6 ms·
In memoriam
- jsheard 2y agoHexus is a big one, being UK-based and UK-centric they are just deleting 24 years of history rather than trying to geoblock around it.
- edwinjones 2y agoHexus shut down years ago did it not?
- stoobs 2y agoThe reviews/news side did, but the forums kept going until this.
- ksec 2y agoI know the law is BS and this just hit me differently. I am really really pissed.
- chris_wot 2y agoApparently the law is dreadfully written. I was reading the lobste.rs thread and wow, it’s like they took a programming course in goto and it statements and applied it to the law…
- ChrisKnott 2y agoI had the complete opposite impression from that thread. It seemed like people were politically motivation to interpret the law in a certain way, so they could act like they were being coerced. These closures are acts of protest, essentially. I agree with @teymour's description of the law. It is totally normal legislation.
- skippyboxedhero 2y agoNot only is this law terrible, there are several other laws like this that have existed for years. People saying criticism is politically motivated (ignoring the fact that this law was drafted by the Tories and passed by Labour...so I am not exactly clear what the imagined motivation might be) ignore the fact that the UK has had this trend in law for a long time and the outcome has generally been negative (or, at best, a massive waste of resources). Legislation has a context: if we lived in a country where police behaved sensibly, I could reasonably see how someone could believe this was sensible...that isn't reality though. Police have a maximalist interpretation of their powers (for example, non-crime hate incidents...there is no legislation governing their use, they are used regularly to "question the thinking" of people who write critical things about politicians, usually local, or the police...no appointed authority gave them this power, their usage his been questioned by ministers...they register hundreds of thousands of a year still). Btw, if you want to know how the sausage is made: security services/police want these laws, some event happens, and then there is a coordinated campaign with the media (the favour is usually swapped for leaks later) to build up "public support" (not actual support, just the appearance of support), meetings with ministers are arranged "look at the headlines"...this Act wasn't some organic act of legislative genius, it was the outcome of a targeted media campaign from an incident that, in factual terms, is unrelated with what the Act eventually became (if this sounds implausible, remember that May gave Nissan £30m on the back of SMMT organising about a week's worth of negative headlines, remember that Johnson brought in about 4m migrants off the back of about two days of briefing against him by a six-month old lobbying group from hotels and poultry slaughterhouses...this is actually how the govt works...no-one reads papers apart from politicians). Giving Ofcom this power, if you are familiar with their operations, is an act of literal insanity. Their budget has exploded higher (I believe near a quarter of a billion now). If you think tech companies are actually going to enforce our laws for us, you are wrong. But suggesting that Ofcom with their new legions of civil servants is supposed to the watchdog of online content...it makes no sense, it cannot be described as "totally normal" in a country other than China.
- Izmaki 2y ago"Furry.energy"? With a total of 49 members? My World of Warcraft guild has more active players...
- huang_chung 2y ago[flagged]
- AnthonyMouse 2y agoThis is exactly the point, isn't it? The smallest websites are destroyed, leaving only the megacorps.
- twinkjock 2y agoThat is not the stated purpose of the law and there is recourse built into it. Too often folks view these laws as binaries where none exists.
- AnthonyMouse 2y agoIt's never the stated purpose of the law, but we might do well to be concerned with what it actually does rather than what the proponents claim it would do. Recourse doesn't matter for a sole proprietorship. If they have to engage with a lawyer whatsoever, the site is dead or blocked because they don't have the resources for that.
- twinkjock 2y agoI’d encourage you to read the actual text of the law and not just others’ interpretation. The sole proprietorship likely falls into one of the exception clauses or is likely using a platform.
- AnthonyMouse 2y agoI feel like you're not understanding; people aren't going to read the law, because the law is non-trivial and they don't feel comfortable doing that themselves instead of hiring a lawyer. But they can't afford to hire a lawyer, so instead they're going to block.
