If they do it, I never want to hear any criticism of the great firewall of China from them ever again.
est · 2h ago
I read on twitter, can't find the exact link, a chinese content site operating in .sg for many years, survived multiple "internet purges" by China, got banned by UK authorities last month.
msgodel · 2h ago
I remember reading posts a decade or two ago on either Linode's forums or some other place like LinuxQuestions in broken English about tunneling through firewalls with ssh from I assume Chinese people.
I've started seeing posts like that from British people now. Absolutely wild. So much for the birthplace of common law.
monero-xmr · 1h ago
And yet so many look for the government to solve society’s ills, as if the “wrong government” will never ever take control. Perhaps we should all do more things for ourselves, and advocate for more laws that restrict what the government is allowed to do
theossuary · 1h ago
This is a silly take. As soon as an authoritarian government takes power they just strip away the protections put in place to prevent abuse. The answer to preventing the "wrong" government from taking power is to have a strong "right" government.
robertlagrant · 43m ago
These things can happen over time. They don't have to suddenly jump into place out of nowhere.
monero-xmr · 1h ago
You have come to the central tension at the heart of democracy!
cmrdporcupine · 26m ago
This. The antidote to authoritarianism is a mobilized and motivated populace.
Liberals (small l) have spent 200 years being afraid of the masses and mass revolts, instead being enamored with pieces of paper that are supposedly holding everything up and keeping the forces of authoritarian reaction at bay.
They don't.
girvo · 5h ago
They have done it, and the west (over half the US states, the UK and Australia at a bare minimum) have entirely ceded any moral high ground regarding it.
buybm · 1h ago
Yeah we ceded it long ago in the US being reliant on child sweatshop labor for the lowest price possible and demanding allegiance to America but no obligation to provide each other any social welfare
xbmcuser · 1h ago
Western countries had no morality before just a facade of one. Now that they are loosing economic power they are also loosing the ability to control the narrative.
djs070 · 4h ago
What you must understand is that they do it because of a moral failing, whereas we do it because the situation requires it.
basilgohar · 9h ago
No one likes hearing hypocrisy from politicians, but it's one of their most dominant traits. That is, if you ascribe normal ethics and morals to them. But politicians' are a different breed, and the sooner we understand that, the better.
They will say, and do, whatever they perceive as being the most politically expedient thing to do. The ones that took moral stances in the actual best interest of the populace usually suffered politically for that. The ones that side with power tend to keep their power. This is the folly of political systems in general short of tyrannies, dictatorships, and kingdoms. And now we are seeing how democracies can be stretched into the same quality of life as so-called "lesser" systems but people don't like hearing that argument because the alternative is made out to be so scary.
It's not so much that democracy is the problem, but that it's too easy to sway people when it's so easy for money and power to be leveraged to manufacture consent. So now it's the people electing their own tyrants who will enrich and entrench themselves and being grateful for the privilege to be used for that purpose.
steps down off of soap box and stops yelling at clouds
grues-dinner · 6h ago
> No one likes hearing hypocrisy from politicians
Cambridge Analytica showed politicians in real time that on a population scale, hypocrisy doesn't make any difference. In fact people will bend themselves around to square the circle.
Politicians finally knowing for a demonstrable, data-backed, evidence-based fact that they can do basically whatever they want and keep their support as long as they just say they right things is what has brought us from 2016 to now.
mystraline · 5h ago
Remember, half the population are under 100 IQ points.
And most general people I meet here in the USA are either heavily propagandized, extraordinarily dumb, or both.
We could be for "better and better, which is what the Chinese have been doing the last 50 years. Instead we've been at" fuck you I got mine haha", and "don't let THEM have anything".
