Wikimedia Foundation Challenges UK Online Safety Act Regulations

There was also in the 90s the weird period of export control of encryption software from the US, leading to the "this tshirt is a munition" shirts with the algorithm printed on them. And the (thankfully failed) "clipper chip" mandate.

Apple made an advertisement about the PowerMac G4 as a "supercomputer" because of onerous export controls related to encryption way back. It's more cheeky, I think, than serious. But then again, I haven't looked into it beyond just remembering that it happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoxvLq0dFvw

From Minitel to the telecomms irrelevance against the US and UK. I'd guess the French investors's would love to kick the nuts of the whole parliament members signing that crap.

It does feel like the online environment is pretty adversarial and hard for parents to deal with. In particular, it seems hard to pick and choose something reasonable. It doesn’t seem totally unreasonable to want some kind of state action to help represent the many parents and encourage creating better reasonable options.

Lots of things that feel relatively common online feel like they would be very alien and weird situations if they happened offline.

To be fair, it is because the state makes it difficult for them to rear children.

Long working hours and both parents working full time means they do not have the time or the energy. Then you have the state offering help, and encouraging parents to drop them off at school first thing for breakfast club, and then keep them there for after school activities.

> parents cba rearing their children

And THAT is the problem that they should be tackling.

Note: the following is not arguing in favor of the UK policy, but is a general observation.

I seriously doubt that the majority of parents want the state to raise their children for them.

By arguing about irresponsible or lazy parents you are latching on to the first, most convenient thing that seems to make sense to you. But I think that is a mistake because not only does it perpetuate some kind of distorted sense of reality where parents don't care about their children and want to hand off all responsibility for them, but it distracts you from the real causal issues.

The fact is that humans have for millions of years acted in various levels of coordination to raise and look after children as a group. Modern society has made this all sorts of dysfunctional, but it still exists.

"but you will find that a majority of parents cba rearing their children so they want the state to do it for them"

This is normal and what public education is for. Teaching online safety and sex ed should be considered no different than teaching history

Is there better evidence to the harms of porn than “dopamine” and “lost innocence”? That article written by a 17 year old, I’m old enough to be her parent and I saw hardcore internet porn in 5th grade. This isn’t new. Personally I don’t think it harmed me. But I’m open to hearing studies showing otherwise, not just hand waving.

> Individual action doesn't work because it only takes one kid in the class who doesn't have parental controls then everyone loses.

The response to this, of course, is that many kids will be educated by their responsible parents.

They will know Santa isn't real or what sex is or why sometimes girls and boys kiss other girls and boys.

Are we going to outlaw teaching your own children about life next? Because they might "spread" the knowledge of... The real world they are about to experience and navigate?

I like to point out in these threads that my first exposure to "pornography" was a cunnilingus scene in Al Franken's political tirade Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. I was eleven.

I don't think my parents had realized that scene was in the book. But I don't think it matters that much. Kids are going to encounter sex. In a pre-industrial society, it's pretty likely that children would catch adults having sex at some point during their childhood -- even assuming they didn't see their own parents doing it at a very young age. Privacy used to be more difficult. Houses often had one bedroom.

I don't mean to say that content controls are useless. I think it was probably for the better that I wasn't watching tons of porn in middle school. But I don't think that content controls need to be perfect; we don't need to ensure that the kids are never exposed to any pornographic content. As long as it isn't so accessible that the kid is viewing it regularly, it probably isn't the end of the world. Like in the one story, PornHub didn't even have a checkbox to ask if you were eighteen. Just don't do that. I didn't end up downloading porn intentionally myself until about five years after reading that book.

For that matter, how many kids manage their parents' devices. Maybe less so today, but for a long time, a lot of children were far more tech savvy than their parents. The contrast between my grandmothers when they were still around was stark. One never fell for anything... the other, I was cleaning malware it felt like quarterly.

My parents for a long time used their neighbor's wifi, despite having their own, because they didn't remember the password.

