16 ms·

Tough news for our UK users

337 points by airhangerf15 1y ago

verzali 1y ago
What does it mean £1.50 per person for Reddit? Can I bankrupt them by spamming them with a billion fake accounts in the UK?
lostmsu 1y ago
We need to get back to researching and developing decentralized software.
smallpipe 1y ago
A shame the ruling party is indistinguishible from the Tory they were voted in to replace.
daedrdev 1y ago
I think they probably should not have implied its accessible via VPN, the UK might still go after their asses for having UK users even with the IP block
- userbinator 1y ago
  If they're coming via a VPN, it's hard to prove the users are even in the UK, or any other country for that matter.
  - louthy 1y ago
    Other than the UK credit card on their account, right?
  - daedrdev 1y ago
    I doubt the government cares, especially since they drove many post office heads to suicide claiming they stole money when it was really software bugs despite all evidence showing this.
IlikeKitties 1y ago
How can they even enforce this? What happens if you run a plattform in let's say Germany and just tell them to fuck off, UK Law is of no interest to me.
- daveoc64 1y ago
  Payments to your service from users in the UK could be blocked. It's also possible for the owners or employees of the company to be held liable if they ever visit the UK.
- aosaigh 1y ago
  I don’t agree with the legislation, but I assume the same way they can go after you for any crime they perceive as being committed in the UK: extradition. It’s obviously incredibly unlikely.
  - bpodgursky 1y ago
    Most sane countries will only extradite if users have broken a law which reciprocally exists in the country they actually live.
    - louthy 1y ago
      Or you travel to a 3rd country that has the same law and an extradition treaty with the UK. Or, you travel to the UK! It’s a pretty popular destination and Heathrow is a major European hub. It would be easy to get caught out. The law may well be onerous and misguided. But looking at that site, it seems they reeeeally should do their due diligence. Not just to avoid the long arm of UK justice, but other territories too. It looks extremely dubious. Their mitigation doesn’t make sense either. If they don’t shutdown UK accounts and those accounts use UK credit cards which continue to use the service via a VPN. It could be reasonably argued that they know they’re providing a service to a UK resident. So, they really need to do their homework. What they’re actually complaining about is the cost of doing business. It sounds pretty amateurish.
      - 1y ago
spiderfarmer 1y ago
I decided I will block signups to my web platform for UK users as well. Just because I don’t understand any of the requirements.
- dumbfounder 1y ago
  I hope you inform the user and show them how to easily complain to their representatives.
  - IlikeKitties 1y ago
    Nah, just send them code 451 and ignore them. UK is still democracy adjacent, uk citicens voted for this nonesense, let them deal with the consequences.
    - vlod 1y ago
      Surely, an ideal opportunity to put a funny dog 451 page.
    - prmoustache 1y ago
      They voted for representatives, not for a particular law and may have not understood the details of this law when it was passed.
      - HPsquared 1y ago
        In 2024, only about 15% of MPs were elected by a local majority. This is a historic low, I think. There was a lot of "vote splitting" and spoiler effect going on due to FPTP. Labour have a very weak mandate.
      - Silhouette 1y ago
        Most of the UK didn't even vote for a Labour representative at the last general election. The Labour party's current control of our government is the result of one of the most disproportionate parliamentary majorities ever relative to its actual popular vote at the election. It's a consequence of our broken "first past the post" voting system. There's a certain irony in our politics right now that FPTP has been maintained by two dominant political parties because it has served their purposes to have little real challenge from smaller parties despite those parties collectively having quite a lot of popular support. That same system has now all but ended one of those two dominant parties as a force in British politics and at the next election it might well do the same for the other. The scariest question is who we might then get instead if Labour don't force through a radical change to our voting system while they still have the (possibly last) chance.
zb3 1y ago
The law could be renamed to "Use VPN Act", this is the actual consequence..
- vidarh 1y ago
  Mullvad has been running ads on London buses recently...
tomschwiha 1y ago
I get both sides. Kids need some sort of protection online. But the UK law is maybe too harsh for small companies. Also hinting at VPN use to bypass the law isn't smart legally.
- polarbear67 1y ago
  Protection for the kids should fall on the parents or schools, not the companies. It's not the companies fault if the kid is given full access to the internet, especially at a young age. It's bad parenting. If it's such an important issue, make the parents liable in some way.
  - ocharles 1y ago
    This keeps getting parroted but it's flawed/overly idealistic/frankly naive. An awful of children are, unfortunately, poorly parented. This is not a new phenomenon, nor something we seem to be improving. OTOH, exposure to extreme material for young children is increasing, and has consequences beyond that child. Exposure to extreme pornography leads to a warped view of sex which affects everyone this child might have sexual encounters with. Exposure to extreme violent material leads to the murder of other innocent children. I don't know where I stand on this legislation - my gut is that it's too heavy handed and will miss the mark. But I think we need to stop saying this falls solely on parents. The internet is far too big, and parenting is far too varied for this to work. I wish it would, but it won't. There simply aren't enough parents that care enough.
    - polarbear67 1y ago
      Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I think it's a terrible thing, but in this case, I think doing nothing is better than doing something. The unintended consequences far outweighs the benefits. The kids that want to find extreme stuff will find it anyway, regardless of regulation.
      - xg15 1y ago
        "But the unintended consequences" has been the standard response of tech startups to any kind of regulation, since they were started being regulated. At some point, it stops being believable.
UrineSqueegee 1y ago
[dead]
- rimbo789 1y ago
  It’s insane that “just follow the rules” gets downvoted
nocoiner 1y ago
“if people find other methods to access the site, that is entirely on them - there are no legal consequences for users.” For a site operator who seems really concerned about potential liability under this law, I sure wouldn’t have put this in writing. Feels like it really undermines the rest of the post and the compliance measures being taken.
- PhoenixReborn 1y ago
  It's basically impossible to prevent people from using VPNs without some serious governmental control over every telco - which of course may be the case in the UK, but I don't think a site operator can be held liable for that in any sane way.
  - bink 1y ago
    It's one thing to not try to prevent people from circumventing the law, it's quite another to encourage them to do so.
    - iLoveOncall 1y ago
      As the website says, it's not illegal for users in the UK to circumvent the restrictions using a VPN, so they're not recommending anything illegal.
      - closewith 1y ago
        This is the kind of comment you get from someone who's never interacted with a Western legal system. Any kind of winking reference is immediately seen through.
        Spivak 1y ago
        I think you assume the fact that it's a winking reference means they have to use a winking reference. It seems like it would be legal for them to post a full guide for UK users on how to access their site using a VPN service. There's literally "Best VPNs For Accessing Porn in the UK" articles, they'll be fine.
laincide 1y ago
Thats ok, i probably wouldnt use a site that uses ghbili style ai generated thumbnails anyway
Trowter 1y ago
[flagged]
- Silhouette 1y ago
  Indeed. I usually expect that sites linked from HN will be reasonably safe and reputable so followed the link assuming it would be some sort of AI startup but not expecting anything like this. A warning would have been appreciated. @dang, maybe change the title to include some kind of NSFW tag?
muglug 1y ago
Um this website offers LLM-powered chat bots that can simulate pretty much any situation the user wants, and most of the content appears to be sexual in nature. I’m no prude, but I think this is a not-great thing to expose kids to, and the UK government is maybe not-terrible to want some sort of way to gate kids’ access.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- tomschwiha 1y ago
  I think the point of the blog is still valid as the law applies to any content publisher/social media platform of any size. Even Hackernews could be a target if I understood correctly.
- r33b33 1y ago
  [flagged]
- blibble 1y ago
  yeah, as a Brit I am against the OSA it places a huge compliance burden on the 99.5% of small sites out there which are completely innocent "janitor.ai" is not one of those sites... an effective OSA should be targeted at sites like that and saying "UK users, we can identify your accounts and have deliberately left them open cough VPN cough" isn't going to help them in the slightest (see Section 19)
r33b33 1y ago
Quickly spin up a VPN (with LLM help) and georedirect UK users to said VPN page. Problem solved.
- prmoustache 1y ago
  I am pretty sure helping your users circumventing the blockage would make you liable the same way.
  - r33b33 1y ago
    So? If the law is stupid, they should get what's coming to them.
dsign 1y ago
There's a explainer of the act here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act-explainer/online-safety-act-explainer#who-the-act-applies-to https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act... . From what I'm reading, Amazon will have to implement age-checks over 8/10 of its book inventory, with the other 2/10 opening the company for liability about the very broad definition of "Age-appropriate experiences for children online." And yes, janitorai is correct that the act applies to them and the content they create, and a blanket ban to UK users seems the most appropriate course of action. For what is worth, the act does not seem to apply to first-party websites, as long as visitors of that website are not allowed to interact with each other. So, say, a blog without a comment feed should be okay.