Well, the out groups have sacrificed so they have no more. Now making the lower and middle and even upper middle class suffer is the name of the game.
hn_throw_250822 · 5h ago
Remember, as long as you can convince people that IQ is a valid metric, they’ll believe anything you say.
afavour · 7h ago
I’m quite sure they don’t see it as hypocrisy. China censors the internet because they want to control everything about their citizens lives. But us? Oh, we’re censoring the internet to protect the children.
themafia · 7h ago
> but it's one of their most dominant traits
Always has been. What has changed is they now have the power to force their constituency to live with their hypocrisy and lies. Any effort to challenge the "leader" results in claims that you are now a "terrorist."
The internet was supposed to empower the citizenry. It's been captured and is now a tool used to suppress them. So now we see leaders completely unchallenged when their darker habits are exposed.
hinkley · 8h ago
> No one likes hearing hypocrisy from politicians
You’re clearly not paying attention to American politics.
xenotux · 55m ago
The main difference between democracies and secular autocracies isn't that they have a vastly different approach to run-of-the-mill moral vices, such as prostitution or porn. It's that democracies tolerate a much wider spectrum of political opinions in public discourse and don't kill or imprison people who try to start an opposition party.
I think we can agree that the UK is moving in the wrong direction without drawing parallels to a place where dissidents are disappeared, both off the internet and in real life.
forrestthewoods · 1h ago
I’m gonna blow your mind. If it happens I’m going to loudly criticize both!
everdrive · 8h ago
The free internet might be gone in the next decade. Probably time to buy a few hard drives and do some archiving. I don't just mean piracy. Articles, blogs, anything you find precious.
SlowTao · 6h ago
I suspect that in some places they might start requiring ID when purchasing large volumes of storage.
"Only a criminal would need 10 terabytes of storage!"
Something stupid like that.
sockbot · 1h ago
It sounds just as unfair as including a levy on blank CDs paid to music copyright holders, regardless of how the CDs are used. But being unfair doesn't mean it can't happen in your country.
Which then allows you to download without being sued because you already paid.
hooskerdu · 59m ago
Back in another life (videography), I had acquaintances who would throw looks when they heard I’d purchased a single terabyte.
Seems that narrative might already be - at least mildly -pervasive.
nmz · 4h ago
Thankfully streaming video games never took off, otherwise we couldn't really use that excuse.
sneak · 1h ago
I got casually questioned by the clerk in Berlin Mitte last month when buying 20x 20TB drives for cash.
“Industrial-scale piracy” is what I told him, truthfully. I think he thought I was joking.
Pretty soon it’ll only be hyperscalers or large enterprises that have data storage. You’ll have the 4TB max in your phone or laptop and that’ll be it.
Flere-Imsaho · 4h ago
What do people think about email as an ever-lasting censorship resistant protocol? It's federated and encrypted at source (in some cases - see Protonmail, etc). I can run my own email server on my own domain, so for example I could have my news letter be an email subscription. Any attempt to censor me would require blocking my domain and/or blocking my email server - both of which could be moving targets.
I've always thought email is under-utilized as a distributed, censorship-resistant technology.
matheusmoreira · 5m ago
This has been brewing for years. The international network will not survive multiple independent governments all attempting to impose their own laws on it. It's bound to fracture into several regional networks with heavy filtering at the borders.
I am glad to have known the true internet before its demise. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.
bloomca · 6h ago
I think about the same. Right now we are at the normalizing the ID verification stage and banning specific content in certain countries/states, once we are desensitized, VPNs will come next, and then some government solution to track everything you do online.
They can go after hostings as well and everybody can take down a lot of things out of fear.
themafia · 7h ago
It's a good time to get an RSS reader and build some direct connections to your sources. They're coming for the "aggregators" next.
1oooqooq · 6h ago
rss is dead. and aggregating won't be your main issue anyway.
nickthegreek · 6h ago
If you don’t use rss, just say you don’t use rss. I assure you that many of us do. It continues to deliver me hundreds of articles from dozens of sources day after day, decade after decade. my services that check rss, continue to run their automated tasks. It’s an amazing protocol and even when big corpos try and take it away, hacks come up to restore access.
JFingleton · 4h ago
RSS is the technological backbone that enables the distribution and subscription of podcasts...which by the way is massive at the moment.