That said, having the carrier assign certain devices marked as "child" or "adult" or even with a DoB stamp that would change the flag when they became an adult might not be a bad thing. While intrusive would still be better than the forced ID path that some states and countries are striving towards.

Yes, it is a pretense and the point of mentioning "the children" is to mobilize the child-worshipping demographic who believe, in all cases, that anything that raises any risk to children should be banned, and that this should not be discussed by decent people. The successful child-worshippers also instantly burst into hysterics and aggressive personal attacks when spoken to about the subject (hysterics and tears when they agree, the latter otherwise.) Their success lies in never lowering themselves to discuss anything with anybody. They're here to tell you.

They are an extreme minority of every population (mostly people who aren't interested in politics or civil liberties who enjoy and care about children.) But sensible people are also an extreme minority of the population; we normal people usually aren't so sensible, instead we listen to sensible people and follow their advice.

So the people who want everybody on the internet to identify themselves pit hysterics against measured voices in the media, in order to create a fake controversy that only has to last until the law gets passed. Afterwards, the politicians and commentariat who were directly paid or found personal brand benefit in associating with the hysterics start leaving quotes like: "This isn't what we thought we passed" and "It might be useful to have a review to see if this has gone too far." Then we find out that half the politicians connected with the legislation have connections to an age verification firm which is also an data broker, and has half a billion in contracts with the MoD.

Those sort of sites already had better moderation than big tech because they’d have their own smaller team of volunteer moderators.

I suspect any smaller site that claims the Online Safety Act was a reason they closed, needed to close due to other complications. For example an art site that features occasional (or more) artistic nudes. Stuff that normal people wouldn’t consider mature content but the site maintainers wouldn’t want to take the risk on.

Either way, whether I’m right or wrong here, I still think the Online Safety Act is grotesque piece of legislation.

> pushing people to using big tech platforms

so big tech platforms will cheerfully embrace it. as expected, major players love regulations.

If you have examples of this happening, please add them to the ORG list: https://www.blocked.org.uk/osa-blocks

I am very skeptical that the Online Safety Act forces community forums and wikis to close. By and large the Act forces forums to have strong moderation and perhaps manual checks before publishing files and pictures uploaded by users, and that's about it.

Likewise, I suspect that most geoblocks are out of misplaced fear not actual analysis.

I think it will be very hard to write a definition that excludes wikipedia and includes (and I am quoting the article) "many of the services UK society is actually concerned about, like misogynistic hate websites".

Very interested how this goes.

It's in the Medium article.

Scroll to "Who falls under Category 1"

https://medium.com/wikimedia-policy/wikipedias-nonprofit-hos...

Wikimedia hosts what UK puritans consider pornographic content.

A lot of it. Often in high quality and with a permissible license.

I would link to relevant meta pages but I want to be able travel through LHR.

There actually was a proposal/standard for this back in the day: https://www.w3.org/PICS/

> X-Age-Rating would only work if the server could be sure of the jurisdictions under which the recipient was bound.

That's no different to the current legislation.

The twitter API used to have a "illegal in France or Germany" field, which was used for known Nazi content.

I think you both have a point. Why not block foreign access to your internet service if the laws of that foreign country are nothing you want to be concerned with?

It might be a bit disruptive in the beginning, but in the long run I think we all benefit from that. It increases the chance of politicians to realize their over-boarding decisions by having public pressure from previous users of those services and it increases the likelihood of local competitors of those services opening.

Yeah, you should probably try to do something about the rising fascist tendencies in the US? Why wouldn't you?

Rolling over for it isn't going to do the EU or other allies any favors. The administration won't reward loyalty with good deals or whatever

That's not fair,

Everyone hates the Brits.

> clause for a government review into the impact of VPNs on the bill after 6 months

thats government speak for deciding to do something about the VPN problem. because there is no way a commission will not find a good reason to ban VPNs when you reach that point, because you could argue they help avoid UK restrictions.