- pacifika 1y ago
  That’s not what Ofcom clarified previously: see the end of https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/06/uk_online_safety_act_bloggers/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/06/uk_online_safety_act_...
  - magicalhippo 1y ago
    The statement from Ofcom is at the very end, and they're very clearly saying you need to only allow moderator-approved on-topic comments on such a blog site in order to fall under the exemption. Any off-topic comment will be subject to the act.
    - pacifika 1y ago
      My reading is that as long as the comments are somewhat related, the provider is safe from being held accountable for them, but the exact level of connection isn't clearly defined. So if you filter out known bad words and spam comments, that could very well cover things.
- card_zero 1y ago
  Possibly a blog with comments would be OK: https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/ra_blog_with_comments/ https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/ra_blog_with_comments/
NitpickLawyer 1y ago
The way these laws and regs don't even consider the provider size is aggravating. Doubly so because they always use "big bad provider" and think of the kids as populist support gaining strategies, but in the end the same big providers benefit. They have the billions to spend on everything from lawyers to fiscal optimisation, and they rake in the entire market since they're the only ones left to serve that market. That's happening with the AI act here as well. Almost no-one wants to even touch the EU shitshow and they're still going forward with it. Even Mistral was trying to petition them, but the latest news seem like it had no effect. Fuck us I guess, right? Both consumers and SMBs will lose if this passes as is.
- skippyboxedhero 1y ago
  They did consider the provider size, it is probably the main element of this law: the problem is that the consideration was to assume that you are always dealing with mega-large companies with teams of lawyers...because these companies have been lobbying regulators and civil servants (not Parliament so much, they don't matter anymore) for years. This is extremely common in the UK (very low corruption by historical methods but when decisions are actually made, there is corruption almost everywhere). The provider size was an active choice. It isn't populist either, no-one supports this. The UK has media campaigns run by newspapers, no-one reads the papers but politicians so these campaigns start to influence politicians. Always the same: spontaneous media campaign across multiple newspapers (low impact on other kinds of media), child as a figurehead, and the law always has significant implications that are nothing to do with the publicly stated aim. Democracy has very little to do with it. Elections happen in the UK but policies don't change, it is obvious why.
  - pjc50 1y ago
    I wouldn't underestimate how weirdly authoritarian British populism can get. Always aimed against "other people", of course.
- edelsohn 1y ago
  Regulatory capture. The impact on small providers was intended.
kylestanfield 1y ago
“this is not just content moderation - it is a complete regulatory framework that assumes every platform is a tech giant.”
puppycodes 1y ago
the UK has been a swirling toilet bowl for free speech for years... unfortunately it seems to have accelerated. I really dont understand why parents don't bare the responsibility of their kids internet access as opposed to the expectation the internet raises their kids...
- aosaigh 1y ago
  Do you have kids? I don’t, so I don’t have any idea how realistic this is. How do you ensure your kids aren’t skirting any blocks you put in place, looking things up with their friends, getting access to a VPN, etc.? I also don’t think this act is the way to address these issues, but I don’t think it’s as easy as just putting everything at the feet of the parents as I imagine it almost impossible to police at home, not to mention at school. When I think of older technologies like television, we have rules and regulations about what can be shown when. Again, this isn’t to say this approach is right, but wanting to regulate isn’t an attack on free speech. It seems there is regularly a tension on HN between free speech absolutists, usually from the US and those more happy to accept regulation, usually from the EU
  - iLoveOncall 1y ago
    > How do you ensure your kids aren’t skirting any blocks you put in place, looking things up with their friends, getting access to a VPN, etc.? I don't, because I don't need to. I had unrestricted access to internet when I was my kids age and I turned out just fine, just like the extreme majority of my generation. I know that serious discussions about important topics are enough to make sure that even if my kids do access content that's not meant for children, they're not negatively affected by them, just like I wasn't.
    - aosaigh 1y ago
      The world is a very very different place technologically then when you grew up. Again I don’t have kids, so I’m not in a position to judge, but I can only imagine the pressures on children are completely different nowadays. For example, we didn’t have computers in our pocket 24/7 with all of our peers on the other end influencing us indifferent ways.
rafram 1y ago
> i know that is terrible timing and im genuinely sorry about that. This Twitter-style faux-casual way of writing is so common among AI people right now (see Sam Altman) and it’s extremely grating. I don’t know anything about this project, but if they really cared about their users, I would hope that they’d use capital letters and punctuation when addressing them in an official announcement.
- landl0rd 1y ago
  "hello fellow humans im friendly and approachable lol" Also: > "and honestly? i..." > "this is not just content moderation - it is a..." These are two huge shibboleths of gpt-ese. He had to specifically tell the bot to write in that style.
  - blitzar 1y ago
    My personal prompt is 'make me sound like an insufferable twat'. Hate on LLMs all you want but 60% of the time, it works every time.
  - rcruzeiro 1y ago
    Perhaps a bit of a personal conspiracy theory: I do wonder if this was "written" this way because having ChatGPT write it like this is the only somewhat guaranteed way to have it avoid putting em dashes everywhere.
- wiredone 1y ago
  The great thing about language is that it changes over time. eg the past decade has seen us remove “that” as a qualifier, and the word literally has become interchangeable with figuratively. its worth considering whether you’re just losing touch…
  - rafram 1y ago
    > eg the past decade has seen us remove “that” as a qualifier, and the word literally has become interchangeable with figuratively The latter didn’t happen just in the last decade, and the former hasn’t happened at all. But no, I can pretty confidently say that the English language still has capitalization and punctuation in it, it’s mostly just on Twitter and in AI-related blog posts where people write like this.
phtrivier 1y ago
My cursory understanding of the ruling is that it applies if you have several million users in the UK... [1] Is that the case here (and it just happens that I have no clue what this particular site is about) ? Or am I grossly misunderstanding the act (very likely I guess since IANAL) ? [1] https://www.onlinesafetyact.net/analysis/categorisation-of-services-in-the-online-safety-act/ https://www.onlinesafetyact.net/analysis/categorisation-of-s... ------------------------------------------- Ofcom’s advice to the Secretary of State Ofcom submitted their advice – and the unerpinning research that had informed it – to the Secretary of State on 29 February 2024 and published it on 25 March. In summary, its advice is as follows: Category 1 Condition 1: Use a content recommender system; and Have more than 34m UK users on the U2U part of the service Condition 2: Allow users to forward or reshare UGC; and Use a content recommender system; and Have more than 7m UK users on the U2U part of the service Ofcom estimates that there are 9 services captured by condition 1 and 12-16 likely to be captured by condition 2. There is one small reference in the annex that the 7m+ monthly users threshold corresponds to the DSA (A6.15) Category 2a (search) Not a vertical search service; and Have more then 7m UK users Ofcom estimates that there are just 2 search services that currently sit (a long way) above this threshold but that it is justified to put it at this level to catch emerging services. Category 2b (children) Allow users to send direct messages; and Have more than 3m UK users on the U2U part of the service Ofcom estimates that there are “approximately 25-40 services” that may meet this threshold. -------------------------------------------
- boznz 1y ago
  A 250+ page law will have so many edge cases I doubt you would want to test it especially in a country with a government that has recently cracked down and arrested people for online "crimes". Sad the UK government has descended to this level of stupidity.
- rafram 1y ago
  Ofcom’s “Does the Online Safety Act apply to your service?” questionnaire [1] doesn’t use those thresholds, and it makes it sound like the law would apply to any site with paying customers in the UK. [1]: https://ofcomlive.my.salesforce-sites.com/formentry/RegulationChecker https://ofcomlive.my.salesforce-sites.com/formentry/Regulati...
Havoc 1y ago
The act does seem poorly thought out practically & I really dislike the UK's overall mindset to online safety. The laws consistently feel like they were written by someone that prints out emails to read... That said the thinking that smaller platform should equal exemptions seems a touch flawed too given topic. If you're setting out to protect a child from content that say is promoting suicide the size of the platform isn't a relevant metric. If anything the smaller less visible corners (like the various chan sites) of the internet may even be higher risk
- crote 1y ago
  Smaller entities are rarely looking for a full exception, they just want the regulations to be implementable without being a megacorp. Take something like a plastic packaging tax, for example. A company like Amazon won't have too much trouble setting up a team to take care of this, and they can be taxed by the gram and by the material. But expecting the same from a mom-and-pop store is unreasonable - the fee isn't the problem, but the administrative overhead can be enough to kill them. Offering an alternative fixed-fee structure for companies below certain revenue thresholds would solve that problem, while still remaining true to the original intention.