- IanCal 2y agoRight or wrong I think many have misread the legislation or read poor coverage of it given people's reasoning. Much of things boils down to doing a risk assessment and deciding on mitigations. Unfortunately we live in a world where if you allow users to upload and share images, with zero checks, you are disturbingly likely to end up hosting CSAM. Ofcom have guides, risk assessment tools and more, if you think any of this is relevant to you that's a good place to start. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/guide-for-services/ https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
- docflabby 2y agoit's not that simple - illegal and harmful content can include things like hate speech - worth a longer read... https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/14/online_safety_act/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/14/online_safety_act/ If I ran a small forum in the UK I would shut it down - not worth risk of jail time for getting it wrong.
- guax 2y agoThe good thing about forums is their moderation. It seems like mostly what the law covers is already enforced by most forums anyways.
- Tuna-Fish 2y agoA forum that merely has good moderation is not automatically compliant with the act. It requires not just doing things, but paperwork that shows that you are doing things. The effort to do this well enough to be sure you will be in compliance is far beyond what is reasonable to ask of hobbyists.
- docflabby 2y agoThe new rules cover any kind of illegal content that can appear online, but the Act includes a list of specific offences that you should consider. These are: terrorism child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) offences, including grooming image-based child sexual abuse material (CSAM) CSAM URLs hate harassment, stalking, threats and abuse controlling or coercive behaviour intimate image abuse extreme pornography sexual exploitation of adults human trafficking unlawful immigration fraud and financial offences proceeds of crime drugs and psychoactive substances firearms, knives and other weapons encouraging or assisting suicide foreign interference animal cruelty
- guax 2y agoSeems like an overreaction in some of these. Perhaps the people running them were close to the edge and more mental burden just pushes them over it. It's like local US news websites blocking European users over GDPR concerns.
- whatshisface 2y agoFeel free to put a stop to it by buying liability insurance for all of these service providers, which you may have to persuade the underwriter should be free. ;-)
- ivanmontillam 2y ago> It's like local US news websites blocking European users over GDPR concerns. I don't know if you said this sarcastically, but I have a friend in Switzerland who reads U.S. news websites via Web Archive or Archive IS exactly because of that. Accessing some of these news sites returns CloudFlare's "not available" in your region message or similar.
- homebrewer 2y agoIt's not just the EU; I'm in a poorer region outside the EU and seeing "not available in your region" is quickly becoming the norm. Site administrators try to cut down on bot traffic (scraping, vulnerability scanners, denial of service, etc) and block whole regions they're not interested in. Hell, we do that ourselves, but only for our own infrastructure that isn't expected to be used outside the county. Whitelisting your own country and blocking everything else cuts out >99% of scrapers and script kiddies.
- guax 2y agoNo sarcasm. I totally understand why a local news website in the US would just block since its irrelevant for them any traffic from outside the country and they're have little resources. I don't judge them from blocking. Fact is that its very unlikely they would ever face any issues about having it not blocked.
- 2y ago
- Fokamul 2y agoI will host public proxied site for these websites, open for UK people, just to troll them :D
- ivanmontillam 2y agoWhilst I don't condone being unlawful (are you sure you want to run that risk?), that's the hacker spirit one needs these days. Being silly to ridicule overreaching laws is top-trolling! Love it.
- AnthonyMouse 2y agoThe trouble here is that the law is so crazy that third parties allowing users in the relevant jurisdiction to access the site could result in the site still be liable, so then they would have the same reason to block your proxy service if a non-trivial number of people were using it. To do any good you don't want to cause grief for the victims of the crazy law, you want to cause grief to its perpetrators.
- ivanmontillam 2y agoThen I guess that'd be a use case of technologies like Tor or I2P, properly, securely used.
- bazzargh 2y agoWorth mentioning that the lawyer who runs onlinesafetyact.co.uk, Neil Brown, has its onion address in his profile. https://mastodon.neilzone.co.uk/@neil https://mastodon.neilzone.co.uk/@neil http://3kj5hg5j2qxm7hgwrymerh7xerzn3bowmfflfjovm6hycbyfuhe6lrqd.onion/ http://3kj5hg5j2qxm7hgwrymerh7xerzn3bowmfflfjovm6hycbyfuhe6l...
