Do want to point out the UK act is such a unworkable mess that it is likely to collapse under its own weight just look at the last UK age verification law that was delayed over and over again until it was quietly scraped. And it's likely Ofcom will struggle to get the OSB up and running
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
178 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
70199 readers
3480 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
At this point they should just consider disconnecting the UK from the wider internet
I assume that once they try to go after one of the "big ones", geoblocking the UK will happen at a larger scale. Just imagine a country being geoblocked by Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
"Dear UK citizen, due to stupid and malign laws enactet by the Tory party of your country, (Google|Twitter|Facebook|Wikipedia|other) will not be available in the UK for the forseeable future."
Failing to comply with the act’s rules could land companies with fines of up to £18 million (around $22 million), or 10 percent of their global annual turnover (whichever is higher), and their bosses could even face prison.
I'm curious how they intend to enforce this on companies that aren't located in the UK.
Just wait until the UK turns into a big white blob on the internet due to getting geoblocked by about anyone.
Cyber-Brexit. GG UK.
If they make money in the UK, they can be fined in the UK .
Or if it's not a company at all, like a random one-person XMPP server located on a VPS outside of the UK.
From the article: "The act has been welcomed by child safety advocates."
Same beeing tried for the EU.
The proposed regulation is excessively “influenced by companies pretending to be NGOs but acting more like tech companies”, said Arda Gerkens, former director of Europe’s oldest hotline for reporting online CSAM.
“Groups like Thorn use everything they can to put this legislation forward, not just because they feel that this is the way forward to combat child sexual abuse, but also because they have a commercial interest in doing so.”
If the regulation undermines encryption, it risks introducing new vulnerabilities, critics argue. “Who will benefit from the legislation?” Gerkens asked. “Not the children.”
“So it’s very clear that whatever their incorporation status is, that they are self-interested in promoting child exploitation as a problem that happens “online,” and then proposing quick (and profitable) technical solutions as a remedy to what is in reality a deep social and cultural problem. (…) I don’t think governments understand just how expensive and fallible these systems are, that we’re not looking at a one-time cost. We’re looking at hundreds of millions of dollars indefinitely due to the scale that this is being proposed at.”
This whole article is worth reading despite its length. This is a mess and the UK is only the start, they are aiming for this being implemented world wide.
I hate the "think of the children" excuse for draconian laws like this. It plays with people's emotions to get them to support or be neutral towards it. Disgusting. As is using children as a shield at all.
"… Importantly, we’ll also take full account of people’s rights to privacy and freedom of expression."
While also being pretty much against end-to-end encryption. Good job.
Is this the one they said you'd need to register with a photo id if you wanted to access porn sites? The one opponents said would do the most good for online safety by teaching the nation to use VPN?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Specific harms the bill aims to address include underage access to online pornography, “anonymous trolls,” scam ads, the nonconsensual sharing of intimate deepfakes, and the spread of child sexual abuse material and terrorism-related content.
The first covers how platforms will have to respond to illegal content like terrorism and child sexual abuse material, and a consultation with proposals on how to handle these duties is due to be published on November 9th.
Ofcom says it expects to publish a list of “categorised services,” which are large or high-risk platforms that will be subject to obligations like producing transparency reports, by the end of next year.
Social media companies will be held to account for the appalling scale of child sexual abuse occurring on their platforms and our children will be safer,” said UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation has said that the bill’s strict obligations for protecting children from inappropriate content could create issues for a service like Wikipedia, which chooses to collect minimal data on its users, including their ages.
In a statement, Ofcom’s chief executive Melanie Dawes pushed back against the idea that the act will make the telecoms regulator a censor.
The original article contains 659 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!