  - Havoc 1y ago
    I get the impossible bind this puts small companies in & having people resort to IP blocking the entire country is clearly a sign of a broken setup But playing devils advocate a bit here if the risk profile to the kid is the same on big and small platforms then there isn't any ethical room a lighter regime. Never mind full exemption, any exemption. The whole line of reasoning that you can't afford it therefore more kids potentially getting hurt on your platform is more acceptable just doesn't play. And similarly if you do provide a lighter touch regime, then the big players will rightly say well if that is adequate to ensure safety then why exactly can't we do that too? Platform size just isn't a relevant metric on some topics - child safety being one of them. Ethically whether a child is exposed to harm on a small or big website is the same thing. Not that I think this act will do much of anything for child safety. Which is why I think this needs to go back to drawing board entirely. Cause if we're not effectively protecting children yet killing businesses (and freedoms) then wtf are we doing
LAC-Tech 1y ago
Timely reminder to all UK people - your system is 100% set up to allow you to easily and legally change your government without bloodshed. This is the benefit of a constitutional monarchy. By "changing your government" I don't mean "shuffle people in and out of parliament" or even "elect your 6th Prime Minister in 10 years". I mean change your government.
- flumpcakes 1y ago
  What do you mean then?
  - LAC-Tech 1y ago
    Regime change
- octo888 1y ago
  The two parties who had/have a chance of winning the/an election both wanted this
  - LAC-Tech 1y ago
    Of course they can't. Labour or the Tories winning an election is not a change in government. It's a continuation of one.
    - octo888 1y ago
      I'm well aware ;)
hdb385 1y ago
You get the government you deserve
- skippyboxedhero 1y ago
  There was an election, both parties said this Act was going to happen. It depends what you mean by government but elected officials in the UK are almost completely irrelevant in this (and in most other things, their job is to get in front of a TV camera say how appalled they are that it has happened, no-one could have foreseen this, don't look back in anger, and that they are going to select from the same policy options that the Civil Service presented the last government with...which results in the same conclusion: more civil servants, more regulation, more corruption). Ofcom has been making a massive power grab, this bill and other recent regulations are granting them massive new powers, and the UK has a system in which ministers have no functional capacity to block this.
  - foldr 1y ago
    I’m afraid this is nonsense. Elected officials aren’t irrelevant. The majority of them support this legislation and that is why it got enough votes to become law. You don’t have to like it (I’m not a huge fan either), but it’s a perfectly straightforward case of a popular policy becoming law via the democratic process. A process that’s notoriously imperfect and not guaranteed to yield the best outcome in all cases. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that this law must have come about by sinister machinations just because you don’t think it’s a good law.
    - skippyboxedhero 1y ago
      The reason I think this is because: 1. I know this first-hand and 2. You have to be completely blind to not see the same thing happen multiple times with multiple laws (this has been happening for decades). Elected officials are irrelevant because, in this case, they are functionally unable to propose a reasonable alternative. Policy options were presented, all of the policy options offered in this case were to empower Ofcom (again, how old are you? are you unable to think of another situation like this: same thing happened with BoE/PRA in 2010, same thing happened with Border Force creation, same thing happened with illegal immigration where the only functional action presented was to increase Home Office staffing, I can go on and on) so what was the alternative? You also may not understand what is going on here either: this legislation gave Ofcom new statutory powers but what you might not be aware of is that Ofcom has also been granted through non-statutory instruments significant new powers that interlock with this legislation...who voted on that? Again: media campaign by the powers that be, multiple Home Office ministers have been railroaded into this, Ofcom/security services have been granted new powers (the latter by the back door...again, tell me what that has to do with "social media abuse"? nothing). Finally, elected officials are mostly pawns. The majority of "them" do not know what is in the legislation. They have been told the PM wants "Molly's Law" passed, so it is passed. Some of the scrutiny was laughable...do you understand that the law has a provision that requires tech companies to provide "end-to-end encryption" that the government can break? To their credit, this was questioned by legislators several times...it wasn't removed from the Bill, despite it obviously being unrelated to anything in the Act. Again, how are you this blind? Do you see why elected officials might be irrelevant if you are so blind?
zkmon 1y ago
I personally know how this works in Europe & UK. Not only government, this applies to big companies such as large banks as well. They recruit two kinds of staff. One that works to progress some work and one who puts an many hurdles as possible and call it risk management, compliance, security, regulatory etc (RCSR). They hire approximately 3 times more people into these RCSR positions compared to the technical and real work related positions. These RCSR guys dump thousands of pages of guidelines, making it impossible for any meaningful work to progress. My technical team has been running around for 4 months for approvals for testing an upgrade of a database. Top management can never go against the RCSR guys, who are like priests of the church in medieval ages. And the RCSR guys have no goals linked to the progress of the real work. The don't like any thing that moves. It's a risk. Management thinks that RCSR helps with controls around the work. But what happens is, you put more people in building controls, they deliver fort walls around your garbage bins.
- landl0rd 1y ago
  America has a similar (if less severe) version of this problem where nobody can contradict any compliance-adjacent function. Because if you get sued, someone will ask you "why did you ignore the guidance of your compliance team??" and might even try to use that to justify piercing the corporate veil. Of course compliance types have no incentive to let business happen just like business types have a limited incentive to operate in a compliant fashion, but lawsuits favor compliance always taking precedent with a hyper-cautious approach.
  - flappyeagle 1y ago
    And yet uber and Airbnb and polymarket and…
    - landl0rd 1y ago
      These are at some level businesses that do well because they avoid regulatory regimes. That risk is built-in from day one and basically their raison d'etre. I happen to think that's fine and good, but it's still the case. In other words, the guys who actually believe in a normal level of compliance are hamstrung, defection is rewarded, classic failure mode of this kind of thing.
hsuduebc2 1y ago
Once again, it seems like the regulations were likely written by the very people being regulated perfectly tailored to kill off any potential competition. An absolute classic.
marginalia_nu 1y ago
Yeah I'm probably gonna have to block UK visitors from Marginalia Search as well. Just no way a single developer can comply with that stuff :-/
- lucb1e 1y ago
  Off topic but your status page says service unavailable while the service is up. The best kind of outage to have! https://status.marginalia.nu https://status.marginalia.nu
  - marginalia_nu 1y ago
    Ironically it's the by far flakiest aspect of the entire setup.
shmerl 1y ago
I've heard it caused all UK operated small forums to shut down. Basically a completely dumb anti free speech "regulation".
basisword 1y ago
[flagged]
- stephen_g 1y ago
  Have you looked at the law though? Like actually? Elsewhere on the thread somebody posted a link where an owner of a forum for people who own hamsters as pets has to close down because they can't afford to comply with the law. It is actually a really bad law.
CommenterPerson 1y ago
[flagged]
daft_pink 1y ago
i’m really curious if the policy of simply blocking ip addresses from random states or countries with laws you don’t like is legally sufficient and making someone assert where they are located or from is necessary.
arrowsmith 1y ago
Many such cases: https://www.thehamsterforum.com/threads/big-sad-forum-news-online-safety-act.2091/ https://www.thehamsterforum.com/threads/big-sad-forum-news-o... (Yes, the UK has effectively made it illegal to run a forum for people with pet hamsters.)
- sswaner 1y ago
  Makes Fleabag’s cafe more normal (Guinea Pigs are not Hamsters, I know).
- glaucon 1y ago
  The unfortunate, but understandable, fallback suggestion from thehamsterforum of all moving over to Instagram shows why large corps _love_ laws like this. More laws just raises the barrier to entry until only those that have entire office blocks of lawyers can afford to participate.
- arlcode 1y ago
  I'm now intrigued to know what prompted them to reopen the forum after "something" was done. They deal with compliance in their terms and apparently did a reboot and apparently introduced new modding tools. Did they reach the conclusion that they are not pose significant risks and that their tools are sufficient? I'm very curious
- lofaszvanitt 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - bmn__ 1y ago
    You can afford to be so flippant because in the chance that Ofcom's enforcement will lead to prison or another punishment, it won't be you who's suffering it.
    - lofaszvanitt 1y ago
      They won't gonna imprison you because of hamsters.
flumpcakes 1y ago
You can use this wizard to check if the new UK law applies to your service: https://ofcomlive.my.salesforce-sites.com/formentry/RegulationChecker https://ofcomlive.my.salesforce-sites.com/formentry/Regulati...
- jadamson 1y ago
  Very first question: > Your online service has links with the UK if: > UK users are a target market for your service; or > It has a significant number of UK users What is "significant"? Is it a percentage or a raw number? I'll click "no" - maybe 5% of my users are from the UK. Great, wizard complete! I don't need to worry...except: > Please note that this result is indicative only
- hermitcrab 1y ago
  >Do you provide a “user-to-user” service? We have a free-to-use technical forum for our (data wrangling software) forum, powered by Discourse. I believe that might allow users to directly message each other. Does that count?
  - beejiu 1y ago
    Yes, but if you fill out the rest of the questionnaire I suspect it says you are not in scope.
    - hermitcrab 1y ago
      I put 'don't know' for that question and the assessement was 'unclear'.
    - Ralfp 1y ago
      Nope, I’ve did questionnaire and it gave me big green „yes”. Only escape hatch they give you later is if all communication between users is delegated to other medium, eg. email or phone or sms.
      - hermitcrab 1y ago
beejiu 1y ago
I have no idea what this service is, but clicking around on their site they mention it's 18+, that they don't allow "Child pornography, Sexualized depictions of minors, Heavy gore, Bestiality, Sexual violence". I don't agree with everything in the Online Safety Act, but if anything needed a risk assessment, it's surely this?
- strken 1y ago
  They appear to be objecting to the scope and extreme cost of the risk assessment rather than its existence.
  - beejiu 1y ago
    They're in scope because they provide a pornographic service, I don't see that is arguable. If you don't have the competence in house to follow the guidelines and need to hire expensive lawyers, then yes it's an "extreme cost", but that's not true of all businesses.
    - dbetteridge 1y ago
      But that's the whole complaint, the overhead of compliance with the law (not necessarily the controls on protecting minors themselves but just the legal burden) is so high as to be untenable for anyone but big corps.
- skissane 1y ago
  From what I understand, it is just giving people access to AI models with minimal censorship - so illegal content [0] is still disallowed, but otherwise you can do what you want. And I’m sure a lot of that will be sexual material, but that’s more about the nature of the market demand for uncensored AI than anything inherent to the offering in itself [0] “law” here isn’t just laws made by governments, but also regulations made by e.g. Visa and Mastercard
- gh2k 1y ago
  Agreed. I read the article and I was thinking "this sounds pretty bad", but after clicking through to the main site my experience was "there's no explanation of what this is, but it looks like it probably falls within the need for some form of regulation". Are there services which offer a less... risky... service that are similarly affected here?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
rimbo789 1y ago
Good. Tech companies have acted far too long like the law is something like they can get to next week. This firm doesn’t care a whit about the impact on users - they are just too cheap to follow the rules. If your business can’t operate without regulation it shouldn’t operate at all because it clearly relies too heavily on exploiting labour and or consumers
- 18172828286177 1y ago
  Nice bait
  - rimbo789 1y ago
    It’s wild that this is a forum where the take “follow the law even if it’s annoying for your company” is considered bait
    - marmarama 1y ago
      It's run by a startup incubator, and a pretty large chunk of the user population has the notion that they will eventually end up part of the rarefied population of company founders that hit the jackpot and make their fortune. Of course that affects attitudes here, even if most people on here will never actually be a founder, let alone a highly successful one.
- transcriptase 1y ago
  Do you have more of your writing available anywhere? I’m fine-tuning a model to act as someone with uncritical deference to authority, a paternal view of government, and no apparent awareness of what it takes to comply with regulation or operate a real business. Your material could be the perfect training data!
  - burnt-resistor 1y ago
    Not just LOL, but I nearly fainted from laughter. Best takedown of illiberal authoritarian bootlickers on the internet today. People must be crazy or broken if they are so brainwashed or misinformed to believe even for a second that illiberalism or government oppression will somehow make their or everyone lives better.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
gerdesj 1y ago
Nightmare! There are normally two shift keys on your keyboard, try either one.
arbuge 1y ago
This kind of thing makes we wonder if the internet as a whole is heading for a Kessler Syndrome kind of situation. Another example: here in the USA we have 50 states vying to each regulate AI; my understanding is that the plan was to have the OBBB put them off from doing this for at least 10 years, but that effort failed, leaving them free to each do their own thing. Complying with all rules and regulations in all jurisdictions to which a website/service could be exposed (i.e. worldwide, by default) seems like it's becoming a well nigh impossible task these days.
- lmz 1y ago
  Well, if we make it expensive enough to operate everywhere, then there will probably be one or two huge "global" sites and hundreds of small local, region-locked ones. Maybe that is the future. Cyberspace is not, eventually, independent[1] if you plan to make money off it and use real world IDs. [1]: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
- throwanem 1y ago
  "Balkanization" has been the term when, previously, the issue has risen into popular discourse. I'm broadly in favor, I think. This species can have instant global communications once it's shown itself equal to the responsibility that implies.
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  Balkanization was always the inevitable end state of the Internet, because the alternative is ceding sovereignty over what is now critical infrastructure, and states simply do not do that. It was fine when the Internet was a side hobby for a slice of the population, but now that it’s fundamental to all aspects of life, having it under the control of a foreign government (and the tech companies which act as de facto organs of that government) is no longer acceptable.
ez8 1y ago
why is scrolling so heavy and lagged on this simple page
- MiddleEndian 1y ago
  People fucking love javascript lol
morkalork 1y ago
Question: What if you don't comply but are outside of the UK and have no business operating there making money, filing taxes etc. What is the consequence, criminal charges in absentia and an attempt at extradition? Also, at $1.50/user, what if users pay for accounts? Perhaps this will be the Band-Aid ripping moment that ushers in sane communities that are no longer under attack by endless bad actors with infinite free accounts?
- arlcode 1y ago
  The second part is something I've been pondering for quite a long time. Having to verify your identity (without it being exposed to other users) sounds like it could reduce endless botting. On the other hand such a system is basically begging to be abused by bad actors (state and non state)
nickdothutton 1y ago
Way too much regulatory risk in the UK now. This particular law is full of vague terms. Easier to just count UK users out (and I am one of them).
corford 1y ago
So they're whining that the UK has laws with teeth which makes it hard for them to offer AI sex bots without investing in adequate protections for minors?
- Ralfp 1y ago
  It may be so, but as somebody else mentioned every site that lets people register an account and share stuff is affected because having legal age verification on site requires you to pay a third party provider and writing paperwork for the gov is too much for your site about pet hamsters.
- stevage 1y ago
  They don't seem to be objecting to the existence of such laws, but the specific ones which are extremely onerous.
- maest 1y ago
  No, it's more nuanced tham it, as described in TFA. Strawmanning their position isn't helpful to anyone.
  - dhdaadhd 1y ago
    Well, one thing they do not mention in framing their position is that their compliance concerns are acute because of the services they offer. They feign throughout that their risks are pedestrian. It is not strawmanning to say that of course they have to be more worried about compliance than a hamster forum (which forum has recently decided not to comply because they [likely correctly] believe that their regulatory risks are minimal).
neilellis 1y ago
If you are UK citizen please sign petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903 https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903
hackerjewsss 1y ago
[flagged]
gieksosz 1y ago
[flagged]
midtvu 1y ago
Its a control thing. The online safety act connects every account to a government ID, leading to easier arrests if you say somehing the good ol' government dont like. Its an attack on free speech
rdm_blackhole 1y ago
I think the problem with this sort of regulation is two fold. The first is that the cost of compliance is astronomical for small businesses and therefore it doesn't makes sense to supply your product/service to UK users if you don't really need them. The second issue is the issue of data privacy. I don't think it is stretching the truth to say that the age verification is the Trojan horse of the upcoming digital ID requirements. It is very clear that the UK/EU wants to move to a world were everything you do online is tied back to your digital ID somehow. The problem with that is that we do not know how long and where this data will be stored, nor who will have access to it and what will happen when it starts being used to prosecute people in the future. If the requirements were to simply prove you are above 18/21 and that was the end of it, then maybe it would be somewhat more palatable. But in reality, we know where this road leads. It is not inconceivable that in 10 years from now once the full digital ID requirements are in place that you, a random citizen will find yourself in hot water because you accessed some part of Reddit and left a comment on a post where someone was advocating to go protest on the streets without the required permits to do so. Make no mistake, this is where this leads. Full on surveillance state. And they say China is bad? Seems to me that China has become and example to follow instead of cautionary tale.
arresin 1y ago
Holy cow, those people are living under a tyranny.
- drnick1 1y ago
  Sad indeed. Thankfully it is trivial (if somewhat inconvenient) to escape by means of a VPN.
ksec 1y ago
The only way to get this repelled isn't by signing up the petition or speaking to your representatives to change it. It is to actively spread the news to all website owners and asking them to comply with the UK law therefore forcing them to block all UK users. Once the damage has been done only then will they listen.