- Mindwipe 2y agoOfcom have said that they consider geoblocking to be sufficient in writing, so at least they would probably lose any legal case brought against them.
- amiga386 2y agoCharlie Stross's blog is next. Liability is unlimited and there's no provision in law for being a single person or small group of volunteers. You'll be held to the same standards as a behemoth with full time lawyers (the stated target of the law but the least likely to be affected by it) http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/12/storm-cloud-approaching-rapidl.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/12/storm-cl... The entire law is weaponised unintented consequences.
- wkat4242 2y ago> unintented consequences Intended consequences no doubt.
- tene80i 2y agoWhat standards would you want individuals or small groups to be held to? In a context where it is illegal for a company to allow hate speech or CSAM on their website, should individuals be allowed to? Or do you just mean the punishment should be less?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- AnthonyMouse 2y agoThe obvious solution is to have law enforcement enforce the law rather than private parties. If someone posts something bad to your site, the police try to find who posted it and arrest them, and the only obligation on the website is to remove the content in response to a valid court order.
- tene80i 2y agoI don't have a strong view on this law – I haven't read enough into it. So I'm interested to know why you believe what you've just written. If a country is trying to, for example, make harder for CSAM to be distributed, why shouldn't the person operating the site where it's being hosted have some responsibility to make sure it can't be hosted there?
- whatshisface 2y agoIt seems like governments around the world are shifting their priorities away from their domestic economies.
- logicchains 2y agoShifting their priorities towards stifling the speech of anyone who tries to complain about the domestic conditions.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- KennyBlanken 2y agoSo, how does all this apply to community discords, slacks, Matrix rooms, IRC chats, etc? Is it discord's responsibility to comply, the admin/moderators, or all of the above?
- twinkjock 2y agoYes, at least for platforms like Discord, they bear the responsibility based on my non-lawyer reading of the plain English. YMMV, IANAL.
- kelnos 2y agoThe hosting platform is responsible for compliance. For Discord or Slack it's easy, but for Matrix, it might be more fuzzy. Certainly the homeserver that is hosting a room would be responsible, but would other homeservers that have users who are members of the room also be responsible?
- KennyBlanken 2y agoYou know what's really rich about the OSA? One of the exemptions is for "Services provided by persons providing education or childcare."
- ColinWright 2y agoDo you have an explicit reference for that? Not doubting it, but if you have a reference to hand it will save me having to search. If it's just something you remember but don't have a reference then that's OK, I'll go hunting based on your clue.
- bazzargh 2y agoIn the text of the act, schedule 1 part 1 paragraph 10 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/schedule/1/paragraph/10 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/schedule/1/para... ... unlike the issue of what size of service is covered, this isn't a pinky swear by Ofcom.
- ColinWright 2y agoSuper ... many thanks.
- porker 2y agoNote that the definition of "Services provided by persons providing education or childcare." is defined in law and narrow. I'm working with a charity providing online lessons for use in schools, where school children can post stuff others in their class can see. As far as I can discern they don’t fall into this exemption.
- tac19 2y agoSafety from dissent, for an authoritarian government. This is just weaponized "empathy".
- rimeice2 2y ago[dead]
- sepositus 2y agoDoesn't this act effectively create a new form of DDoS? A bad actor can sufficiently flood a platform with enough hate content that the moderation team simply cannot keep up. Even if posts default to not show, the backlog could be enough to harm a service. And of course, it will turn into yet another game of cat and mouse, as bad actors find new creative ways to bypass automatic censors.
- sieabahlpark 2y ago[dead]
- riwsky 2y agoAka a “heckler’s veto”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler's_veto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler's_veto
- throwaway48476 2y agoThis already happens but attackers go after hosts and registrars.
- maxed 2y agoIs Hacker News also affected by this act?
- Mindwipe 2y agoYes.
