What's frustrating me about this is that theoretically this list should include every MUD and BBS, if they don't want to get in trouble. It's a horrible law, which forces people into the pockets of the largest sites which can afford to do the age verification.
Speaking as a Brit, I wish Wikipedia would just go black for the UK. That might focus some minds.
cs02rm0 · 1h ago
> Speaking as a Brit, I wish Wikipedia would just go black for the UK. That might focus some minds.
Likewise. People (organisations/companies), as far as possible, shouldn't be pandering to this stuff, it's not the answer, it doesn't help them or us.
dabeeeenster · 34m ago
What is the answer?
cs02rm0 · 20m ago
To online safety for children? The same as offline safety; parenting and education. There's not much money in those though.
Making content restrictions easier for parents to implement would help a ton — like being able to block all sites in a browser and create a whitelist of the ones kids are allowed to access. Similar whitelisting should be available and easy to implement for YouTube and social media. Having to individually block each site/video/profile you don’t want your kid to access is a futile game of whack a mole.
dabeeeenster · 7m ago
I wish it was as simple as that
bodge5000 · 1h ago
They're also one of the few sites in a perfect position to; enough usage to make people/government really notice, not typically NSFW related to make the message clear that its not just a "porn ban", and without the profit incentive that makes the likelihood of such an act unlikely or to give the government room to "wait them out".
To be clear, also a Brit
xnorswap · 7m ago
They're not in a perfect position to at all. Wikipedia publishes its data, there are a hundred identical clones ready to pop up in its place.
The open web is so much smaller than the walled-gardens.
I'm pretty sure you'd actually only get significant outcry here if one of these services were affected:
- Whatsapp
- Facebook
- Instagram
- Google ( incl. gmail/maps/etc )
- Twitter
- ChatGPT
I'm not sure people care enough otherwise for anything else. Maybe Tiktok, but even then I'm not convinced, since it's such a vapid / transient experience that is replaceable.
Another big reliance strategically would also be Microsoft Teams ( + ecosystem ), but that's all behind (semi-verified) accounts, so it's hard to argue how that fits into OSA.
There are essentially just a handful of companies control most of the online experience.
These are also companies that helped design and shape the current bad law. They have carved out for themselves the necessary exemptions and have the funds for compliance and fines.
silon42 · 1h ago
Even if they don't, maybe go black for all weekends.
cm2187 · 1h ago
That wouldn’t address their liability.
vaylian · 1h ago
It would raise awareness in the general population and increase justified resistance against this stupid law.
vidarh · 1h ago
But in that case it'd be easy for supporters of the law to argue it was just performative and clearly not really needed since they're otherwise accessible.
4bpp · 9m ago
They are free to do that, but what of it? Sanctions and boycotts are "performative" in the same sense, and yet they continue being a popular tool to compel voters and politicians of other countries to act or refrain from acting in particular ways.
Wikipedia is a popular website that many people depend upon; denying access to UK users would not only create a massive inconvenience along with the temptation that it could be avoided if the law were rolled back, but would also encourage more UK users to adopt VPNs, which would subvert the law's effectivity along with that of a plethora of other authoritarian measures that the UK has in place.
GJim · 30m ago
> What's frustrating me....
... is that gambling sites are except.
I may need to prove my age to visit Reddit (and soon Wikipedia) but not to visit Bet365, Ladbrook's, Paddy Power etc etc.
Need I tell you who some of the biggest lobbyists and political donors have been?
glenjamin · 20m ago
This doesn't seem accurate to me - Gambling sites legally operating in the UK already have strict KYC requirements applied to them via the Gamling regulator.
Visiting a gambling site isn't restricted, but signing up and gambling is.
cm2187 · 1h ago
In fact that would likely devastate Labour’s already slim chances of reelection. And would make the argument for repealing that idiotic law wholesale something else than “let my constituents watch porn”
mdiesel · 7m ago
It's the Online Safety Act 2023 and was going through parliament from 2019, I'm sure the moment it becomes sufficiently unpopular in the wider public we'll see the "2023" part gain more prominence. Starmer won't be able to say it's a bad idea, because he and his party have been supportive of it since, but there'll be the usual political maneuverings. I can't see people switching to vote Green because they suggested a digital bill of rights.
gorgoiler · 1h ago
One thing I’ve realised over the past few weeks is that some parents must be delighted to have the government control the web for them.
When the parent does the enforcement themselves then they can be put under direct pressure by their children to drop the ban. When the government does it then the parent can say, honestly, sorry, there’s nothing they can do about it: It’s out of their hands. The child only has access to tier 1 support [parent] and the support agent’s only response is “sorry, corporate policy [law] requires AV for certain sites, there’s nothing I can do. Is there anything else I can help you with today?…”
I don’t say this to make the laws easier to swallow but the social economics of it make it more understandable why this law might be so popular with anyone already overloaded with angry teenagers.
Next up: the Bedtime Is At Nine PM Act 2026, Tuck Your Shirt In Act 2027, and No We Have One At Home Already Act 2028.
vidarh · 58m ago
And then the child talks to their friends, some of whom already have free VPNs, and works around it and said parent goes around oblivious to the fact that their child has access to whatever they want.
My son figured out free VPNs when he was 8-9. This is only stopping adults.
somenameforme · 40m ago
Exactly what I was going to say, though I don't think this will stop adults either. If somebody wants porn without asking Big Brother for permission, they're going to search for the answer for how to do that, and find it immediately.
In the era of LLMs this is even more true. Every single chatbot I tried (DeepSeek, Grok, Claude, ChatGPT) except ChatGPT immediately gave numerous and detailed instructions on how to easily bypass the bans. I'm sure one could trivially push ChatGPT outside its love for big brother as well, if they cared to do so.
It's not clear to me who exactly such bans are effective against, and to what end. Obviously the government gains an immense amount of power so they're going to love it, regardless of its efficacy.
vidarh · 13m ago
LLMs is a good point. I think a lot of older people would struggle to figure it out themselves or even know what to search for, but given you can now so easily just ask plain questions about how to circumvent it, perhaps the tech illiterate will also easily bypass them.
culebron21 · 26m ago
Reminded me of the Youtube Kids. It's supposed to filter out inappropriate and irrelevant content. So, there you can't see things like trains or steam locomotives, or harvesters at work (inappropriate!), but there are infinite cheap-ass 3D cartoons with "toy world", without any words and plots.
teamonkey · 25m ago
> I don’t say this to make the laws easier to swallow but the social economics of it make it more understandable why this law might be so popular with anyone already overloaded with angry teenagers.
The “think of the children” angle is certainly there to make the bill more morally appealing, but is it actually popular with parents? Or anyone, other than politicians?
The kids in question are those of millennial and Gen-Z(!) parents. They’re not a generation that doesn’t understand the internet.
That’s not to say that some restriction wouldn’t be welcomed, but did the OSA really come from these parents?
iLoveOncall · 42m ago
The most shameful thing is that the only websites actually harmful to children, aka social media, aren't banned or behind an ID check.
dabeeeenster · 31m ago
I agree to an extent, but extreme porn is a huge problem for kids, in the UK at least.