337 points by airhangerf15 1y ago

What does it mean £1.50 per person for Reddit? Can I bankrupt them by spamming them with a billion fake accounts in the UK?

lostmsu 1y ago

We need to get back to researching and developing decentralized software.

smallpipe 1y ago

A shame the ruling party is indistinguishible from the Tory they were voted in to replace.

daedrdev 1y ago

I think they probably should not have implied its accessible via VPN, the UK might still go after their asses for having UK users even with the IP block

userbinator 1y ago
If they're coming via a VPN, it's hard to prove the users are even in the UK, or any other country for that matter.
- louthy 1y ago
  Other than the UK credit card on their account, right?
- daedrdev 1y ago
  I doubt the government cares, especially since they drove many post office heads to suicide claiming they stole money when it was really software bugs despite all evidence showing this.

IlikeKitties 1y ago

How can they even enforce this? What happens if you run a plattform in let's say Germany and just tell them to fuck off, UK Law is of no interest to me.

daveoc64 1y ago
Payments to your service from users in the UK could be blocked. It's also possible for the owners or employees of the company to be held liable if they ever visit the UK.
aosaigh 1y ago
I don’t agree with the legislation, but I assume the same way they can go after you for any crime they perceive as being committed in the UK: extradition. It’s obviously incredibly unlikely.
- bpodgursky 1y ago
  Most sane countries will only extradite if users have broken a law which reciprocally exists in the country they actually live.
  - louthy 1y ago
    Or you travel to a 3rd country that has the same law and an extradition treaty with the UK. Or, you travel to the UK! It’s a pretty popular destination and Heathrow is a major European hub. It would be easy to get caught out. The law may well be onerous and misguided. But looking at that site, it seems they reeeeally should do their due diligence. Not just to avoid the long arm of UK justice, but other territories too. It looks extremely dubious. Their mitigation doesn’t make sense either. If they don’t shutdown UK accounts and those accounts use UK credit cards which continue to use the service via a VPN. It could be reasonably argued that they know they’re providing a service to a UK resident. So, they really need to do their homework. What they’re actually complaining about is the cost of doing business. It sounds pretty amateurish.
    - 1y ago

spiderfarmer 1y ago

I decided I will block signups to my web platform for UK users as well. Just because I don’t understand any of the requirements.

dumbfounder 1y ago
I hope you inform the user and show them how to easily complain to their representatives.
- IlikeKitties 1y ago
  Nah, just send them code 451 and ignore them. UK is still democracy adjacent, uk citicens voted for this nonesense, let them deal with the consequences.
  - vlod 1y ago
    Surely, an ideal opportunity to put a funny dog 451 page.
  - prmoustache 1y ago
    They voted for representatives, not for a particular law and may have not understood the details of this law when it was passed.
    - HPsquared 1y ago
      In 2024, only about 15% of MPs were elected by a local majority. This is a historic low, I think. There was a lot of "vote splitting" and spoiler effect going on due to FPTP. Labour have a very weak mandate.
    - Silhouette 1y ago
      Most of the UK didn't even vote for a Labour representative at the last general election. The Labour party's current control of our government is the result of one of the most disproportionate parliamentary majorities ever relative to its actual popular vote at the election. It's a consequence of our broken "first past the post" voting system. There's a certain irony in our politics right now that FPTP has been maintained by two dominant political parties because it has served their purposes to have little real challenge from smaller parties despite those parties collectively having quite a lot of popular support. That same system has now all but ended one of those two dominant parties as a force in British politics and at the next election it might well do the same for the other. The scariest question is who we might then get instead if Labour don't force through a radical change to our voting system while they still have the (possibly last) chance.

zb3 1y ago

The law could be renamed to "Use VPN Act", this is the actual consequence..

vidarh 1y ago
Mullvad has been running ads on London buses recently...

tomschwiha 1y ago

I get both sides. Kids need some sort of protection online. But the UK law is maybe too harsh for small companies. Also hinting at VPN use to bypass the law isn't smart legally.

polarbear67 1y ago
Protection for the kids should fall on the parents or schools, not the companies. It's not the companies fault if the kid is given full access to the internet, especially at a young age. It's bad parenting. If it's such an important issue, make the parents liable in some way.
- ocharles 1y ago
  This keeps getting parroted but it's flawed/overly idealistic/frankly naive. An awful of children are, unfortunately, poorly parented. This is not a new phenomenon, nor something we seem to be improving. OTOH, exposure to extreme material for young children is increasing, and has consequences beyond that child. Exposure to extreme pornography leads to a warped view of sex which affects everyone this child might have sexual encounters with. Exposure to extreme violent material leads to the murder of other innocent children. I don't know where I stand on this legislation - my gut is that it's too heavy handed and will miss the mark. But I think we need to stop saying this falls solely on parents. The internet is far too big, and parenting is far too varied for this to work. I wish it would, but it won't. There simply aren't enough parents that care enough.
  - polarbear67 1y ago
    Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I think it's a terrible thing, but in this case, I think doing nothing is better than doing something. The unintended consequences far outweighs the benefits. The kids that want to find extreme stuff will find it anyway, regardless of regulation.
    - xg15 1y ago
      "But the unintended consequences" has been the standard response of tech startups to any kind of regulation, since they were started being regulated. At some point, it stops being believable.

UrineSqueegee 1y ago

[dead]

rimbo789 1y ago
It’s insane that “just follow the rules” gets downvoted

nocoiner 1y ago

“if people find other methods to access the site, that is entirely on them - there are no legal consequences for users.” For a site operator who seems really concerned about potential liability under this law, I sure wouldn’t have put this in writing. Feels like it really undermines the rest of the post and the compliance measures being taken.

PhoenixReborn 1y ago
It's basically impossible to prevent people from using VPNs without some serious governmental control over every telco - which of course may be the case in the UK, but I don't think a site operator can be held liable for that in any sane way.
- bink 1y ago
  It's one thing to not try to prevent people from circumventing the law, it's quite another to encourage them to do so.
  - iLoveOncall 1y ago
    As the website says, it's not illegal for users in the UK to circumvent the restrictions using a VPN, so they're not recommending anything illegal.
    - closewith 1y ago
      This is the kind of comment you get from someone who's never interacted with a Western legal system. Any kind of winking reference is immediately seen through.
      - Spivak 1y ago
        I think you assume the fact that it's a winking reference means they have to use a winking reference. It seems like it would be legal for them to post a full guide for UK users on how to access their site using a VPN service. There's literally "Best VPNs For Accessing Porn in the UK" articles, they'll be fine.

laincide 1y ago

Thats ok, i probably wouldnt use a site that uses ghbili style ai generated thumbnails anyway

Trowter 1y ago

[flagged]

Silhouette 1y ago
Indeed. I usually expect that sites linked from HN will be reasonably safe and reputable so followed the link assuming it would be some sort of AI startup but not expecting anything like this. A warning would have been appreciated. @dang, maybe change the title to include some kind of NSFW tag?

muglug 1y ago

Um this website offers LLM-powered chat bots that can simulate pretty much any situation the user wants, and most of the content appears to be sexual in nature. I’m no prude, but I think this is a not-great thing to expose kids to, and the UK government is maybe not-terrible to want some sort of way to gate kids’ access.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tomschwiha 1y ago
I think the point of the blog is still valid as the law applies to any content publisher/social media platform of any size. Even Hackernews could be a target if I understood correctly.
r33b33 1y ago
[flagged]
blibble 1y ago
yeah, as a Brit I am against the OSA it places a huge compliance burden on the 99.5% of small sites out there which are completely innocent "janitor.ai" is not one of those sites... an effective OSA should be targeted at sites like that and saying "UK users, we can identify your accounts and have deliberately left them open cough VPN cough" isn't going to help them in the slightest (see Section 19)

r33b33 1y ago

Quickly spin up a VPN (with LLM help) and georedirect UK users to said VPN page. Problem solved.

prmoustache 1y ago
I am pretty sure helping your users circumventing the blockage would make you liable the same way.
- r33b33 1y ago
  So? If the law is stupid, they should get what's coming to them.

dsign 1y ago

There's a explainer of the act here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act-explainer/online-safety-act-explainer#who-the-act-applies-to https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act... . From what I'm reading, Amazon will have to implement age-checks over 8/10 of its book inventory, with the other 2/10 opening the company for liability about the very broad definition of "Age-appropriate experiences for children online." And yes, janitorai is correct that the act applies to them and the content they create, and a blanket ban to UK users seems the most appropriate course of action. For what is worth, the act does not seem to apply to first-party websites, as long as visitors of that website are not allowed to interact with each other. So, say, a blog without a comment feed should be okay.