As others have stated, plenty of websites have RSS feeds.
bpye · 4h ago
> As others have stated, plenty of websites have RSS feeds.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag though - whilst some big websites still have an RSS feed, you can’t get the full article text, smaller blogs etc seem to be better in that regard.
crtasm · 3h ago
There are RSS readers which can automatically download the full article text. I use Handy Reading on Android which can also do so on-demand.
themafia · 6h ago
RSS is alive and well. I use it daily with dozens of sites and authors. It's incredibly useful, widely used, and well supported.
Finding content is the issue. Unless I go directly to each site every day and scan for new articles I'm likely to miss them. If not for aggregators and RSS how else would this be accomplished?
> [RSS] is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology.
arguing that RSS is dead because the average person doesn't understand it is like saying HTTP's dead for the same reason. neither are dead: we've just abstracted them to the point that they're no longer the front-facing part of any interaction.
anthk · 4h ago
The Conversation feeds say otherwise.
65 · 5h ago
Most news sites have RSS feeds. Wordpress ships with an RSS feed.
And for sites that don't you can make your own feeds by selecting links on pages (such as how AP News doesn't have an RSS feed).
periodjet · 24m ago
And notice it’s not being destroyed by the (largely fantastical) “fascist threats” constantly being whined about; rather, this is all the direct act of a decidedly left-wing government. Shocking to no one who has even a passing familiarity with the history of the 20th century…
Fizzadar · 8h ago
Bought some drives recently having come to the same conclusion. Future of the internet looks bleak.
black6 · 6h ago
The Internet was philosophically designed to move information, and for every effort to prevent that there is a workaround. There will always be a free protocol.
ngcc_hk · 6h ago
Same as market; anything that does not use it will use less efficient alternatives like politics. Sadly market like tao and politics has no moral either.
pharos92 · 6h ago
From my perspective, this is born out of NGO's and political elite. This is not an ask from or concern of the general population.
0dayz · 1h ago
And not corporate despite the lobbying?
Afaik not a single serious ngo support this.
takoid · 35m ago
It depends what you consider a “serious NGO,” but the NSPCC, the Molly Rose Foundation, the Breck Foundation, the End Violence Against Women Coalition, and other NGOs actively campaigned for and supported it.
philipallstar · 42m ago
Lobbying only does something if government is corrupt.
afavour · 5h ago
> This is not an ask from or concern of the general population.
It isn’t, but when asked in a “Do you support saving children?” way a lot of people do support it. You might say that’s idiotic, and you’re right, but any campaign to reverse this stuff has to reckon with it.
userbinator · 1h ago
Ditto for "do you want more secure software?" It turns out people don't realise that also means making software secured against their will.
mrbombastic · 1h ago
Is it just me or is this demonizing of NGOs a very recent phenomenon trickling into the dialogue? I find it quite alarming.
sh-run · 12m ago
Sure, 4chan is a cesspool, but what if I start a replacement? How does the UK block it? Do we end up with an allowlist only internet?
echelon · 3m ago
That's the thing, one day you won't be able to.
You'll only be able to connect to domains that have been bought with a state-issued ID and digitally signed. If you run afoul of the rules, you'll be taken down, fined, or worse.
The means to publish and consume will be taken from us.
"Trusted" computing. "You wouldn't download a car." "Think of the children". "Free speech allows hate."
Within a generation of complete and total control of communications, we will be slaves. Powerless, impotent, unable to organize, disposable fodder.
1984 is coming.
digianarchist · 10h ago
There are a lot of extra steps the UK government can take beyond the fines:
> In the most extreme cases, with the agreement of the courts, Ofcom will be able to require payment providers, advertisers and internet service providers to stop working with a site, preventing it from generating money or being accessed from the UK.
They’ve done this before (various piracy websites are blocked by ISPs).
The criminal liability of senior managers could cause travel headaches too.
RenThraysk · 5h ago
OFCOM is powerless.
ISP blocks are worthless.
This is going to fizzle out, like the Australian eSafety team trying to remove content off X globally.
Or get Apple to poke holes in it's crypto. Just not going to happen.
>a stand-off has been engineered between UK censorship measures nobody asked for, and the constitutional rights of all Americans.
This is probably my favorite line in the entire piece. Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children, and now they are being pitted against the constitutional rights of United States citizens.
Truly incredible work from the UK government. I imagine the United States will not be happy..
mr_toad · 1h ago
The new ban is easily bypassed even without a VPN. The government is trying to block cracks in a dam with their fingers. Assuming they even care about results rather than performative posturing.
I'm largely in line with where a lot of the comments under these political posts are coming from, but there's no discussion in them. It's rhetoric, outrage, and oversimplifying things.
The comments on HN are worth reading precisely because of the discussions, so I'm not sure what the point of political posts are if that fails.
dmitrygr · 10h ago
I look forward to the current us admin forcing the uk to very publicly walk this back. Their motivation will have nothing to do with defending free speech, but an enemy of my enemy IS my friend.
krona · 9h ago
S.1748 - Kids Online Safety Act[1] is working its way through and as I understand it has fairly broad support.
There may be significant differences between KOSA and OSA in their implementation but they are the same in essence.
Honestly from the summary this seems pretty.. reasonable?
whatshisface · 8h ago
If the limitations on conducting A/B tests on people under 13 are enforced, you will need a driver's license to connect to the internet, and you will need to show it to every website.
chmod775 · 1h ago
Companies don't need A/B tests to tell them that requiring a driver's license is going to hurt conversions more than no more A/B tests.
opan · 4h ago
Surely a state ID is enough, right? I know at least 3 legal adults in my circles alone without a driver's license, though I believe they all have either a state ID or permit. (Not that I support requiring any sort of meatspace identification for acting in cyberspace).
crooked-v · 5h ago
What the summary leaves out is that elements of it like 'harm to minors' have loopholes you could drive a truck through. It's designed to allow arbitrary censorship of wrongthink with 'think of the children' as cover.
basisword · 9h ago
>> I look forward to the current us admin forcing the uk to very publicly walk this back
He'll need to start first with taking action at home. Florida and I believe Texas have also implemented age restrictions for various websites and did so before the UK.
So maybe they're not your friend.
croes · 9h ago
But the predator of your predator isn’t your protector, just a bigger predator.
The current US administration isn’t pro free speech, they just use other tools to prevent it.
UK uses laws, US uses money respectively the lack of money for you if your speech doesn’t suit them.
US free speech has a price tag.
_carbyau_ · 2h ago
> But the predator of your predator isn’t your protector, just a bigger predator.
That line sounds like the start of a counter to "Won't somebody think of the children."
Mississpi is a pretty Republican state and has enacted even more stringent and privacy-invasive laws.
cyanydeez · 9h ago
The us is on a parallel track
You will be underwhelmed.
jimbob45 · 9h ago
For someone who has never been there, sure. It’s hardly the worst *chan though and I’d argue KiwiFarms is less redeemable.
nly · 7h ago
Given that web traffic to certain adult websites has dropped 90% from the UK, in waiting to hear news of the lawsuit.
thebruce87m · 7h ago
What is the resultant increase in traffic from other countries I wonder? VPN endpoint traffic has to pop up somewhere.
Yeul · 8h ago
4chan doesn't do anything illegal unless you think that being mean should be banned.
afavour · 7h ago
Well that depends on what laws are passed, doesn’t it? 4Chan is now in violation of a new UK law.
No comments yet
AlienRobot · 7h ago
The most insane thing about this headline is that implies parents are giving their children devices with unfiltered access to the Internet and then the government needs to play wack-a-mole with every single website they come across to prevent children from accessing it.
thinkingtoilet · 5h ago
Parents are absolutely giving children devices with unfiltered internet access. I think people here need to step out of their ivory tower. I would say most people don't even know to think about the things people here think about. "Unknowns unknowns", if you will. We all agree here that this is a bad idea. What percentage of the worlds population do you think reads Hacker News?
AlienRobot · 4h ago
If you're going to say that, I think most people wouldn't even access websites to begin with. They spend most of their time on Youtube, Instagram, and TikTok.
I know people who don't know how to use Google because they only use a smartphone to browse scroll Instagram and Facebook. They're never going to access a website.
mr_toad · 1h ago
The most insane thing about western society is the tendency of a lot of the populace to abrogate all responsibility to the government.
seanalltogether · 4h ago
I don't know about iOS, but on Android I have access to Family Link which means I can control what apps my kids can run off the app store, and I can control whether they can access explicit websites (according to google) or have free access. I know other parents that are well aware of this tool, but they have to make sure those phones or tablets are signed into with accounts they have ownership of. I think this is the direction that the government should be pushing for and making sure apple google and microsoft are all playing nicely to allow parents to manage devices under the family.
Aloisius · 57m ago
iOS is similar. You can also limit apps/books/movies/etc. by content age rating, block adult sites, etc. without parental approval (which just happens over messages).
There is even an on-device image classifier for images/video to blur pornography from messages and keep them from sending it to others.
1oooqooq · 6h ago
who wouldn't want the gov banning workers organizing collective action online? can you think of the damage to children if they mistake it for a Minecraft server? do you want to be responsible for that?
svgmaker · 10h ago
i think so.
pinoy420 · 10h ago
My local MP won’t do anything and basically dismissed me as a pedo/terrorist for even considering talking against the OSA.
What can be done if those who represent you, don’t?
mystraline · 9h ago
Vouched.
However you really need to name your MP. These political public figures need named and shamed for using binary fallacious logic like that. And barring listening to constituents, get rid of them.
logicchains · 8h ago
If you're an engineer, contribute to technologies that take power away from those who lord over you. Which in this case would be distributed, censorship-resistant communication technologies. There's a lot of work to be done, not only in hard engineering, but also in things like UI and marketing, as widespread adoption is the best way to maximise the chance of success. For all its flaws, cryptocurrency (in particular anonymous ones like Monero) is a demonstration that this is possible: no government desires for its citizens to have a means to transact large sums anonymously online, yet Monero still exists. And as governments impose more restrictions on the internet, there'll be more and more demand for means to bypass those restrictions.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 57m ago
Over the last few years, it's become ever more apparent to me that technology can't fix what's broken. Even as we invent more ways to bypass censorship it becomes more so that people have less to say that I might want to hear with those technologies. And it's not just an ideological thing either, because best I can tell there's plenty of that stuff for whichever way you lean. What I mean is that people write less, there's less for me to read. But they have plenty of hustlely Youtube videos of the sort I have no inclination to watch. Less journalism, but plenty of opinions/editorials (I have enough opinions of my own, thanks). Less music... the whole recording industry seems to have imploded.
We're not in danger of censorship so much as we're in danger of there no longer being anything for them to censor away from me. I don't think it's just me either, I know some of you are seeing the same things I am.
mulmen · 5h ago
By all means work on better privacy technology but censorship isn't a technology problem. It is a human problem. We cannot work around ignorance forever. We have to engage the system to affect real change.
r33b33 · 5h ago
Which specific projects in particular?
basisword · 9h ago
They represent their constituents - you are one of those. If the majority of their constituents support the legislation they're doing their job. Could you post their full response to you? Pretty shocking if they accused you of being a terrorist pedophile and worth making people aware of which MP this was!
hungmung · 9h ago
More made up problems for a fundamentally inept government to solve because fixing real problems like a broken healthcare system is hard and not a guaranteed political win.
Thanks Starmer, you're a worthless turd and no different than your predecessor.
girvo · 5h ago
> Thanks Starmer, you're a worthless turd and no different than your predecessor.
It’s amusing/depressing that Labor in Australia is doing the same nonsense too. They’re not actually much better than their alternative, which is why they continually get voted out and kept out of power.
FridayoLeary · 8h ago
I think it was an agenda years in the making. I saw the groundwork being laid for this in 2021 and it somehow survived a general election and an entirely new government with a different political alignment. Ive seen other laws like this. It was nothing to do with the politics or the politicians, it has to do with civil servants who are working with their own agenda. Just like yes prime minister.
People seem to have forgotten that all major UK ISPs are now logging TCP connection metadata and all DNS queries
ISPs will send you warning letters if you're using bittorrent
basisword · 9h ago
The Online Safety Act was passed when the Tories were still in government.
Rolling that back essentially makes you a prime minister that believes children should have unfettered access to porn, self-harm material, gore, and that the outspoken parents of kids who've killed themselves after accessing this material shouldn't be listened to. At least, that's how the media (on all sides) would spin it. Not really a fight worth picking.
MrGinkgo · 8h ago
The way to fight it without coming off that way is by advocating for a form of age check that doesn't require personal information, which I haven't heard any really water-tight suggestions yet.
If their real interest was in protecting children, they'd make a free, publicly accessible age blocking system that parents could choose to opt into, that isn't thrust upon all citizens at once
zahlman · 7h ago
>a form of age check that doesn't require personal information
But your age is personal information.
MrGinkgo · 4h ago
sure, but it's far from the most identifying information you can hand over to a government, though
o11c · 4h ago
> The way to fight it without coming off that way is by advocating for a form of age check that doesn't require personal information, which I haven't heard any really water-tight suggestions yet.
Given the spread of explicit "give us our pedo games" and "let kids watch porn" voices, I don't think there's any demand for a moderate solution.
And when the moderate solution is actively rejected for a very real problem, nobody has a right to complain when the problem eventually is addressed using extreme solutions.
YurgenJurgensen · 9h ago
That’s populist talk, and if the PM wants to play populism, he’s not doing a very good job of it.
basisword · 9h ago
The problem the majority of people have with this law is "I can't easily access my free porn anymore". The counter-argument is "child kills self"[1] because shitty tech companies can't control their thirst for money. Like I said, I don't agree with the legislation but it's not an easy argument to make.
In a world where you can cast your vote anonymously in the voting booth, it’s a dangerous game to piss off a large number of voters, even if they can’t admit publicly why. They will be reminded every day of that idiotic policy. Like cookie consent banners.
afavour · 7h ago
I think you’re correct and the person you’re replying to is correct too.
Voters aren’t all that rational. They could choose to vote against the person that blocked their access to porn but also choose to vote against the person who made porn available again because doing so puts children in danger or whatever the scaremongering line would be.
FridayoLeary · 8h ago
He's not doing a very good job of anything. His main problem is he has very few fundamental beliefs. All he has is some vague left wing aligned principles which he allows others to advise him on and then selects whatever position will gain himself the most goodwill. Which is why his ministers can propose atrocious ideas and he will go along with them. It's not as if he has anything better to suggest.
miohtama · 8h ago
Nick Farage from Reform plans to pick this fight. Of course whether he does it or not will be seen.
grues-dinner · 6h ago
He says he's against the OSA but he's also funded by religious right nutters who think it's a great first step. So if/when he gets into power, don't expect anything better to replace it. Not that I would expect him to uphold a single promise: as I understand it, Reform doesn't even commit to a formal manifesto, anyway.
monkey_monkey · 7h ago
Farage is a moral-free scumbag who will be known in history as one of the architects of Britain's period of decline. The fact that he hasn't been held to account is one of the great scandals of our age.
mr_toad · 46m ago
Unless he gets into power he’s just a symptom.
BLKNSLVR · 5h ago
I like the fact that as soon as his cause 'won' he stepped down so that he didn't need to do any of the actual hard work in implementing the disaster.
anal_reactor · 1h ago
People literally wanted this though.
akk0 · 9h ago
Not a fight worth picking if truth, sanity, principles and integrity are worthless to you, I'm sure.
FridayoLeary · 6h ago
Just want to point out that none of those are guiding principles for politicians either.
pessimizer · 6h ago
I still can't believe the UK got suckered into the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. All it took was like two years of making you vote every three months and you gave up your democracy.
You're not like the US. The US turns over a good portion of Congress every two years, and re-elects what is basically a active King every four. All you did was make sure that no one in government has to think about the public for a second, while they do what their backers and buddies ask, then retire in five years.
There's no way out of it. Starmer should try to get down to an <10% approval rating just to make the history books.
I've started seeing posts like that from British people now. Absolutely wild. So much for the birthplace of common law.
Liberals (small l) have spent 200 years being afraid of the masses and mass revolts, instead being enamored with pieces of paper that are supposedly holding everything up and keeping the forces of authoritarian reaction at bay.
They don't.
They will say, and do, whatever they perceive as being the most politically expedient thing to do. The ones that took moral stances in the actual best interest of the populace usually suffered politically for that. The ones that side with power tend to keep their power. This is the folly of political systems in general short of tyrannies, dictatorships, and kingdoms. And now we are seeing how democracies can be stretched into the same quality of life as so-called "lesser" systems but people don't like hearing that argument because the alternative is made out to be so scary.
It's not so much that democracy is the problem, but that it's too easy to sway people when it's so easy for money and power to be leveraged to manufacture consent. So now it's the people electing their own tyrants who will enrich and entrench themselves and being grateful for the privilege to be used for that purpose.
steps down off of soap box and stops yelling at clouds
Cambridge Analytica showed politicians in real time that on a population scale, hypocrisy doesn't make any difference. In fact people will bend themselves around to square the circle.
Politicians finally knowing for a demonstrable, data-backed, evidence-based fact that they can do basically whatever they want and keep their support as long as they just say they right things is what has brought us from 2016 to now.
And most general people I meet here in the USA are either heavily propagandized, extraordinarily dumb, or both.
We could be for "better and better, which is what the Chinese have been doing the last 50 years. Instead we've been at" fuck you I got mine haha", and "don't let THEM have anything".
Well, the out groups have sacrificed so they have no more. Now making the lower and middle and even upper middle class suffer is the name of the game.
Always has been. What has changed is they now have the power to force their constituency to live with their hypocrisy and lies. Any effort to challenge the "leader" results in claims that you are now a "terrorist."
The internet was supposed to empower the citizenry. It's been captured and is now a tool used to suppress them. So now we see leaders completely unchallenged when their darker habits are exposed.
You’re clearly not paying attention to American politics.
I think we can agree that the UK is moving in the wrong direction without drawing parallels to a place where dissidents are disappeared, both off the internet and in real life.
"Only a criminal would need 10 terabytes of storage!"
Something stupid like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
“Industrial-scale piracy” is what I told him, truthfully. I think he thought I was joking.
Pretty soon it’ll only be hyperscalers or large enterprises that have data storage. You’ll have the 4TB max in your phone or laptop and that’ll be it.
I've always thought email is under-utilized as a distributed, censorship-resistant technology.
I am glad to have known the true internet before its demise. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.
They can go after hostings as well and everybody can take down a lot of things out of fear.
As others have stated, plenty of websites have RSS feeds.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag though - whilst some big websites still have an RSS feed, you can’t get the full article text, smaller blogs etc seem to be better in that regard.
Finding content is the issue. Unless I go directly to each site every day and scan for new articles I'm likely to miss them. If not for aggregators and RSS how else would this be accomplished?
That's a stretch.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss/
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...
arguing that RSS is dead because the average person doesn't understand it is like saying HTTP's dead for the same reason. neither are dead: we've just abstracted them to the point that they're no longer the front-facing part of any interaction.
And for sites that don't you can make your own feeds by selecting links on pages (such as how AP News doesn't have an RSS feed).
Afaik not a single serious ngo support this.
It isn’t, but when asked in a “Do you support saving children?” way a lot of people do support it. You might say that’s idiotic, and you’re right, but any campaign to reverse this stuff has to reckon with it.