RaSoJo · 1h ago
> bsky.app | @greg.org on Bluesky
https://bsky.app/profile/greg.org/post/3lvt3mjvskk2i
Reported: 07 August, 2025 at 19:53
Shut down on: 07 August, 2025
Geoblocking due to OSA
Statue of |david behind age verification filter
So, going forward, will similar pieces of art be blocked in the British Museum as well? Like physically?
fenykep · 1h ago
Or you can simply block people under 18 from the museum.
That's what Hungary did - no minors allowed in places where homosexuality could be on display.
thrance · 57m ago
Literal cultural suicide.
mapcars · 1h ago
These are two different things though
miroljub · 56m ago
It's the same "but think of the children and their safety" kind of thing.
mapcars · 24m ago
Well you do have to think about children and their safety, for example you don't want to expose them to drugs, I hope that much sense is still there.
thrown-0825 · 1h ago
Easier to just destroy it all like ISIS did.
fiftyacorn · 1h ago
I like it - request that greek statues cover up in case children see
cm2187 · 1h ago
Or start breaking statues penises again
callc · 53m ago
That would at least help change size expectations!
iLoveOncall · 1h ago
I'm in the UK and that tweet and profile aren't blocked (not even an ID wall).
Likewise for every Reddit link and probably more.
I wish the website made a better effort at filtering those because it muddies the point when the government can point out that half of the list is actually accessible in the UK (even if some are behind an ID wall).
dabeeeenster · 30m ago
I don’t think it has 4k videos of rape porn on loop tho
elaus · 26m ago
Did you comment in the wrong thread? How is Michelangelo's David "rape porn on loop"?
coldtea · 2h ago
Yeah, the government that let the strets go rampant with crime, that they don't even bother tracking anymore, is concerned about the people's "online safety"...
vidarh · 56m ago
Per the Crime Survey for England and Wales - which doesn't depend on "tracking" but on peoples reported experience of crime -, crime is overall at a one of the lowest levels in decades.
EDIT: Since there is one (dead) comment on this: To reiterate: The Crime Survey surveys people and tracks the rate of crime people state in a response to a survey that they have experienced. As such it includes crimes that are not reported.
GJim · 16m ago
Seconded.
Furthermore, violent crime throughout the entire western world (not just England and Wales) has been dropping from its peak in the mid 1990's.
Unfortunately these facts don't fit in with the Daily Mail narrative and what people want to believe.
j-krieger · 7m ago
This is only true if you choose a very specific reference frame to fit your narrative. Crime is rising again among western nations since 2015, year after year.
disruptiveink · 1h ago
We have a near perfect system for finding the location of phone thieves, yet the police will not go and knock on the doors of criminals even when explicitly shown proof of "this is where the thief is currently".
randomNumber7 · 1h ago
They don't want you to be able to talk about their incompetence or organize protests.
moffkalast · 55m ago
There's a great documentary on the topic, it's called "Yes Minister"
jama211 · 1h ago
I always hear this but it seems to mostly be made up? Like yeah, there’s crime in London, but less than in most European or American cities… seems like a narrative that keeps being pushed without merit
cs02rm0 · 1h ago
It's a slightly mixed picture. Knife crime is one area that's been trending up for 10 years now. Shoplifting is at a 20 year high. Fraud is up. Firearms offences are roughly level.
But criminal damage is down. Of course, if you call the police for criminal damage, everyone knows they won't turn up and you'll just get a crime number, so unless you're claiming on insurance you're probably less and less likely to report it.
We shouldn't be aiming for London (with 200 phones stolen every day as it is) to reach the level of the worst European or American cities.
iamacyborg · 1h ago
200 phones a day doesn’t sound like that many given the size of the population and the number of tourists.
I live in London and I can tell you no, it isn't mostly made up.
The crime rates in other places is irrelevant if the city you've lived in for the last 20 years has become noticeably more dangerous.
This is not "a narrative that keeps being pushed without merit", in fact the people who dismiss such claims are often the ones who live very insulated lives.
vidarh · 54m ago
I live in London too, and don't recognise these claims at all.
I've been here 25 years, and most of the areas that used to be sketchy are now not.
indy · 29m ago
Which areas are you familiar with?
I witnessed the aftermath of a murder last week in Stoke Newington! (Saw that the road had been closed off)
I've seen women publicly urinating into drains on a busy road (Hackney)
There are massive increases in the number of homeless people (Tooting, Clapton, Shadwell), several times I've seen a homeless looking person harass women passing by.
Seen needles lying around (Shadwell, Commercial Road)
The general advice now is never to wear a watch in Central London, this wasn't the case 10 years ago.
I've seen security guards restrain people trying to leave shops in Central London after they shoplifted.
So yeah, some areas might not look sketchy, and these gentrified places (e.g. Stoke Newington) might be ok if you stick to the bars, restaurants and then Uber home, but for a lot of people these remain dangerous if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.
vidarh · 25m ago
I've literally spent hours walking around Shadwell and Commercial Road over the last couple of months, as well as places like Bow, Canning Town, Forest Gate, Romford that used to be awful. I've lived in Croydon most of the last 25 years.
I'm also not seeing any more homeless in London now than I used to see on Oxford Street when I lived by Marble Arch in 2000, for example. There were large encampments in the subways near Marble Arch at that time - I've not seen anything like it since.
> The general advice now is never to wear a watch in Central London, this wasn't the case 10 years ago.
Says who? I've never heard anyone say this, and don't know anyone who'd worry about wearing a watch in Central London.
johnisgood · 11m ago
> Phone snatching in Central London has become a significant issue, with the Metropolitan Police reporting around 80,000 phones stolen last year, primarily by organized criminal gangs. To combat this, police have increased visibility and implemented operations to deter theft, particularly in hotspot areas.
If you do not like The Guardian, search for "central london phone snatching".
indy · 6m ago
"Says who?" Then we are living in separate universes because this is common knowledge.
Wearing a nice watch in Soho, Liverpool Street, Tower Bridge is super sketchy and you're likely to get comments about how 'brave' (stupid) you are.
foldr · 55m ago
I haven’t personally noticed London getting any more dangerous over the past 10 years that I’ve lived here.
zimpenfish · 7m ago
> I haven’t personally noticed London getting any more dangerous over the past 10 years that I’ve lived here.
I've been here 26 years this time (and a couple of years before that) and similarly not noticed it getting noticeably more dangerous.
(on the caveat side, I am a fairly hefty white bloke who apparently "looks scary" which might explain things.)
johnisgood · 47m ago
You need to go out there, then.
There are areas where people do drugs openly, and overdosing, too, and no one cares. A cop walked past a lady overdosing.
You should watch videos of YouTubers going to these areas if you do not want to do it yourself.
The areas are famous for tourists where most phone snatching is rampant, 18 a day at a minimum, on one famous street alone.
