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How I believe Terry Pratchett would likely view those activists who promote Age Verification to support the Online Safety Act
I am speculating, of course, but absolutely everybody who has a clue — adults, kids, whomever — is circumventing the age verification controls with a VPN because it’s a one-step fix to a better life, and the wonks who didn’t understand that this would happen, because they were too busy projecting their erroneous presumption of…
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Oh this is glorious: Journalist @zoecrowther.bsky.social using Bluesky seeks DMs from people impacted by the Online Safety Act… but impacted people cannot use DM on Bluesky
I mean, great, thanks Zoë, glad to have you investigating. But, yeah, this is kinda the point. Maybe post a Signal handle, instead? Via:
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“If Ofcom decides that Wikipedia is not a Category 1 service, then no further issue will arise” | …Wikipedia OSA Judgement kicked into the long grass
The UK Regulatory infrastructure is working as desired, keeping the Government from having to legislate on hard issues when instead they can blame the regulator… https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Wikimedia-Foundation-and-another-v-Secretary-of-State-for-Science-Innovation-and-Technology.pdf See also: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/08/11/wikimedia-foundation-challenges-uk-online-safety-act-regulations
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Chris Stokel-Walker at the Guardian on issues with the Online Safety Act
The Guardian have done a TikTok video edit of Chris’s which lays out the issues quite frankly:
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Five Themes Discussed at Princeton’s Workshop on Decentralized Social Media – Freedom to Tinker – THIS NEEDS A PROPER ANALYSIS
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2024/03/19/five-themes-discussed-at-princetons-workshop-on-decentralized-social-media/
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Bristol LibDems: “Following the lead of @liberal_reform, we are submitting an emergency motion to the Young Liberals conference, aiming to make the **repeal** of the Online Safety Act official policy”
I am mildly concerned about the upstream thread and its framing, but at least this could turn into the first serious pushback against the OSA: Hadrian’s Firewall will be breached. We will not remain silent, nor will we allow our party to do so.
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“Does requiring a law abiding internet user to dox themselves … prevent [badness]?”
Answer: no.
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Excellent thread by @rcolvile (unrolled from Twitter) re: Westminster-native appeals to let the OSA “bed-in” because “early days”
We at @CPSThinkTank wrote multiple reports on what a looming disaster it was, and lobbied furiously (and succesfully) to ameliorate ‘legal but harmful’. But also @asi, @89up, @StartupCltn and many others. We all ran into invincible status of ‘won’t someone think of the children‘. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1953030333454057633.html
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Online Safety Act – shutdowns and site blocks | Open Rights Group
You can submit your own reports; some bizarre victims here: Online Safety Act – shutdowns and site blocks https://www.blocked.org.uk/osa-blocks
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Today in “…just wait until the UK Ofcom censors find out that you can talk to AI Chatbots over DNS…”
ch.at: a chatbot which you can query over DNS and open-access SSH: https://ch.at https://github.com/Deep-ai-inc/ch.at Bonus: iodine: IPv4 VPN over DNS: https://github.com/yarrick/iodine Via:
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Age Verification Providers’ Association now imagines it’s incumbent for platforms (i.e. everybody) to treat TCP connections which may be inbound from a VPN as “potential children”
Not all VPN connections are enumerated or known or knowable. Also: this is a step up from imagining that all items of content – globally – must now be individually classified & age-gated according to the UK’s Online Safety Act. Via: