't monetise adult content. The UK can't impose fines? Only eventually force ISPs to block that site?
You are sending data into the UK, hence you have to abide by their laws regarding said data.
As the owner of a U.S. based website, I am not sending data anywhere. Some people in the U.K. might request data and download it from my site. I'm not forcing it on them.
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or what?
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The UK government does not care. The law applies no matter where you are hosted, where you are incorporated or who is proxiying you.
>You do not need to abide by UK laws, even if your website is accessible from there.
The UK government does not agree.
But its still not the UK government's decision. They don't have sovereignty over other nations, as much as they'd like to think they do.
All they can legally do is bitch and moan and order UK ISPs to block. There's no action they can legally take against Imgur.
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I suppose in their defense, culturally, the UK hasn't respected many borders apart from their own so this really isn't anything new.
Zing aside, I'd be thrilled to see whatever prosecutor or litigator or whatever they call them over there bring a case against a US based company for hosting content in the US, geoblocking the UK, a UK resident using a VPN to bypass that block, and making the case that that is somehow the US company's fault.
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I'm probably alone in thinking this is ok. According to the statement by the ICO reported by the BBC, this is because imgur has refused to implement some kind of technical verification of users being served pornography or suicide promotion.
Requiring this is not a bad thing
Governments/Regulation is the only tool at our disposal
How else should we approach this problem? Do we just throw our hands in the air? Or do we think that serving pornography and suicide promotion is not something that requires oversight?
If I don't want my child doing something, it's up to me to enforce that. I don't want my kid eating snacks before dinner, have I called upon the UK government to shut down the biscuit aisle at Tesco from 3pm-5pm?
The core of this issue is a kind of backwards notion that the internet needs to be a safe place, that the UK government says it can legislate that everyone on the internet has to verify who is accessing their site and then enforcing the UK's laws around it. It's nuts.
It's also not solving a problem. If you want to control what your kid sees on the internet there are already safeguards you can use, you can set up content restrictions on basically any device today. This law appears to be in place to be the mummy of children whose own mummies don't want to enforce certain restrictions on internet access.
I hear next month the M25 is going to be prosecuted for letting a child walk down the hard shoulder.
While this is a very real concern; I can't help but think it's over exaggerated? Kids will always find ways around blocks. I know, I too was once a child.
They're already using Google Docs as a chat application in class when social media is blocked. So what are we really trying to do here? Much like prohibition, I suspect we'll see the masses annoyed and inconvenienced, and those who want to find alcohol finding it regardless.
Sometimes I miss the old flash, irc, html tables for layouts internet.
The (a?) problem is that only the largest / most profitable players can afford to implement these systems. So while well intentioned they just shut out any company/service without loads of extra cash
FWIW, on old.reddit.com it still shows the cached image view, so no actual need to visit Imgur.com - a site that has had some quite interesting drama for the last few months.
It's not a "UK Image site", it's a US company.
Where does it say it is?
In the now-edited article headline.
Prior discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45418587
In short, governments and internet do no mix. Whenever they do, it ends in a disaster for the people.
But also, Internet with zero governance isn't any better for the people.
So what's left?
Are you sure?
Back in late 90s, 2000s, even 2010s, the internet was truly awesome. Only once governments started to get involved, by increasing the red tape and adding restrictions and whatnot, it became shit.
So I would argue that you are completely wrong. Yes, it might have been a bit of a wild west, but that is a good thing because you needed to have some smarts to navigate it and that filtered out the dumb masses that pollute it today and why we cannot have nice things.
I am not saying people should not have access to it, just that the less people there were, the better it was and the less attention it had by the governments. Which in turn made it much better experience than it is today.
But most people, actually, have not lived through those "early" days and cannot even comprehend how great it was back then and how crappy and restricted it is today.
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by the definition inter-net is the net between (something). These laws create intra-nets, which are ruled by different laws
> by the definition inter-net is the net between (something)
Internet was originally defined as the "network of networks", i.e. the net between local nets.
Pretty much all countries have governments and the internet and I'd say it tends to end in annoyance rather than disaster, such as having to turn on a vpn to see junk on imgur in this case.
The only actual internet caused disaster I can think of - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide - was caused by a lack of regulation and "let's kill them all" stuff on facebook. 25k+ dead.
Everything that Cambridge Analytica did is another good example [1]. Granted that it doesn't rise to the level of a "25k+ dead disaster", but it's not nothing, it's a lot of bad things. And it also stems from lack of regulation, not from the opposite. As will other examples.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Elections
What's the backstory here?
UK passed an insanely stupid and dangerous (as well as authoritarian) act called Online Safety Act.
It's essentially because of shitty parents allowing kids unsupervised access to the internet, rather than expecting parents to parent they pushed the cost/risk to companies.
Imgur decided they didn't want to foot the cost/risk and pulled out.
As a brit, I don't blame them, if I was US based I'd geoblock the UK as well.
Not least because it's the only way this will make enough of a stink for the gov to climb down.
> Imgur decided they didn't want to foot the cost/risk and pulled out.
Is that info from Imgur? Or from conjecture?
> because of shitty parents allowing kids unsupervised access to the internet
>90% of parents allow their kids unsupervised access to the internet. That's reality. We've spent the last 30 years begging them to supervise and it hasn't worked, so proposing to do it again is a nonstarter.
On the other hand, I completely get why. Expecting parents to know how to operate Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, iOS, Android, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, ChatGPT, and school-issued devices is absurd, delusional, obviously never happening. CompTIA A+ Certification, for entry-level help desk work, requires learning about less platforms than what a parent faces. Even then, what about the computers that have minimal filtering at school libraries, or at friend's houses?
Denial of the kids on the internet as a problem, combined with unfair expectations on parents, is how we got here.
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Oppan North Korean Style.
In Poland we had no access to "western" electronics since 1989 because we had been part of the "Warsaw Pact" i.e. subordinate to USSR. This was hard, so I pity for you guys in UK
> In Poland we had no access to "western" electronics since 1989
I think you meant "until 1989"
Nope. He's typing that from an old Amiga over a 600 baud connection.
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yeah, sorry... Czeski błąd
It's hardly a comparable situation to be honest
What I mean is that this always starts with the same. First goes draconian laws, full inviligation, "Give me the man and I’ll find the crime". Later goes isolation. Apple already considered BREXIT of their cloud because of UK govt's invigilation programme
Imgur is a joke. They block VPN users with an intentionally obtuse "Imgur is temporarily over capacity. Please try again later.". Most importantly, its value for the average person has plummeted ever since its 2021 acquisition, and when they started deleting inactive content. UK's regulations have no place on a free internet, but the company running it is anything but worthy of praise.
Question: How does a company block access from an entire country? Is that done through DNS or IP range or something else?
When you receive a request to your website (or any service), that request comes from an IP address. There are databases that can tell you what country an IP address is from. It's not perfect, but it works well enough 99.99% of the time. Then, if the country is blacklisted, you do not allow access.
So that could be defeated by a VPN?
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It's actually unclear what the cause of this is.
There is an ongoing ICO investigation about privacy and handling of children's data under data protection laws, rather than this being related to the Online Safety Act:
https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs...
The ICO has indicated it is planning to give a fine to the owner of Imgur due to breaches of data protection laws.
https://archive.ph/wGoEO
Europe is working hard to build themselves a little ghettoized corner of the internet.
Good for the UK IMHO. Just seeing with how many 3rd party sites Imgur shares data with is disgusting.
It's all a bit annoying. I gather imgbox is an alternative.
This is the best possible result I think. Until the regular citizens suffer as a result of tyrannical policies they will never think to vote out the corrupt police state politicians who invoke these insane policies in ever increasing power grabs.