FWIW, I am talking about London.
vidarh · 15m ago
When we know that peoples perceptions of crime levels are entirely divorced from reality, perhaps you should spend less time watching Youtube, and more time looking at the actual stats.
Crime overall is at a low level historically in the England, per the Crime Survey of England and Wales, which track actual victims through surveys.
That's not to say the UK couldn't do much better, but this fearmongering is basically repeating far-right conspiracy claims pushed by the press that are not supported by data including by peoples actual responses when asked if they have actually been a victim as per the Crime Survey.
"According the Crime Survey for England and Wales, someone is actually less likely to be a victim of crime in London than they are across the country as a whole. In the capital, 14.9% of people experienced a crime either to their person or their household in the year ending September 2023, compared with 15.7% nationally. But what about different types of crime?"
j-krieger · 4m ago
> When we know that peoples perceptions of crime levels are entirely divorced from reality, perhaps you should spend less time watching Youtube, and more time looking at the actual stats
When we know that police is understaffed and can't respond to all crime, perhaps you should spend less time blindly trusting the numbers. You, too, can't build an argument on unreliable data. Just like the poster you're replying to.
GJim · 10m ago
> You should watch videos of YouTubers
Oh FFS.
Do you seriously consider this robust evidence?
Instead, have a look at the Crime Survey for England and Wales (HINT: This tracks peoples experience of crime and so includes unreported crime)
johnisgood · 6m ago
No, that was just an example, for people not wanting to go out.
You are free to walk around these areas (just go to Knightsbridge) with an expensive watch to see if it is true or not. Get back to us safely to report.
foldr · 44m ago
I’m just honestly reporting my personal experience. Why would I want to deliberately go to a dangerous area that I have no reason to go to? Is that normal behavior for people who live in large cities?
People doing drugs isn’t a danger to me.
johnisgood · 32m ago
It isn't, but the crimes do not happen only in these areas.
Crimes (like phone, expensive items in a bag snatching) happen in rich areas, too.[1]
I know that there is a lot of media reporting of knife crime and phone theft. However, I am contributing my personal experience to the thread. You could search YouTube for videos of people complaining about crime in any major city. This is a popular trope that gets a lot of views and engagement.
johnisgood · 24m ago
The point is that it happens not only in particularly shit areas of London, it happens in rich areas too, or where there are lots of tourists, areas that are supposed to be safe, but they are not.
And UK is doing fuck-all about it, they care more about who said what online. It is absurd.
As for your personal experience, sure, that is valid. It really depends on when you go out or what you are wearing.
foldr · 11m ago
I mean phone thefts can happen anywhere, but I imagine that’s also true of other places. If you’re a phone thief you’re going to go to the areas where people have nice phones, I assume.
johnisgood · 8m ago
> If you’re a phone thief you’re going to go to the areas where people have nice phones, I assume.
Yes, and they are doing it, and it is a major issue in London. We are not talking about other places right now. It is a huge issue in London.
j-krieger · 5m ago
Have you considered that you live in a bubble?
piva00 · 56m ago
It's also quite sad there isn't anyone with a big political voice connecting the dots between Brexit and the rise in crime.
Brexit has markedly made the UK's economy weaker, there are less opportunities, the opportunities that exist outside of finance/tech are quite low paid compared to other European countries while the cost of living in London is absurdly high when compared to other major European cities. It's the perfect storm coupled with high immigration: blame immigrants for the lack of opportunities caused by a policy pushed by anti-immigration rhetoric, it will just feed into giving power to Reform which, if given power, will continue to crash the UK's economical prospects.
The ship has sailed, it will take the UK quite a while to correct course, perhaps even a generation or so... While that correction course happens British society will just keep eroding away.
indy · 40m ago
It's become a feedback loop of "crime", "erosion of trust", "polarisation of communities".
miroljub · 44m ago
It is Brexit, but not how you think it. What Brexit did is basically reducing immigration from the culturally and societally compatible EU countries with the immigration from the ex colonies and other third world places.
j-krieger · 5m ago
How convenient for governments to point to crime statistics that they themselves control while police in instances doesn't even respond to calls.
password321 · 1h ago
Potential energy vs kinetic energy. Just because it is not in motion doesn't mean the potential is not there, that's why everyone has Amazon Ring in front of their homes and won't let their kids alone in the park. Relying on police to deter crime or relying on police reports to understand the current crime landscape is beyond naive.
pjc50 · 1h ago
Potential crime isn't real crime!
More importantly, you can't deal with potential crime by making real arrests, because then you have to start arresting people who haven't done anything.
moffkalast · 1h ago
Out of the top four crime ridden cities in entire Europe, three are British.
Given we know from comparing e.g. Crime Survey data to polls about peoples beliefs about crimes that peoples beliefs about crime rates in the UK are not remotely well correlated with actual crime rates, that page doesn't tell us what you claim it does.
It tells us that out of visitors to Numbeo, people who claim to live in 3 British cities report that they are more worried than most others.
For Bradford, the data is based on just 131 contributors in the last 5 years:
That sounds a lot like the Swedish defense, that Malmö only looks bad because the reporting standards are more rigorous. Meanwhile there are literal hand grenades exploding on their streets daily.
vidarh · 38m ago
Yes, the Crime Survey, which actually surveys representative samples about their direct experience as victims of crime.
With 131 biased samples over 5 years, to continue with Bradford, who are not asked about actual crime, but about how they feel about it without an qualification as to whether they have any actual experience with it, this site is not saying anything useful.
Presenting it as if it is ranking cities by actual crime rates is ignorant of the data gathering at best, and at worst blatantly dishonest.
Then again given the hyperbole you're employing regarding Malmö, I should perhaps not expect you to care much about the veracity of data - yes, attacks with explosives is an escalating problem in Sweden, but nowhere remotely at the scale you're claiming.
johnisgood · 50m ago
I saw these streets. People openly doing drugs, overdosing, no one, including cops care, even if one or two are in the area. Literally a cop walked past by a woman overdosing. No one cares.
thrance · 55m ago
This constant fearmongering about crime, which in actuality is way done since the 1990s, is what led to the popularity of this wave of authoritarianism. Stop it at once.
I think maybe if people stopped fear mongering about crime where there is no actually massive raise of crime, there would be overall less paranoia.
bilvar · 33m ago
That’s some grade A gaslighting you’re attempting.
__loam · 1h ago
The idea that the uk is a remotely dangerous country is probably why it's now seeing more and more nanny state laws. It's also probably part of why Brexit happened.
rapsey · 1h ago
Any country or city can be made to look safe if crime is not prosecuted or policed.
This is a confusing mix of sites that have decided to geoblock UK users because they don't want to deal with the regulations (fair enough) but also ones that have age verification and no geoblock
j1elo · 2h ago
> reddit discussion about a type of bowel surgery
Are they really going to register individual topics for Reddit?
Wait,
> Post on social media website X claiming that content relating to protests has been age-gated due to the Online Safety Act.
Now we're reporting individual tweets?!?
Popeyes · 2h ago
I think it is based on tags, so if you tag stuff as NSFW then you get an age challenge.