- kelnos 2y agoYes, but I don't really understand how the UK can expect to enforce this law against non-UK entities that don't have any employees or physical presence in the UK. HN/YC could just tell them to go pound sand, no? (Assuming YC doesn't have any operations in the UK; I have no idea.)
- milesrout 2y agopg lives in Britain if I'm not mistaken.
- SSLy 2y agothey could impound you while on a layover in UK (not that you'd ever want to do that)
- ekianjo 2y agoa good reason never to visit the UK again
- _trampeltier 2y agoThey could open an international arrest warrant. So you can't travel at all.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Rochus 2y agoInternational law limits state jurisdiction to territorial boundaries (Art. 2(1) UN Charter). Hacker News is a US web site and Y Combinator LLC is a US company. The OSA, which is a UK law, cannot mandate physical enforcement (e.g., server seizures) on foreign soil. If they really didn't like HN, UK government could try to suppress HN access for their citicens by local means. If HN had a branch in the UK, the UK government could take action against that branch. As far as I know that's not the case.
- mattvr 2y agoShould order this list by number of affected rather than alphabetical IMO. The 275K monthly user platform is almost hidden relative to the 49 and 300 user examples.
- logicallee 2y agoThe State of Utopia has published this report on the source of funding of Ofcom, the U.K. statutory regulator responsible for enforcing the Online Safety Act: https://medium.com/@rviragh/ofcom-and-the-online-safety-act-funding-and-contracts-ff198fb4b320 https://medium.com/@rviragh/ofcom-and-the-online-safety-act-...
- v3xro 2y agoJust another bad UK law not worth knowing about ;)
- cgcrob 2y agoI am part of a small specialist online technical community. We just moved it over to a Hetzner box in Germany and someone there is paying for it instead of it being hosted in the UK. What are you going to do Ofcom?
- kelnos 2y agoIf you live in the UK and can still be linked as an operator/organizer of the site (or if it's not you, other UK residents), can't they still come after you directly? I don't know about you, but I don't think running an online community would be worth huge fines to me.
- cgcrob 2y agoThere are no UK residents involved in the organisation or operation of it now even though we came up with it.
- throwaway48476 2y agoNon UK sites should IP block UK IPs and create a block page that advertises VPNs.
- dang 2y agoRelated ongoing thread: Lobsters blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152178
- darnthenuggets 2y agoWhat concept allows the UK to (attempt to) enforce this against non citizens whose business or life has no ties to their country? Plenty of small countries have odd censorship laws but have escaped similar legal hand wringing.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- JFingleton 2y agoThe Chaos Engine forums - a site for game developers to discuss, moan, and celebrate fellow and former colleagues... Now moved to Discord due to this act. It really is a strange time we are living through. https://thechaosengine.com/index.php https://thechaosengine.com/index.php
- hatly22 2y agoMy unpopular opinion is that it is a long time coming. Smaller sites that do not have strong technical knowledge of security or IT maintenance are targets for bot nets and scammers to host on. It's the same as arguing that Health and Safety regulation harms small businesses because they have to ensure the safety of their employees and customers. Or that it's not coducive to small businesses to have employment law. Companies have had decades to switch to safe and secure online businesses, but the self-regulation never materialised. Site owners are not going to be arrested willy nilly. All that is needed is to show that you have the administration in place to deal with complaints from the publis and enquiries from OFCOM. If you host illegal content, you have to have someone around to deal with it. If you host hate speech then you have to deal with the consequences. nobody has been prosecuted for saying the government is rubbish, but they will be for advocating physical harm on people in our society. This will create digital management agencies that act as proxies to OFCOM, it may even create a cottage industry of remote working digital administrators. These changes should be enbraced as opportunity, and fought when needed, but this isn't anything but law enforcement. The conspiracy bunnies are hopping mad, citing some sort of tyrannical destruction of liberty, but it's not.
- AlexandrB 2y ago> This will create digital management agencies that act as proxies to OFCOM, it may even create a cottage industry of remote working digital administrators. So bullshit jobs that do nothing productive but are there for "compliance". I think we have enough of that, thanks.
- liam09 2y ago[flagged]