pacifika 1y ago
That’s not what Ofcom clarified previously: see the end of https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/06/uk_online_safety_act_bloggers/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/06/uk_online_safety_act_...
- magicalhippo 1y ago
  The statement from Ofcom is at the very end, and they're very clearly saying you need to only allow moderator-approved on-topic comments on such a blog site in order to fall under the exemption. Any off-topic comment will be subject to the act.
  - pacifika 1y ago
    My reading is that as long as the comments are somewhat related, the provider is safe from being held accountable for them, but the exact level of connection isn't clearly defined. So if you filter out known bad words and spam comments, that could very well cover things.
card_zero 1y ago
Possibly a blog with comments would be OK: https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/ra_blog_with_comments/ https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/ra_blog_with_comments/

NitpickLawyer 1y ago

The way these laws and regs don't even consider the provider size is aggravating. Doubly so because they always use "big bad provider" and think of the kids as populist support gaining strategies, but in the end the same big providers benefit. They have the billions to spend on everything from lawyers to fiscal optimisation, and they rake in the entire market since they're the only ones left to serve that market. That's happening with the AI act here as well. Almost no-one wants to even touch the EU shitshow and they're still going forward with it. Even Mistral was trying to petition them, but the latest news seem like it had no effect. Fuck us I guess, right? Both consumers and SMBs will lose if this passes as is.

skippyboxedhero 1y ago
They did consider the provider size, it is probably the main element of this law: the problem is that the consideration was to assume that you are always dealing with mega-large companies with teams of lawyers...because these companies have been lobbying regulators and civil servants (not Parliament so much, they don't matter anymore) for years. This is extremely common in the UK (very low corruption by historical methods but when decisions are actually made, there is corruption almost everywhere). The provider size was an active choice. It isn't populist either, no-one supports this. The UK has media campaigns run by newspapers, no-one reads the papers but politicians so these campaigns start to influence politicians. Always the same: spontaneous media campaign across multiple newspapers (low impact on other kinds of media), child as a figurehead, and the law always has significant implications that are nothing to do with the publicly stated aim. Democracy has very little to do with it. Elections happen in the UK but policies don't change, it is obvious why.
- pjc50 1y ago
  I wouldn't underestimate how weirdly authoritarian British populism can get. Always aimed against "other people", of course.
edelsohn 1y ago
Regulatory capture. The impact on small providers was intended.

kylestanfield 1y ago

“this is not just content moderation - it is a complete regulatory framework that assumes every platform is a tech giant.”

puppycodes 1y ago

the UK has been a swirling toilet bowl for free speech for years... unfortunately it seems to have accelerated. I really dont understand why parents don't bare the responsibility of their kids internet access as opposed to the expectation the internet raises their kids...

aosaigh 1y ago
Do you have kids? I don’t, so I don’t have any idea how realistic this is. How do you ensure your kids aren’t skirting any blocks you put in place, looking things up with their friends, getting access to a VPN, etc.? I also don’t think this act is the way to address these issues, but I don’t think it’s as easy as just putting everything at the feet of the parents as I imagine it almost impossible to police at home, not to mention at school. When I think of older technologies like television, we have rules and regulations about what can be shown when. Again, this isn’t to say this approach is right, but wanting to regulate isn’t an attack on free speech. It seems there is regularly a tension on HN between free speech absolutists, usually from the US and those more happy to accept regulation, usually from the EU
- iLoveOncall 1y ago
  > How do you ensure your kids aren’t skirting any blocks you put in place, looking things up with their friends, getting access to a VPN, etc.? I don't, because I don't need to. I had unrestricted access to internet when I was my kids age and I turned out just fine, just like the extreme majority of my generation. I know that serious discussions about important topics are enough to make sure that even if my kids do access content that's not meant for children, they're not negatively affected by them, just like I wasn't.
  - aosaigh 1y ago
    The world is a very very different place technologically then when you grew up. Again I don’t have kids, so I’m not in a position to judge, but I can only imagine the pressures on children are completely different nowadays. For example, we didn’t have computers in our pocket 24/7 with all of our peers on the other end influencing us indifferent ways.

rafram 1y ago

> i know that is terrible timing and im genuinely sorry about that. This Twitter-style faux-casual way of writing is so common among AI people right now (see Sam Altman) and it’s extremely grating. I don’t know anything about this project, but if they really cared about their users, I would hope that they’d use capital letters and punctuation when addressing them in an official announcement.

landl0rd 1y ago
"hello fellow humans im friendly and approachable lol" Also: > "and honestly? i..." > "this is not just content moderation - it is a..." These are two huge shibboleths of gpt-ese. He had to specifically tell the bot to write in that style.
- blitzar 1y ago
  My personal prompt is 'make me sound like an insufferable twat'. Hate on LLMs all you want but 60% of the time, it works every time.
- rcruzeiro 1y ago
  Perhaps a bit of a personal conspiracy theory: I do wonder if this was "written" this way because having ChatGPT write it like this is the only somewhat guaranteed way to have it avoid putting em dashes everywhere.
wiredone 1y ago
The great thing about language is that it changes over time. eg the past decade has seen us remove “that” as a qualifier, and the word literally has become interchangeable with figuratively. its worth considering whether you’re just losing touch…
- rafram 1y ago
  > eg the past decade has seen us remove “that” as a qualifier, and the word literally has become interchangeable with figuratively The latter didn’t happen just in the last decade, and the former hasn’t happened at all. But no, I can pretty confidently say that the English language still has capitalization and punctuation in it, it’s mostly just on Twitter and in AI-related blog posts where people write like this.

phtrivier 1y ago

My cursory understanding of the ruling is that it applies if you have several million users in the UK... [1] Is that the case here (and it just happens that I have no clue what this particular site is about) ? Or am I grossly misunderstanding the act (very likely I guess since IANAL) ? [1] https://www.onlinesafetyact.net/analysis/categorisation-of-services-in-the-online-safety-act/ https://www.onlinesafetyact.net/analysis/categorisation-of-s... ------------------------------------------- Ofcom’s advice to the Secretary of State Ofcom submitted their advice – and the unerpinning research that had informed it – to the Secretary of State on 29 February 2024 and published it on 25 March. In summary, its advice is as follows: Category 1 Condition 1: Use a content recommender system; and Have more than 34m UK users on the U2U part of the service Condition 2: Allow users to forward or reshare UGC; and Use a content recommender system; and Have more than 7m UK users on the U2U part of the service Ofcom estimates that there are 9 services captured by condition 1 and 12-16 likely to be captured by condition 2. There is one small reference in the annex that the 7m+ monthly users threshold corresponds to the DSA (A6.15) Category 2a (search) Not a vertical search service; and Have more then 7m UK users Ofcom estimates that there are just 2 search services that currently sit (a long way) above this threshold but that it is justified to put it at this level to catch emerging services. Category 2b (children) Allow users to send direct messages; and Have more than 3m UK users on the U2U part of the service Ofcom estimates that there are “approximately 25-40 services” that may meet this threshold. -------------------------------------------

boznz 1y ago
A 250+ page law will have so many edge cases I doubt you would want to test it especially in a country with a government that has recently cracked down and arrested people for online "crimes". Sad the UK government has descended to this level of stupidity.
rafram 1y ago
Ofcom’s “Does the Online Safety Act apply to your service?” questionnaire [1] doesn’t use those thresholds, and it makes it sound like the law would apply to any site with paying customers in the UK. [1]: https://ofcomlive.my.salesforce-sites.com/formentry/RegulationChecker https://ofcomlive.my.salesforce-sites.com/formentry/Regulati...