Havoc · 23m ago
Yeah it’s nsfw tag based on reddit. So not particularly fine grained or accurate
hdgvhicv · 2h ago
The Reddit link works fine with old.reddit. New Reddit has always required an account for nsfw subs.
II2II · 2h ago
Judging from how most of the reports are phrased, the shutdowns and blocks are initiated by the content providers. Some are for legal reasons, some because they are legitimately concerned that they may be covered by the act, and some to protest the act. Those who are claiming that the government shut down these sites are spreading disinformation. It is more accurate to describe it as a chilling effect.
coldtea · 2h ago
>Those who are claiming that the government shut down these sites are spreading disinformation. It is more accurate to describe it as a chilling effect.
Same difference. Making a pedantic distinction to mud the waters is the real disinformation.
xn--yt9h · 1h ago
On this note, how does this work? Do they terminate TLS now?
vidarh · 41m ago
Who are "they"? British authorities does not block anything directly.
A few sites are covered by DNS/IP blocks by network providers separate to the Online Safety Act, but no sites are - at least so far - blocked by providers because of the OSA. These are mainly piracy related. E.g. The Pirate Bay.
The blocks/age verification due to OSA are done by the sites themselves under threat of steep fines.
This is all in the finest British tradition of passing the responsibility to someone else so you can point fingers when you get blamed. UK authorities love getting industry to "self regulate" as much possible, under threat of more restrictive laws or court challenges when they don't regulate hard enough.
The upside from a government point of view is that these blocks then are hard to challenge in court.
santiagobasulto · 2h ago
EDIT: I was wrong in this comment, I thought it was blocked but the owners decided to take it down.
Original comment follows:
They blocked irish.session.nz: "Resources for learning Irish music by ear".
This is either a mistake or a very early example of a political abuse of the OSA. Both are wrong of course and prove what a stupid and concerning thing OSA truly is.
nickweb · 2h ago
They didn't block it. The site owners have chosen to not show the site to UK users for Legal Reasons.
octo888 · 1h ago
A bit like choosing to give up your wallet with a gun to your head
A ridiculous analogy but not entirely
miohtama · 1h ago
If I am right it is the opposite. It's because website owners block the UK IP addresses, as otherwise they could face criminal charges unless they buy an expensive compliance-as-a-service solution to check the age of all visitors and hire lawyers to craft "compliance policy" Ofcom can read. Otherwise you have a criminal liability.
Think it as a bit like GDPR but 1) much more expensive 2) with criminal liability 3) Makes even less sense than GDPR as it does nothing to prevent harm for minors 4) derimental for user experience and users.
"Funnily enough" the companies who lobbied for Online Safety Act, and former Ofcom employees, are now selling age verification check services and compliance services related to Online Safety Act. They have pretty good profit margins there, making even Google and Facebook look poor.
> And for everybody out there who's thinking about using VPNs, let me just say to you directly, verifying your age keeps a child safe. Keeps children safe in our country. So let's just not try and find a way around. Just prove your age. Make the internet safer for children. Make it a better experience for everyone. That's surely what we should aspire to in this country.
It's a grave insult to think someone would even believe this.
Peter Kyle is the same person who has strongly implied that everyone opposed to this law are siding with pedophiles. Meanwhile, there are pictures of him with his friend Ivor Caplin[1], who was caught in a sting and arrested on suspicion of engaging in online sexual communications with a child[2], so perhaps he should worry more about the people he surround himself with.
The data quality here seems poor, eg it lists reddit.com as having shut down, which is clearly false. I think some list like this would probably come across better with some curation so it isn’t largely a list of unsympathetic porn sites and no-name blogs being blocked to spite the UK.
a5c11 · 1h ago
Under the main link (the big, bold one) there is a link to what precisely has been blocked. Apparently, it's enough for them to just geoblock specific subreddits, like: dark humour, bowel surgeries, some porn stuff, etc.
blisstonia · 38m ago
I hope any websites geoblocking UK ip addresses will leave some message about why they are blocking access, so the user sees it and hates it.
KillenBoek · 2h ago
This is insane, how long will it take them to overreach and abuse their power for political gain?
j-krieger · 2m ago
Considering that this already constitutes an insane overreach and abuse of power, not long.
coldtea · 2h ago
This is already part of a long line of laws specifically used for abuse of power and political gain...
Mk2000 · 2h ago
They already are...
zimpenfish · 1h ago
c2000 with the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act[0]?
This is already happening and not just the UK. Happened years ago for Australia and is getting codified into law for the good (TM) EU. This is a concerted push.
swarnie · 2h ago
It happened almost immediately. Certain protest footage posted to X was already blocked in the UK.
Get back to work Nicholas 30 ans. The Uniparty demands another day of sacrifice.
True, but certianly doesn't make me feel any better about it. If we started getting school shootings in the UK, and someone said ah but the US has that too, I wouldn't feel much better.
lblissett · 1h ago
I’m in the uk. No vpn. I tried several of these links and they all worked for me…
Is there any verification on submissions to this?
diordiderot · 1h ago
sites have been allowed to estimate age based on account age and digital fingerprinting.
esskay · 1h ago
That might also be the case but some things on that list arent blocked at all in the UK (yet). It doesn't appear to be actually checked and anyone can submit a link and it just gets added from the looks of it.
lblissett · 39m ago
Yes. The Online Safety Law (and similar ones in other countries) is stupid and should be repealed.
However, this is a list of "blocked sites" composed mostly of sites that are not blocked.
anonzzzies · 1h ago
I learn about nice sites / pages there I did not know before.
jarek83 · 22m ago
So, now whoever runs anything on the web, will just be over-cautious and block UK traffic, while those in the UK will use VPNs. Are we going to have a time where UK web space will look dormant for law enforcements?
odwyerrich · 33m ago
It's the J's.
Telaneo · 2h ago
The list's probably going to get a lot longer. I wonder how it's going to compare to the list of sites who block Europeans due to GDPR concerns. I've only ever noticed two sites that did that, even though the amount of noise from Americans was not insubstantial. The OSA is a lot more invasive than the GDPR though.
michaelt · 2h ago
Also the EU's population is 450 million, while the UK's is 69 million. So losing the users stings 85% less.
visualphoenix · 2h ago
It’s not just the UK implementing age verification actively. 5 EU member states [0] are actively participating: Denmark, Greece, Spain, France [1], and Italy.
It puts a UK user in a weird situation. On one hand, the more countries that join in (and I've heard of US states too), the more likely it is that age verification becomes well supported and I continue having access to the wider world's internet. On the other hand, we've reached a very thick part of the wedge already: this is terrible for competition and I do not trust any state with this power.
The best path is one of calamitous implementation that scares off other countries and embarrasses this one into a u-turn. But it's increasingly unlikely.
mna_ · 1h ago
Just looking at raw population isn't good enough because some countries are more "online" than others and the UK is one of those countries.