You'll only be able to connect to domains that have been bought with a state-issued ID and digitally signed. If you run afoul of the rules, you'll be taken down, fined, or worse.
The means to publish and consume will be taken from us.
"Trusted" computing. "You wouldn't download a car." "Think of the children". "Free speech allows hate."
Within a generation of complete and total control of communications, we will be slaves. Powerless, impotent, unable to organize, disposable fodder.
1984 is coming.
> In the most extreme cases, with the agreement of the courts, Ofcom will be able to require payment providers, advertisers and internet service providers to stop working with a site, preventing it from generating money or being accessed from the UK.
They’ve done this before (various piracy websites are blocked by ISPs).
The criminal liability of senior managers could cause travel headaches too.
This is going to fizzle out, like the Australian eSafety team trying to remove content off X globally.
Or get Apple to poke holes in it's crypto. Just not going to happen.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg2kz9kn93o
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/174...
4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44982681
This is probably my favorite line in the entire piece. Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children, and now they are being pitted against the constitutional rights of United States citizens.
Truly incredible work from the UK government. I imagine the United States will not be happy..
529,454 signatures and counting
The comments on HN are worth reading precisely because of the discussions, so I'm not sure what the point of political posts are if that fails.
There may be significant differences between KOSA and OSA in their implementation but they are the same in essence.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/174...
He'll need to start first with taking action at home. Florida and I believe Texas have also implemented age restrictions for various websites and did so before the UK.
So maybe they're not your friend.
The current US administration isn’t pro free speech, they just use other tools to prevent it.
UK uses laws, US uses money respectively the lack of money for you if your speech doesn’t suit them.
US free speech has a price tag.
That line sounds like the start of a counter to "Won't somebody think of the children."
https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-22-2025-mississippi-hb1126
Mississpi is a pretty Republican state and has enacted even more stringent and privacy-invasive laws.
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I know people who don't know how to use Google because they only use a smartphone to browse scroll Instagram and Facebook. They're never going to access a website.
There is even an on-device image classifier for images/video to blur pornography from messages and keep them from sending it to others.
What can be done if those who represent you, don’t?
However you really need to name your MP. These political public figures need named and shamed for using binary fallacious logic like that. And barring listening to constituents, get rid of them.
We're not in danger of censorship so much as we're in danger of there no longer being anything for them to censor away from me. I don't think it's just me either, I know some of you are seeing the same things I am.
Thanks Starmer, you're a worthless turd and no different than your predecessor.
It’s amusing/depressing that Labor in Australia is doing the same nonsense too. They’re not actually much better than their alternative, which is why they continually get voted out and kept out of power.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_201...
People seem to have forgotten that all major UK ISPs are now logging TCP connection metadata and all DNS queries
ISPs will send you warning letters if you're using bittorrent
Rolling that back essentially makes you a prime minister that believes children should have unfettered access to porn, self-harm material, gore, and that the outspoken parents of kids who've killed themselves after accessing this material shouldn't be listened to. At least, that's how the media (on all sides) would spin it. Not really a fight worth picking.
If their real interest was in protecting children, they'd make a free, publicly accessible age blocking system that parents could choose to opt into, that isn't thrust upon all citizens at once
But your age is personal information.
Given the spread of explicit "give us our pedo games" and "let kids watch porn" voices, I don't think there's any demand for a moderate solution.
And when the moderate solution is actively rejected for a very real problem, nobody has a right to complain when the problem eventually is addressed using extreme solutions.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-62998484
Voters aren’t all that rational. They could choose to vote against the person that blocked their access to porn but also choose to vote against the person who made porn available again because doing so puts children in danger or whatever the scaremongering line would be.
You're not like the US. The US turns over a good portion of Congress every two years, and re-elects what is basically a active King every four. All you did was make sure that no one in government has to think about the public for a second, while they do what their backers and buddies ask, then retire in five years.
There's no way out of it. Starmer should try to get down to an <10% approval rating just to make the history books.