Havoc 1y ago

The act does seem poorly thought out practically & I really dislike the UK's overall mindset to online safety. The laws consistently feel like they were written by someone that prints out emails to read... That said the thinking that smaller platform should equal exemptions seems a touch flawed too given topic. If you're setting out to protect a child from content that say is promoting suicide the size of the platform isn't a relevant metric. If anything the smaller less visible corners (like the various chan sites) of the internet may even be higher risk

crote 1y ago
Smaller entities are rarely looking for a full exception, they just want the regulations to be implementable without being a megacorp. Take something like a plastic packaging tax, for example. A company like Amazon won't have too much trouble setting up a team to take care of this, and they can be taxed by the gram and by the material. But expecting the same from a mom-and-pop store is unreasonable - the fee isn't the problem, but the administrative overhead can be enough to kill them. Offering an alternative fixed-fee structure for companies below certain revenue thresholds would solve that problem, while still remaining true to the original intention.
- Havoc 1y ago
  I get the impossible bind this puts small companies in & having people resort to IP blocking the entire country is clearly a sign of a broken setup But playing devils advocate a bit here if the risk profile to the kid is the same on big and small platforms then there isn't any ethical room a lighter regime. Never mind full exemption, any exemption. The whole line of reasoning that you can't afford it therefore more kids potentially getting hurt on your platform is more acceptable just doesn't play. And similarly if you do provide a lighter touch regime, then the big players will rightly say well if that is adequate to ensure safety then why exactly can't we do that too? Platform size just isn't a relevant metric on some topics - child safety being one of them. Ethically whether a child is exposed to harm on a small or big website is the same thing. Not that I think this act will do much of anything for child safety. Which is why I think this needs to go back to drawing board entirely. Cause if we're not effectively protecting children yet killing businesses (and freedoms) then wtf are we doing

LAC-Tech 1y ago

Timely reminder to all UK people - your system is 100% set up to allow you to easily and legally change your government without bloodshed. This is the benefit of a constitutional monarchy. By "changing your government" I don't mean "shuffle people in and out of parliament" or even "elect your 6th Prime Minister in 10 years". I mean change your government.

flumpcakes 1y ago
What do you mean then?
- LAC-Tech 1y ago
  Regime change
octo888 1y ago
The two parties who had/have a chance of winning the/an election both wanted this
- LAC-Tech 1y ago
  Of course they can't. Labour or the Tories winning an election is not a change in government. It's a continuation of one.
  - octo888 1y ago
    I'm well aware ;)

hdb385 1y ago

You get the government you deserve

skippyboxedhero 1y ago
There was an election, both parties said this Act was going to happen. It depends what you mean by government but elected officials in the UK are almost completely irrelevant in this (and in most other things, their job is to get in front of a TV camera say how appalled they are that it has happened, no-one could have foreseen this, don't look back in anger, and that they are going to select from the same policy options that the Civil Service presented the last government with...which results in the same conclusion: more civil servants, more regulation, more corruption). Ofcom has been making a massive power grab, this bill and other recent regulations are granting them massive new powers, and the UK has a system in which ministers have no functional capacity to block this.
- foldr 1y ago
  I’m afraid this is nonsense. Elected officials aren’t irrelevant. The majority of them support this legislation and that is why it got enough votes to become law. You don’t have to like it (I’m not a huge fan either), but it’s a perfectly straightforward case of a popular policy becoming law via the democratic process. A process that’s notoriously imperfect and not guaranteed to yield the best outcome in all cases. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that this law must have come about by sinister machinations just because you don’t think it’s a good law.
  - skippyboxedhero 1y ago
    The reason I think this is because: 1. I know this first-hand and 2. You have to be completely blind to not see the same thing happen multiple times with multiple laws (this has been happening for decades). Elected officials are irrelevant because, in this case, they are functionally unable to propose a reasonable alternative. Policy options were presented, all of the policy options offered in this case were to empower Ofcom (again, how old are you? are you unable to think of another situation like this: same thing happened with BoE/PRA in 2010, same thing happened with Border Force creation, same thing happened with illegal immigration where the only functional action presented was to increase Home Office staffing, I can go on and on) so what was the alternative? You also may not understand what is going on here either: this legislation gave Ofcom new statutory powers but what you might not be aware of is that Ofcom has also been granted through non-statutory instruments significant new powers that interlock with this legislation...who voted on that? Again: media campaign by the powers that be, multiple Home Office ministers have been railroaded into this, Ofcom/security services have been granted new powers (the latter by the back door...again, tell me what that has to do with "social media abuse"? nothing). Finally, elected officials are mostly pawns. The majority of "them" do not know what is in the legislation. They have been told the PM wants "Molly's Law" passed, so it is passed. Some of the scrutiny was laughable...do you understand that the law has a provision that requires tech companies to provide "end-to-end encryption" that the government can break? To their credit, this was questioned by legislators several times...it wasn't removed from the Bill, despite it obviously being unrelated to anything in the Act. Again, how are you this blind? Do you see why elected officials might be irrelevant if you are so blind?

zkmon 1y ago

I personally know how this works in Europe & UK. Not only government, this applies to big companies such as large banks as well. They recruit two kinds of staff. One that works to progress some work and one who puts an many hurdles as possible and call it risk management, compliance, security, regulatory etc (RCSR). They hire approximately 3 times more people into these RCSR positions compared to the technical and real work related positions. These RCSR guys dump thousands of pages of guidelines, making it impossible for any meaningful work to progress. My technical team has been running around for 4 months for approvals for testing an upgrade of a database. Top management can never go against the RCSR guys, who are like priests of the church in medieval ages. And the RCSR guys have no goals linked to the progress of the real work. The don't like any thing that moves. It's a risk. Management thinks that RCSR helps with controls around the work. But what happens is, you put more people in building controls, they deliver fort walls around your garbage bins.

landl0rd 1y ago
America has a similar (if less severe) version of this problem where nobody can contradict any compliance-adjacent function. Because if you get sued, someone will ask you "why did you ignore the guidance of your compliance team??" and might even try to use that to justify piercing the corporate veil. Of course compliance types have no incentive to let business happen just like business types have a limited incentive to operate in a compliant fashion, but lawsuits favor compliance always taking precedent with a hyper-cautious approach.
- flappyeagle 1y ago
  And yet uber and Airbnb and polymarket and…
  - landl0rd 1y ago
    These are at some level businesses that do well because they avoid regulatory regimes. That risk is built-in from day one and basically their raison d'etre. I happen to think that's fine and good, but it's still the case. In other words, the guys who actually believe in a normal level of compliance are hamstrung, defection is rewarded, classic failure mode of this kind of thing.

hsuduebc2 1y ago

Once again, it seems like the regulations were likely written by the very people being regulated perfectly tailored to kill off any potential competition. An absolute classic.

marginalia_nu 1y ago

Yeah I'm probably gonna have to block UK visitors from Marginalia Search as well. Just no way a single developer can comply with that stuff :-/

lucb1e 1y ago
Off topic but your status page says service unavailable while the service is up. The best kind of outage to have! https://status.marginalia.nu https://status.marginalia.nu
- marginalia_nu 1y ago
  Ironically it's the by far flakiest aspect of the entire setup.

shmerl 1y ago

I've heard it caused all UK operated small forums to shut down. Basically a completely dumb anti free speech "regulation".

basisword 1y ago

[flagged]

stephen_g 1y ago
Have you looked at the law though? Like actually? Elsewhere on the thread somebody posted a link where an owner of a forum for people who own hamsters as pets has to close down because they can't afford to comply with the law. It is actually a really bad law.

CommenterPerson 1y ago

[flagged]

daft_pink 1y ago

i’m really curious if the policy of simply blocking ip addresses from random states or countries with laws you don’t like is legally sufficient and making someone assert where they are located or from is necessary.

arrowsmith 1y ago

Many such cases: https://www.thehamsterforum.com/threads/big-sad-forum-news-online-safety-act.2091/ https://www.thehamsterforum.com/threads/big-sad-forum-news-o... (Yes, the UK has effectively made it illegal to run a forum for people with pet hamsters.)

sswaner 1y ago
Makes Fleabag’s cafe more normal (Guinea Pigs are not Hamsters, I know).
glaucon 1y ago
The unfortunate, but understandable, fallback suggestion from thehamsterforum of all moving over to Instagram shows why large corps _love_ laws like this. More laws just raises the barrier to entry until only those that have entire office blocks of lawyers can afford to participate.
arlcode 1y ago
I'm now intrigued to know what prompted them to reopen the forum after "something" was done. They deal with compliance in their terms and apparently did a reboot and apparently introduced new modding tools. Did they reach the conclusion that they are not pose significant risks and that their tools are sufficient? I'm very curious
lofaszvanitt 1y ago
[flagged]
- bmn__ 1y ago
  You can afford to be so flippant because in the chance that Ofcom's enforcement will lead to prison or another punishment, it won't be you who's suffering it.
  - lofaszvanitt 1y ago
    They won't gonna imprison you because of hamsters.

flumpcakes 1y ago

You can use this wizard to check if the new UK law applies to your service: https://ofcomlive.my.salesforce-sites.com/formentry/RegulationChecker https://ofcomlive.my.salesforce-sites.com/formentry/Regulati...