Telaneo · 1h ago
Are any countries in the EU a lot less online than the rest, to the point that this matters more than a few percentage points? Even grandmas in Eastern Europe have smartphones now, and I don't think the EU has expanded to Sub-Saharan Africa quite yet (unless you want to count Réunion).
ta1243 · 2h ago
The main category of site which GDPR blocks are local news sites in the US
Sites block for GDPR because they want to abuse visitor data and privacy
Sites block for OSA because they don't want to abuse visitor data and privacy
Oras · 2h ago
How about when it’s a local site, they don’t really care about EU traffic? It’s too much “pointless” effort to comply such as having EU servers to process user data, extra code to show the ugly cookie consent, and privacy policy and terms of service that would comply with GDPR.
trinix912 · 2h ago
Or perhaps just don't use sketchy 3rd party advertising and analytics? You can always offer companies to send you PNG's of ads and serve them to the user without any of this. You can always analyze server logs to see which pages are the most popular, without deanonymizing the users. It's how some news agencies in the EU already do.
ben_w · 1h ago
I wish I knew what's going through the minds of the people who approve all these analytics partners. I've not been able to effectively argue even against the use of "consent or pay" in EU apps and websites, despite "the European Data Protection Board released a non-binding opinion stating that in most cases, consent-or-pay models do not constitute valid consent within the meaning of the GDPR." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_or_pay
mytailorisrich · 2h ago
Why would you bother at all?
If you are a local site by a local company on the other side of the world you don't need to block anyone, you just ignore foreign laws.
In the case of those news sites, though I suspect that most are owned by large multinational companies whose lawyers advised that blocking EU visitors is the only 100% sure way to avoid hypothetical retaliations by EU authorities.
ta1243 · 1h ago
If it's a local site then it's not subject to the GDPR. The GDPR applies to sites aimed at europeans.
However the privacy attacking malware they embed on there to mine data from their users would apply, and that's why they block it - because America allows abuse of their citizens data, but Europe doesn't.
Of course there is no enforcement for an entity attacking European citizens in this way so they could do it anyway, but like with cookie banners the point isn't to comply with a law, the point is to get citizens to blame the law rather than the abusers.
crashprone · 2h ago
Would you mind elaborating on your statement? How is the GDPR invasive? Invasive from the content providers' POV?
Telaneo · 1h ago
Invasive from the content providers' POV, yes. Mostly in good ways in my experience being on the other side of that, but its obviously not completely non-invasive, given that a few things happened after the GDPR came into effect. If it was completely non-invasive, then nothing would have happened, and there wouldn't have been any point in passing it. No point in passing a law you don't want to actually affect anything.
akomtu · 2h ago
100 years ago the British Empire tried to thought-control India. Today the empire is a bunch of demented aristocrats who are thought-policing those few who are still under their control.
gadders · 1h ago
Yes, the UK is so unsuccessful a large number of Indians want to move there every year.
thrown-0825 · 1h ago
Being a better place to live than India is an extremely low bar.
Source: Lived in India for 15 years.
mapcars · 1h ago
Just for economical reasons, not because of great culture or anything like that.
gadders · 15m ago
Haha. The "Magic Soil" theory. The UK (and Western culture in general) is the cause of the economic success. They are indivisible.
bilvar · 54m ago
That’s a bit rich given that they’re leaving a country where taking a dump in the middle of the street is a common occurrence and gang rapes are a daily phenomenon.
b800h · 2h ago
If the aristocrats were in control we wouldn't have these problems. They stopped running things a long time ago.
Maken · 1h ago
The aristocrats were removed long ago. Bankers have run the UK since the Age of Sail.
michaelt · 1h ago
Yes, these days our prime ministers normal, everyday knights, etonians and billionaires. Sometimes they'll be photographed without a tie, or they'll have a chummy nickname like Tony or Dave or Liz.
You know, normal people like you and me.
cess11 · 2h ago
Fine, it's not as much an aristocracy as a more general nobility, to an extent competing with foreign oligarchs and governments for control.
They'd have to block amazon and ebay, too. Someone might have the idea to buy a book there. Speaking of which, are they also closing book stores and libraries? Apparently, they're not blocking MechaHitler. Cheers.
LAC-Tech · 2h ago
At this point, I am pretty confident I can live the rest of my life without ever entering British air space.
So I ask myself - could I come up with a simple HTML page that would be illegal in the UK without age verification checks? I won't host pornography, but it seems to cover a lot more than that. Photos from contests? Calls to overthrow the government?
I'd put it under some creative commons license so other people could host the exact same content. What if there were thousands, or tens of thousands of sites that did it. It'd be wonderful if people were willing to put their money where their mouth is how them how impotent and illegitimate their laws really are.
zimpenfish · 55m ago
> could I come up with a simple HTML page that would be illegal in the UK without age verification checks?
Put up a page saying you support "Palestine Action". Given that group is (currently) a proscribed "terrorist organisation" (and therefore illegal to support, obvs.), your page would definitely be illegal in the UK.
(Although I suppose there's the light risk that MI6 might decided to rendition you with $LOCALCOUNTRY's assistance if they're feeling exuberant.)
LAC-Tech · 9m ago
When you said terrorist organisation, I expected to see bombs and people being murdered, so I checked out the wikipedia page.
Vandalism, property damage and trespassing. Illegal, sure, but terrorism? Really now...
I'd put that up on a page.
trinix912 · 2h ago
I don't think it will take long for most people in the UK to realize what's going on, they're already protesting, and it's clear that protest footage is being blocked too.
I also don't think it would take the UK too long to block sites like what you're describing. It's now totally doable that ISPs would run non-whitelisted websites through an AI screening before serving them to the user. Or they might choose to go after individuals accessing them multiple times, as repressive governments go after individuals possessing/viewing politically "harmful" material.
LAC-Tech · 2h ago
I would love to be blocked by the UK government. I'd wear that badge proudly.
Do you think I could get them to send me a certificate and everything?
ENGNR · 2h ago
Blocked.
By Order the Queen.
I'm sure someone could whip up some merch super quickly as souvenirs/protest
gschizas · 1h ago
> By Order the Queen
The King. Sorry to spoil The Crown for you, but Queen Elisabeth II has been dead for a few years.
jaggederest · 53m ago
Chuck Trey (is that lese majeste?) has male heirs, too. Unlikely that we'll see another Queen of the commonwealth in our lifetime.
Digit-Al · 1h ago
What rock are you living under; our Queen died a while ago now. It will be by order of the King these days : - )
devnullbrain · 1h ago
Also, one of her final acts was paying off her son's legal battle with Virginia Giuffre. She was fighting the war on unsafety on the side of unsafety.
alpaca128 · 1h ago
Block Save the King
cjs_ac · 1h ago
All laws are just words; they only have power because they are backed by a government's monopoly on the legitimate use of force[0].
The Online Safety Act has to be understood as a regulation of the Big Tech platforms that form what we might call the NormieNet. Your web page is unlikely to come to the attention of politicians, Ofcom (the relevant regulator) or the wider public, so you almost certainly would not suffer any adverse consequences, even if you were a resident of the UK.
Britain has a long history of libertarianism - it's where American libertarianism came from - but British libertarians don't make florid speeches about how free they are, they just quietly do whatever it is they want to do without telling anyone who might object. During the coronavirus pandemic, the UK had particularly strict lockdown regulations, because the Johnson government believed that most people wouldn't take any notice of them.
I'm sure someone will come along soon to tell me that this is a terrible principle on which to run a country, but the truth is that Britain is governed entirely by realpolitik, because the historical record shows that strongly principled government does not endure[1].
I've asked some of my British friends to report my site. You are right it might still be ignored, but it's worth a shot.
Just need to come up with something to put on the page.
cjs_ac · 48m ago
The law doesn't work by having ISPs block websites. It works by imposing a legal duty on website operators to a) determine what risks there are to their users from the content that may appear on their website; and b) develop and implement policies to eliminate or substantially mitigate that risk. All of the blocks listed above are voluntary self-censorship to avoid obligations under the Act.
If Ofcom does decide to pursue you, they will start by asking to see your risk assessments and policy documents, and would then in theory proceed to legal action, but in practice would just ignore you, because you're just protesting, and they have no chance of getting the millions in fines out of you.
I'm not sure what content you could put on your page, but if anyone suggests a message of support for a protest group called Palestine Action, I most strongly recommend that you don't do this, because the nature of their protests has led to their proscription as a terrorist organisation, and the resultant legal action against you would be of a very different nature.
No comments yet
isaacremuant · 1h ago
Extend all your thoughts to Europe. UK and Australia are just the "bad cop".
almaight · 1h ago
reddit/x.com/4chan
imtringued · 2h ago
Stop smoking subreddit and irish music site considered harmful to children.
The amount of geoblocked/shutdown sites by far exceeds the "intended" [0] targets.
[0] Everyone knows that the collateral damage is intentional and this was never about porn.
trinix912 · 2h ago
As well as seemingly completely innocent things like renaultevclub.co.uk - Renault EV Club. What on earth did they think was going on there to get them on the list?
HPsquared · 2h ago
Any forum, really. Abundance of caution. It's a cost/benefit thing. Also I suppose forum users of an EV site will be able to get around the block anyway.
PeterStuer · 1h ago
It's a site were users can post content that can be seen by other users. Yes, it is that simple. Can't have the common folk spouting uncontrolled narrative without us knowing their identity now can we.
alpaca128 · 1h ago
Same reason many local US news sites etc just block anyone from the EU. They don't want to bother with GDPR and perhaps don't really get enough visits to warrant the effort either.
est · 1h ago
It's never a good idea for the authority to block something
It's an even worse idea to make the block list public lmao
disruptiveink · 1h ago
I'm not victim blaming here, but does anyone have this nagging feeling that in this case, we, the "techies" caused this by refusing to engage with lawmakers?
In the case of E2E encryption, it's definitely a hill to die on, there is no way to make a backdoor "only the good guys" can access. But in this case, the long standing refusal for the tech industry to engage in even the lightest of lobbying towards having legal regulation for standards seems to bite us in the ass every now and then. We've seen it time and time even for things that are non controversial and would clearly benefit everyone: why is BCP 38 not mandated by law in any country? Why is IPv6 at the ISP consumer edge not mandated by law?
All of this could have had the same effect if instead of putting the onus of age verification on millions of websites, you instead put it onto the "customer end device", with some definition as to have it only apply to anyone who sells devices used to access online content with more than X% market share (meaning effectively Microsoft, Google on behalf of all Android OEMs and Apple, plus TVs and console makers).
You'd also put into law what content providers need to do to become compliant. It drops from "having a robust system of age verification" into "if you're serving content over HTTP and your content is for over 18, you need to send a specific over 18 header". If you're publishing an app on a walled garden app store, you need to specify the age rating (as one does already). If you state your page is good for under 18s when it's actually over 18, you then incur a fine.
Then it's really just up to OS makers to build support for the above into the parental controls functions that mostly already exist. Implement the header checking on the browser. Then restrict over 18 apps and outside app store that aren't explicitly authorised: this ensures no alternate browsers could be installed or ran by a child, while leaving them freedom to roam the web and install under 18 apps. The issue with existing parental controls is twofold: the web is a wild place and manually vetting every single app your kid wants to install is overbearing so everyone gives up on parental controls.
Then it's a matter of, when you buy a phone for your kid, you click a button "the user is a child, enable parental controls, set the grown up password". If parents fail to even do this, then clearly it's their own fault?
You'd specifically leave out non-HTTP protocols and leave a bunch of technical loopholes that could be exploited by technically minded people. It would both limit the amount of wreckage to things the common people doesn't even know it exists and make sure this wouldn't creep into places it doesn't belong. Sure, teenager who downloads Arch into a USB pen drive and boots off it can then access whatever they want, or someone who finds they can get into IRC and XDCC a bot for hot JPEGs, but at that point they clearly earned it.
I get the feeling that we've fucked it, left very important regulations up to people who have no clue and now we get the most onerous and worst implementation possible of things every single time put into law. We could have done the same with cookies, there's like, three browsers. Remember P3P? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P
absqueued · 1h ago
Eh? Why the lobste.rs?
thrown-0825 · 1h ago
Being British sounds genuinely awful.
hn_throw2025 · 1h ago
Voting British is genuinely awful.
This is another draconian powergrab designed by a Tory government and supported by a Labour government.
The Uniparty is real. The control freak technocrats are cut from the same cloth.
disruptiveink · 1h ago
Starmer is as authoritarian as the Tories at this point. There is no difference here.
cbeach · 42m ago
I'm resigned to the fact we need the next four years to be sufficiently awful, that voters will want radical change in 2029.
Look at how Reform UK politicians actually voted, please. They won't repeal the Online Safety Act: they're populist authoritarians in waiting, and not even particularly good at hiding it.
esskay · 1h ago
Yup it is right now. Altho probably not quite as bad as watching your country turn into a fascist state, but hey ho we all have our problems.
thrown-0825 · 1h ago
Im not American, nor do I live in the US.
You guys seem to be right behind the US when it comes to fascism 2.0 though.
esskay · 1h ago
Oh 100% we are. Most likely outcome is Reform get in during the next election and we end up with Farage trying to "Make Britain Great Again" or some such nonsense.
Crap times ahead!
drcongo · 1h ago
It is.
nickweb · 2h ago
Fully understand the reasons for the site - and the title on HN is shutdowns and site blocks - but the site itself displays self-enforcinging sites and shows them as potential government blocks.
There are blocked sites but you have to look for them in different sections of the site.
One site shown at the start of the other pages, adult friend finder is showing as blocked, however I can access it from my UK provider so honestly not sure what value this site brings (yet) apart from highlighting those that have a self-enforced blackout due to "451 Legal Reasons".
