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The first #AgeWall ? Substack is introducing Age Verification to cut UK people off from seeing “Potentially Harmful” Substack content
Paid subscribers get a bypass, of course: Why is Substack asking to verify my age? The UK Online Safety Act requires restricted access to content that could be considered sensitive for younger audiences. If you see blurred or blocked content, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the content is harmful, it just may fall into a
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If Ofcom want to stop UK people visiting a non-UK website, they need to stop the UK people, not tell the non-UK website to work to prevent the UK hordes
This should be obvious, no? It’s how we deal with football hooligans: Football (Offences and Disorder) Act 1999 (Notes) …The measures proposed would provide recourse to the law to prevent a range of offenders from attending matches in this country and travelling to and attending designated matches abroad. One could try to argue “Yes but
age verification censorship football geoblocking ofcom online safety online safety act surveillance VPNFediverse reactions
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X/Twitter exposing user location in such a safety-positive way makes a modest dent in the EU’s approach to protecting personally-identifiable information
I’m confident a few privacy activists across Europe are seeking GDPR (etc) arguments to critique the mechanisms behind the location-based exposure of “Foreign, Fake MAGA Agents”; I disagree, but I think there will be ripples of positive & negative consequences until a new norm is established & understood. Of course I’m not the only one
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Software companies must be held liable for British economic security, say MPs | The Record
Well this is misconceived and is going to end badly, if it goes anywhere at all. Perhaps the British people ought to be able to sue members of parliament for losses caused by legislation? https://therecord.media/software-companies-liable-britain-security
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“Key Management” is the cryptographic community’s version of “…it’s always DNS”
International Association for Cryptologic Research runs secure vote and then loses the keys so nobody knows what the result is. As one commenter put it: “So a single member can collude to reset the vote?”
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I know it’s hard for folk to detach themselves from emotion regarding child protection, hate speech or trolling, but it’s important to understand that Ofcom’s duty to deliver online safety is incipient censorship
Excellent post here from Preston Byrne, full text attached below for those without X accounts. This is not right-wing American bombast or imperialism, this is just them wanting to be left alone as anyone else would want: Folks in London might be wondering whether my instructions really are to destroy the Online Safety Act or
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In Case You Missed It This Week: Ofcom, pursuing its lawful duties, is about to drive the UK over a cliff and into online censorship; here’s how…
Here’s how Ofcom will bring about censorship in the UK; it will… 1/ declare itself (truthfully) to be acting on behalf of the UK sovereign government… Ofcom has claimed it has “sovereign immunity” as it seeks to fend off a US free speech lawsuit from the website 4chan … Lawyers for the regulator told a
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I asked ChatGPT to explain why Ofcom, acting as an agent of the sovereign UK Government, cannot enforce penalties or sanctions in the USA against 4chan &al
If Ofcom clarifies its role as an agency of a sovereign government, this is what happens next: Suffice it to say: when the equivalent US laws would be violations of the 1st amendment, there’s no hope for Ofcom here. To fulfil their duties Ofcom will need to demand that {DNS, IP, DPI} blocks are imposed
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“MPs and peers warned of China spy risk on LinkedIn” | Translation: “Horny / Lazy Spooks Targeted by Fake Hot Chinese Girls via LinkedIn, GCHQ Panic”
Hot Asian Women Seek Fun In Cheltenham: The MI5 alert identifies two LinkedIn profiles … used on behalf of … Chinese MSS … “actively reaching out to individuals in our community” … to “collect information and lay the groundwork for long-term relationships … The … “false personas” approach targets to “work as freelance consultants authoring
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“‘We’re Going to DESTROY the Online Safety Act’: Meet the Top Lawyer Waging War on Ofcom” | OrderOrder | …it’s an interesting thesis that…
…the credibility of the online safety act now hinges upon its (in)ability to make Britain the safest place to be online, by virtue of inability to effectively sanction the rest of the world. Instead it will become a British censorship charter, failing to stop Britons accessing content that would worry safety activists, academics, or the
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