Hopefully many more companies do this and British internet users migrate to use of VPNs. This will apply maximum pressure on the government to reverse these parochial laws.
its not the online safety act, its basic data protection, which means they are probably breeching the Californian equivalent
>This will apply maximum pressure on the government to reverse these parochial laws
Whatever the annual revenue of imgur was is now up for grabs for any British entrepreneur willing to build an image hosting site and unless British people have an innate preference for exporting their data to the US they'll likely stick with that. In other words, it's a good opportunity for the domestic tech sector, that's what happens in most cases when foreign companies tend to be blocked.
The value of imgur isn’t really in being able to upload images there, it’s access to all the images uploaded from the rest of the world. Especially historical uploads, say, a turorial or a travel log using imgur as reliable image host. Locally created and operated british website aimed at brits makes sense when it’s local news or local services or whatever. Local image hosting site that serves only (primarily?) brits seems of very questionable utility unless you somehow become a big hub for outsiders… at least until $other_country demands UK stop tracking their children or whatever excuse they’ll use.
Yeah let us find random ways, that we never used to care about, to ban all foreign websites so a "brit" can take over haha. This is quite authoritarian and corporatist and worthy of some criticism from more libertarian minded onlookers.
I'm not a fan of the law but the idea of foreign businesses pressuring the government still puts a bad taste in my mouth.
... or to ban VPNs.
I really don't remember voting on this web censorship issue, or ID cards, because both of those policies would have changed my vote, for sure.
Of course you don't remember - you don't vote on individual laws, you vote for politicians.
Politicians always lie/"break promises", so whatever they say before an election only has a loose correlation with what they actually do. Pay attention to their track record and vote accordingly next time.
What are you suggesting though? That there were clues to herald these changes? Tbh, I did look at my (new) MP's record on social justice and welfare... They were surprisingly out of Party character on a few issues. But certainly better than the other candidates in aggregate.
That's about the best we can all do.
Like many others, I would like to see a Swiss style vote on anything that gathers enough public support.
Apparently, there are a few sources that suggest a 'silent' majority supports the OSA. I think far reaching laws like these (the assisted death law changes being another) should always be put before the public. That way at least, I can better understand my position, and consider whether I'm in the wrong.
(I feel the OSA should have forced the ISPs to add parental controls, and let each household manage their own patterns of consumption)
The source is this statement from the ICO (Information Commissioner's Office, who enforce data privacy rules, GDPR etc).
https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs...
Do business in the UK? Then accept we prioritise our kids over your costs. Toodle pip.
What are they actually accused of? That article doesn't mention any specifics.
There is a bit more detail on these pages:
https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs...
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
No full detail though. Having said that, the second link is particularly interesting as it goes though various companies with comments about each.
>The ICO also confirmed that companies could not avoid accountability by withdrawing their services in the UK.
Get the fuck out of here.
I do wonder if this is in any way linked to the ongoing enshittification of imgur, and the recent associated user revolt (link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45102905 ).
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Outrage! Now where am I going to get my cat pictures from ?! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Im sorry, if you run a site some where not in the UK. It doesn't give the country jurisdiction over the entire internet.
If a country wants to enforce some kind of rules, they will have to apply them to the countries residents, because its the resident that go out on the net and conduct the behavior, not the other way around.
This has been common sense for a long time now. Everybody is going crazy/mad. Must be some seriously narcissistic people running the UK.
Just a few months ago games built by US-based developers, sold on US-based platform with payments processors also US-based were censored by actions of Australian christian activist group.
Simply by sending some threating letters to payment processor management. It was done by few hundred fanatics who want to censor what content everyone is allowed to access.
Since this is possible, there not enough resistance and UK government have much more resources we'll all have to live with this.
Im not sure how they can enforce this?
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If you are serving the UK market, you follow UK laws. It's that simple. In this case they are misusing UK children's information, that's a no-no in a country that has actual consumer protection laws. I'll wait for the EU to catch up on this too.
While the UK and EU (and US) like to pass stupid laws, in this case it's just an American company misusing citizen's data and not giving a crap. Good riddance.
"Serving a particular market" is ridiculous. Just adding Paypal to your website should not require you to understand 200 odd legal jurisdictions.
This needs to end asap.
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