I'm on mobile so difficult to copy and paste - but that site was the top of an alphabetical list after I made my way past a few VPNs.
awaisrauf · 1h ago
Why are people so bothered with govt requiring a single photo for some websites when private companies already have all the data of almost all humanity?
robinsonb5 · 1h ago
As a Brit I don't really care too much about the age verification aspect. It's stupid and easily circumvented but I'm happy to just ignore sites that expect it.
I'm far more bothered by this being yet another nail in the coffin of web forums. The issue is the burden the regulations place on any site which hosts user-generated content. For small low-risk sites the burden isn't all that great - OFCOM have some guidance on their website - but it's still enough to be offputting. A 100-user web forum isn't going to want to bother with it, so those run by UK nationals are just pulling the plug, while those run elsewhere are just blocking UK users because it's the easiest solution.
Which reminds me, I should go and disable comments on my blog...
trinix912 · 1h ago
Because it could end up with the government blocking access to websites critical of it, or going after individuals accessing such websites as they will now have all "proof" they'd need for that.
In an extreme case, they could potentially blacklist your ID to prevent you from spreading "harmful" political opinions, cutting you off the web entirely.
foldr · 47m ago
The OSA doesn’t make any provision for the government blocking access to websites that are critical of it. This is a pretty long slippery slope that you’re talking about, where the government directly enforces the rules instead of OFCOM, and the rules are substantially different from those currently in force. In other words, you are basically just saying that “things might get worse”. This is true, but it’s not really a very strong criticism of the OSA (which I do not support).
Also, any hypothetical attempt to abuse the OSA to rein in political dissent would almost certainly be subject to legal challenges under the ECHR.
altacc · 1h ago
There are many reasons that you could research with a quick search but simply put, it breaks the anonymity of web use and has huge implications for intentional and unintentional surveillance and data misuse. What is asked for here is much more and much more strongly linked to an individual than the data you refer to.
It requires everyone to upload either ID and/or high quality photos & videos of themselves to a random company. Not just one company one whomever a website chooses for age verification, which can include doing it themselves. This creates multiple massive treasure troves of IDs that will attract hacking attempts (for example the Tea app breach). It creates opportunity for blackmail from this data (for example the Ashley Madison breach but much worse). For those age verification services that require a photo/video, that creates a resource for deep fakes. Plus any 15 year old boy worthy of their digital device will be able to get around age verification using fake id/photos or a VPN, whilst a less savvy adult trying to access information about quitting drinking or drug abuse will face a barrier.
And this is for ANY website that has a very broad range of content that the OSA mandates age verification for. It's easier for a website to err on the side of caution and just block the UK. That especially includes websites that have zero reporting back to Meta/Google/etc... for usual marketing profiling. If anything it pushes more people into the limited, monitored and advertising driven Meta/Google web.
esskay · 1h ago
Most of the 3rd parties being used for this are based in the US. You're sending your photo and details to a foreign entity. That same foreign entity is likely used by lots of sites.
Oh look, that foreign entity now has a profile of you, and what sites you've visited.
Fast forward a year, they get hacked (or maybe even just sold), a copy of your personally identifiable details are pinched along with your browsing history.
I really really hope you weren't being naive enough to go down the utterly stupid "nothing to hide" route with your line of thinking.
isaacremuant · 1h ago
Why are people so bothered with a camera in their room? It's just so daddy government can protect us from crimes. Google already knows where you are.
Speaking as a Brit, I wish Wikipedia would just go black for the UK. That might focus some minds.
Likewise. People (organisations/companies), as far as possible, shouldn't be pandering to this stuff, it's not the answer, it doesn't help them or us.
https://x.com/moo9000/status/1950866445186818209
To be clear, also a Brit
The open web is so much smaller than the walled-gardens.
I'm pretty sure you'd actually only get significant outcry here if one of these services were affected:
- Whatsapp
- Facebook
- Instagram
- Google ( incl. gmail/maps/etc )
- Twitter
- ChatGPT
I'm not sure people care enough otherwise for anything else. Maybe Tiktok, but even then I'm not convinced, since it's such a vapid / transient experience that is replaceable.
Another big reliance strategically would also be Microsoft Teams ( + ecosystem ), but that's all behind (semi-verified) accounts, so it's hard to argue how that fits into OSA.
There are essentially just a handful of companies control most of the online experience.
These are also companies that helped design and shape the current bad law. They have carved out for themselves the necessary exemptions and have the funds for compliance and fines.
Wikipedia is a popular website that many people depend upon; denying access to UK users would not only create a massive inconvenience along with the temptation that it could be avoided if the law were rolled back, but would also encourage more UK users to adopt VPNs, which would subvert the law's effectivity along with that of a plethora of other authoritarian measures that the UK has in place.
... is that gambling sites are except.
I may need to prove my age to visit Reddit (and soon Wikipedia) but not to visit Bet365, Ladbrook's, Paddy Power etc etc.
Need I tell you who some of the biggest lobbyists and political donors have been?
Visiting a gambling site isn't restricted, but signing up and gambling is.
When the parent does the enforcement themselves then they can be put under direct pressure by their children to drop the ban. When the government does it then the parent can say, honestly, sorry, there’s nothing they can do about it: It’s out of their hands. The child only has access to tier 1 support [parent] and the support agent’s only response is “sorry, corporate policy [law] requires AV for certain sites, there’s nothing I can do. Is there anything else I can help you with today?…”
I don’t say this to make the laws easier to swallow but the social economics of it make it more understandable why this law might be so popular with anyone already overloaded with angry teenagers.
Next up: the Bedtime Is At Nine PM Act 2026, Tuck Your Shirt In Act 2027, and No We Have One At Home Already Act 2028.
My son figured out free VPNs when he was 8-9. This is only stopping adults.
In the era of LLMs this is even more true. Every single chatbot I tried (DeepSeek, Grok, Claude, ChatGPT) except ChatGPT immediately gave numerous and detailed instructions on how to easily bypass the bans. I'm sure one could trivially push ChatGPT outside its love for big brother as well, if they cared to do so.
It's not clear to me who exactly such bans are effective against, and to what end. Obviously the government gains an immense amount of power so they're going to love it, regardless of its efficacy.
The “think of the children” angle is certainly there to make the bill more morally appealing, but is it actually popular with parents? Or anyone, other than politicians?
The kids in question are those of millennial and Gen-Z(!) parents. They’re not a generation that doesn’t understand the internet.
That’s not to say that some restriction wouldn’t be welcomed, but did the OSA really come from these parents?
So, going forward, will similar pieces of art be blocked in the British Museum as well? Like physically?
Likewise for every Reddit link and probably more.
I wish the website made a better effort at filtering those because it muddies the point when the government can point out that half of the list is actually accessible in the UK (even if some are behind an ID wall).
EDIT: Since there is one (dead) comment on this: To reiterate: The Crime Survey surveys people and tracks the rate of crime people state in a response to a survey that they have experienced. As such it includes crimes that are not reported.
Furthermore, violent crime throughout the entire western world (not just England and Wales) has been dropping from its peak in the mid 1990's.
Unfortunately these facts don't fit in with the Daily Mail narrative and what people want to believe.