jadamson 1y ago
Very first question: > Your online service has links with the UK if: > UK users are a target market for your service; or > It has a significant number of UK users What is "significant"? Is it a percentage or a raw number? I'll click "no" - maybe 5% of my users are from the UK. Great, wizard complete! I don't need to worry...except: > Please note that this result is indicative only
hermitcrab 1y ago
>Do you provide a “user-to-user” service? We have a free-to-use technical forum for our (data wrangling software) forum, powered by Discourse. I believe that might allow users to directly message each other. Does that count?
- beejiu 1y ago
  Yes, but if you fill out the rest of the questionnaire I suspect it says you are not in scope.
  - hermitcrab 1y ago
    I put 'don't know' for that question and the assessement was 'unclear'.
  - Ralfp 1y ago
    Nope, I’ve did questionnaire and it gave me big green „yes”. Only escape hatch they give you later is if all communication between users is delegated to other medium, eg. email or phone or sms.
    - hermitcrab 1y ago

beejiu 1y ago

I have no idea what this service is, but clicking around on their site they mention it's 18+, that they don't allow "Child pornography, Sexualized depictions of minors, Heavy gore, Bestiality, Sexual violence". I don't agree with everything in the Online Safety Act, but if anything needed a risk assessment, it's surely this?

strken 1y ago
They appear to be objecting to the scope and extreme cost of the risk assessment rather than its existence.
- beejiu 1y ago
  They're in scope because they provide a pornographic service, I don't see that is arguable. If you don't have the competence in house to follow the guidelines and need to hire expensive lawyers, then yes it's an "extreme cost", but that's not true of all businesses.
  - dbetteridge 1y ago
    But that's the whole complaint, the overhead of compliance with the law (not necessarily the controls on protecting minors themselves but just the legal burden) is so high as to be untenable for anyone but big corps.
skissane 1y ago
From what I understand, it is just giving people access to AI models with minimal censorship - so illegal content [0] is still disallowed, but otherwise you can do what you want. And I’m sure a lot of that will be sexual material, but that’s more about the nature of the market demand for uncensored AI than anything inherent to the offering in itself [0] “law” here isn’t just laws made by governments, but also regulations made by e.g. Visa and Mastercard
gh2k 1y ago
Agreed. I read the article and I was thinking "this sounds pretty bad", but after clicking through to the main site my experience was "there's no explanation of what this is, but it looks like it probably falls within the need for some form of regulation". Are there services which offer a less... risky... service that are similarly affected here?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

rimbo789 1y ago

Good. Tech companies have acted far too long like the law is something like they can get to next week. This firm doesn’t care a whit about the impact on users - they are just too cheap to follow the rules. If your business can’t operate without regulation it shouldn’t operate at all because it clearly relies too heavily on exploiting labour and or consumers

18172828286177 1y ago
Nice bait
- rimbo789 1y ago
  It’s wild that this is a forum where the take “follow the law even if it’s annoying for your company” is considered bait
  - marmarama 1y ago
    It's run by a startup incubator, and a pretty large chunk of the user population has the notion that they will eventually end up part of the rarefied population of company founders that hit the jackpot and make their fortune. Of course that affects attitudes here, even if most people on here will never actually be a founder, let alone a highly successful one.
transcriptase 1y ago
Do you have more of your writing available anywhere? I’m fine-tuning a model to act as someone with uncritical deference to authority, a paternal view of government, and no apparent awareness of what it takes to comply with regulation or operate a real business. Your material could be the perfect training data!
- burnt-resistor 1y ago
  Not just LOL, but I nearly fainted from laughter. Best takedown of illiberal authoritarian bootlickers on the internet today. People must be crazy or broken if they are so brainwashed or misinformed to believe even for a second that illiberalism or government oppression will somehow make their or everyone lives better.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

gerdesj 1y ago

Nightmare! There are normally two shift keys on your keyboard, try either one.

arbuge 1y ago

This kind of thing makes we wonder if the internet as a whole is heading for a Kessler Syndrome kind of situation. Another example: here in the USA we have 50 states vying to each regulate AI; my understanding is that the plan was to have the OBBB put them off from doing this for at least 10 years, but that effort failed, leaving them free to each do their own thing. Complying with all rules and regulations in all jurisdictions to which a website/service could be exposed (i.e. worldwide, by default) seems like it's becoming a well nigh impossible task these days.

lmz 1y ago
Well, if we make it expensive enough to operate everywhere, then there will probably be one or two huge "global" sites and hundreds of small local, region-locked ones. Maybe that is the future. Cyberspace is not, eventually, independent[1] if you plan to make money off it and use real world IDs. [1]: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
throwanem 1y ago
"Balkanization" has been the term when, previously, the issue has risen into popular discourse. I'm broadly in favor, I think. This species can have instant global communications once it's shown itself equal to the responsibility that implies.
Analemma_ 1y ago
Balkanization was always the inevitable end state of the Internet, because the alternative is ceding sovereignty over what is now critical infrastructure, and states simply do not do that. It was fine when the Internet was a side hobby for a slice of the population, but now that it’s fundamental to all aspects of life, having it under the control of a foreign government (and the tech companies which act as de facto organs of that government) is no longer acceptable.

ez8 1y ago

why is scrolling so heavy and lagged on this simple page

MiddleEndian 1y ago
People fucking love javascript lol

morkalork 1y ago

Question: What if you don't comply but are outside of the UK and have no business operating there making money, filing taxes etc. What is the consequence, criminal charges in absentia and an attempt at extradition? Also, at $1.50/user, what if users pay for accounts? Perhaps this will be the Band-Aid ripping moment that ushers in sane communities that are no longer under attack by endless bad actors with infinite free accounts?

arlcode 1y ago
The second part is something I've been pondering for quite a long time. Having to verify your identity (without it being exposed to other users) sounds like it could reduce endless botting. On the other hand such a system is basically begging to be abused by bad actors (state and non state)

nickdothutton 1y ago

Way too much regulatory risk in the UK now. This particular law is full of vague terms. Easier to just count UK users out (and I am one of them).

corford 1y ago

So they're whining that the UK has laws with teeth which makes it hard for them to offer AI sex bots without investing in adequate protections for minors?

Ralfp 1y ago
It may be so, but as somebody else mentioned every site that lets people register an account and share stuff is affected because having legal age verification on site requires you to pay a third party provider and writing paperwork for the gov is too much for your site about pet hamsters.
stevage 1y ago
They don't seem to be objecting to the existence of such laws, but the specific ones which are extremely onerous.
maest 1y ago
No, it's more nuanced tham it, as described in TFA. Strawmanning their position isn't helpful to anyone.
- dhdaadhd 1y ago
  Well, one thing they do not mention in framing their position is that their compliance concerns are acute because of the services they offer. They feign throughout that their risks are pedestrian. It is not strawmanning to say that of course they have to be more worried about compliance than a hamster forum (which forum has recently decided not to comply because they [likely correctly] believe that their regulatory risks are minimal).

neilellis 1y ago

If you are UK citizen please sign petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903 https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903

hackerjewsss 1y ago

[flagged]

gieksosz 1y ago

[flagged]

midtvu 1y ago

Its a control thing. The online safety act connects every account to a government ID, leading to easier arrests if you say somehing the good ol' government dont like. Its an attack on free speech

rdm_blackhole 1y ago

I think the problem with this sort of regulation is two fold. The first is that the cost of compliance is astronomical for small businesses and therefore it doesn't makes sense to supply your product/service to UK users if you don't really need them. The second issue is the issue of data privacy. I don't think it is stretching the truth to say that the age verification is the Trojan horse of the upcoming digital ID requirements. It is very clear that the UK/EU wants to move to a world were everything you do online is tied back to your digital ID somehow. The problem with that is that we do not know how long and where this data will be stored, nor who will have access to it and what will happen when it starts being used to prosecute people in the future. If the requirements were to simply prove you are above 18/21 and that was the end of it, then maybe it would be somewhat more palatable. But in reality, we know where this road leads. It is not inconceivable that in 10 years from now once the full digital ID requirements are in place that you, a random citizen will find yourself in hot water because you accessed some part of Reddit and left a comment on a post where someone was advocating to go protest on the streets without the required permits to do so. Make no mistake, this is where this leads. Full on surveillance state. And they say China is bad? Seems to me that China has become and example to follow instead of cautionary tale.

arresin 1y ago

Holy cow, those people are living under a tyranny.

drnick1 1y ago
Sad indeed. Thankfully it is trivial (if somewhat inconvenient) to escape by means of a VPN.

ksec 1y ago

The only way to get this repelled isn't by signing up the petition or speaking to your representatives to change it. It is to actively spread the news to all website owners and asking them to comply with the UK law therefore forcing them to block all UK users. Once the damage has been done only then will they listen.