I don't care where the headline is from. Other places have the same suspicion. There clearly is _some_ concern in Labour that VPNs could be used to bypass the OSA and it doesn't take much imagination to see where this is going.

'Kyle told The Telegraph last week in a warning: "If platforms or sites signpost towards workarounds like VPNs, then that itself is a crime and will be tackled by these codes."'

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/vpns/what-does-the-labou... :

"In 2022 when the Online Safety Act was being debated in Parliament, Labour explicitly brought up the subject of VPNs with MP Sarah Champion worried that children could use VPNs to access harmful content and bypass the measures of the Safety Act. "

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vpns-online-s...

Sure. Nothing was said directly right now, but to just take Labour's word for it that they won't go further with these restrictions is really naive.

It may not be recent but it is something that Labour MPs have said before in the context of the OSA.

The Labour think tank Labour Together also recently brought up a manditory goverenment ID called BritCard, ostensibly for government services but to be rolled out else where.

At the same time they've just set up an elite police force to monitor social media.

Labour must know people are rattled by all this, they just published a response to the petiion they recieved.

They're not addressing any concerns though, it's all we know best or shutting down debate with slurs.

In the absence of anything new we just have to take Labour policy on the last things they've said or done.

> "This is a fine sentiment, could you also please provide an alternative approach?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3477966 ("Wikipedia blackout page (wikipedia.org)" (2012))

Wikimedia weren't always a giant ambulating pile of cash; they used to be activists. Long ago.

Warn the UK users during the grace period as best as they can.

And after the grace period... yeah, I think blocking UK IPs is the "correct" thing to do. If the government doesn't make them an exception than they'll have to do that, correct or not, anyway.

Shut down in the UK seems like a reasonable approach.

If UK wants to be more like China: let them.

> Shutdown in the UK?

That might actually be one of the few things that would help.

One of the complaints against OSA is how easy it's proven to circumvent, evidenced by the massive increase in VPN usage.

So it would be interesting to understand if shutting down in the UK would have an impact, now we all had to learn how to circumvent georestrictions this past week.

> Shutdown in the UK?

Yes. This is what every single large company which is subject to this distopian law should do. They should do everything they can to block any traffic from the UK, until the law is repelled.

Laws get challenged and overturned all the time. I doubt it will happen this time, can't have wrongthink.

Are you saying an algorithmic content recommendation system is an important part of "collecting all the world's knowledge"?

They previously did a 24 hour blackout to protest SOPA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA...

I believe public policy initiatives are already Wikimedia's second-biggest expenses, after salaries, so I don't see how that would be much more different than usual fundraising except for making it more transparent.

The issue here is that the internet is dominated by large companies that have a huge incentive to use this as a way to ensure regulatory capture of the free internet.

I think that's kind of the joke as well, because WhatsApp (being totally unmoderated and opaque) is probably the exact place you'd want to enact age controls, especially in groups.

It's like the government thought long and hard about how to make the restrictions the most inconvenient and with the largest number of gaps in the approach.

The problem is, that both pornhub and facebook also love underage (well, too young) users, because those users will stay there.

Cutting off UK for a few weeks won't cause that much damage but might help them in the long run.

> What would be the punishment for that?

On a legal level? None. On a personal level? Don't give them money or your business. Avoid them completely or ensure you use ad blockers on their sites and throw away accounts if necessary. Do not contribute to their content.

In short: you take whatever they give you, and you give nothing in return.

All companies could easily just block UK Users instead.

How is "algorithmic feed" related to safety? Or is it, along with seemingly arbitrary numbers like 7 or 34 millions, a way to target a specific platform for those who are afraid to spell the name explicitly?

Is search results 'an algorithmic feed'.

Their homepage certainly is.

I'm a parent, I have researched it, and found it not great because it still involves third parties and doesn't promote local control/anonymity without involving some external entity - i.e. Apple requires accounts, Google still gets its metrics, etc.

Unless you've got some specific better examples?

Too bad they can't prevent fully grown adults from acting like children.