But criminal damage is down. Of course, if you call the police for criminal damage, everyone knows they won't turn up and you'll just get a crime number, so unless you're claiming on insurance you're probably less and less likely to report it.
We shouldn't be aiming for London (with 200 phones stolen every day as it is) to reach the level of the worst European or American cities.
The crime rates in other places is irrelevant if the city you've lived in for the last 20 years has become noticeably more dangerous.
This is not "a narrative that keeps being pushed without merit", in fact the people who dismiss such claims are often the ones who live very insulated lives.
I've been here 25 years, and most of the areas that used to be sketchy are now not.
I witnessed the aftermath of a murder last week in Stoke Newington! (Saw that the road had been closed off)
I've seen women publicly urinating into drains on a busy road (Hackney)
There are massive increases in the number of homeless people (Tooting, Clapton, Shadwell), several times I've seen a homeless looking person harass women passing by.
Seen needles lying around (Shadwell, Commercial Road)
The general advice now is never to wear a watch in Central London, this wasn't the case 10 years ago.
I've seen security guards restrain people trying to leave shops in Central London after they shoplifted.
So yeah, some areas might not look sketchy, and these gentrified places (e.g. Stoke Newington) might be ok if you stick to the bars, restaurants and then Uber home, but for a lot of people these remain dangerous if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I'm also not seeing any more homeless in London now than I used to see on Oxford Street when I lived by Marble Arch in 2000, for example. There were large encampments in the subways near Marble Arch at that time - I've not seen anything like it since.
> The general advice now is never to wear a watch in Central London, this wasn't the case 10 years ago.
Says who? I've never heard anyone say this, and don't know anyone who'd worry about wearing a watch in Central London.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/26/mobile-ph...
If you do not like The Guardian, search for "central london phone snatching".
Wearing a nice watch in Soho, Liverpool Street, Tower Bridge is super sketchy and you're likely to get comments about how 'brave' (stupid) you are.
I've been here 26 years this time (and a couple of years before that) and similarly not noticed it getting noticeably more dangerous.
(on the caveat side, I am a fairly hefty white bloke who apparently "looks scary" which might explain things.)
There are areas where people do drugs openly, and overdosing, too, and no one cares. A cop walked past a lady overdosing.
You should watch videos of YouTubers going to these areas if you do not want to do it yourself.
The areas are famous for tourists where most phone snatching is rampant, 18 a day at a minimum, on one famous street alone.
FWIW, I am talking about London.
Crime overall is at a low level historically in the England, per the Crime Survey of England and Wales, which track actual victims through surveys.
That's not to say the UK couldn't do much better, but this fearmongering is basically repeating far-right conspiracy claims pushed by the press that are not supported by data including by peoples actual responses when asked if they have actually been a victim as per the Crime Survey.
"According the Crime Survey for England and Wales, someone is actually less likely to be a victim of crime in London than they are across the country as a whole. In the capital, 14.9% of people experienced a crime either to their person or their household in the year ending September 2023, compared with 15.7% nationally. But what about different types of crime?"
When we know that police is understaffed and can't respond to all crime, perhaps you should spend less time blindly trusting the numbers. You, too, can't build an argument on unreliable data. Just like the poster you're replying to.
Oh FFS.
Do you seriously consider this robust evidence?
Instead, have a look at the Crime Survey for England and Wales (HINT: This tracks peoples experience of crime and so includes unreported crime)
You are free to walk around these areas (just go to Knightsbridge) with an expensive watch to see if it is true or not. Get back to us safely to report.
People doing drugs isn’t a danger to me.
Crimes (like phone, expensive items in a bag snatching) happen in rich areas, too.[1]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP6tygFIQq0
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP6tygFIQq0&t=1794s
And UK is doing fuck-all about it, they care more about who said what online. It is absurd.
As for your personal experience, sure, that is valid. It really depends on when you go out or what you are wearing.
Yes, and they are doing it, and it is a major issue in London. We are not talking about other places right now. It is a huge issue in London.
Brexit has markedly made the UK's economy weaker, there are less opportunities, the opportunities that exist outside of finance/tech are quite low paid compared to other European countries while the cost of living in London is absurdly high when compared to other major European cities. It's the perfect storm coupled with high immigration: blame immigrants for the lack of opportunities caused by a policy pushed by anti-immigration rhetoric, it will just feed into giving power to Reform which, if given power, will continue to crash the UK's economical prospects.
The ship has sailed, it will take the UK quite a while to correct course, perhaps even a generation or so... While that correction course happens British society will just keep eroding away.
More importantly, you can't deal with potential crime by making real arrests, because then you have to start arresting people who haven't done anything.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/region_rankings_current.jsp?reg...
Given we know from comparing e.g. Crime Survey data to polls about peoples beliefs about crimes that peoples beliefs about crime rates in the UK are not remotely well correlated with actual crime rates, that page doesn't tell us what you claim it does.
It tells us that out of visitors to Numbeo, people who claim to live in 3 British cities report that they are more worried than most others.
For Bradford, the data is based on just 131 contributors in the last 5 years:
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/in/Bradford
That sounds a lot like the Swedish defense, that Malmö only looks bad because the reporting standards are more rigorous. Meanwhile there are literal hand grenades exploding on their streets daily.
With 131 biased samples over 5 years, to continue with Bradford, who are not asked about actual crime, but about how they feel about it without an qualification as to whether they have any actual experience with it, this site is not saying anything useful.
Presenting it as if it is ranking cities by actual crime rates is ignorant of the data gathering at best, and at worst blatantly dishonest.
Then again given the hyperbole you're employing regarding Malmö, I should perhaps not expect you to care much about the veracity of data - yes, attacks with explosives is an escalating problem in Sweden, but nowhere remotely at the scale you're claiming.
https://policinginsight.com/feature/analysis/most-crime-has-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152154 ("In memoriam (onlinesafetyact.co.uk)"—147 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42433044 ("Lfgss shutting down 16th March 2025 (day before Online Safety Act is enforced) (lfgss.com)"—555 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152178 ("Lobsters blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act"—87 comments)
Are they really going to register individual topics for Reddit?
Wait,
> Post on social media website X claiming that content relating to protests has been age-gated due to the Online Safety Act.
Now we're reporting individual tweets?!?
Same difference. Making a pedantic distinction to mud the waters is the real disinformation.
A few sites are covered by DNS/IP blocks by network providers separate to the Online Safety Act, but no sites are - at least so far - blocked by providers because of the OSA. These are mainly piracy related. E.g. The Pirate Bay.
The blocks/age verification due to OSA are done by the sites themselves under threat of steep fines.
This is all in the finest British tradition of passing the responsibility to someone else so you can point fingers when you get blamed. UK authorities love getting industry to "self regulate" as much possible, under threat of more restrictive laws or court challenges when they don't regulate hard enough.
The upside from a government point of view is that these blocks then are hard to challenge in court.
Original comment follows: They blocked irish.session.nz: "Resources for learning Irish music by ear". This is either a mistake or a very early example of a political abuse of the OSA. Both are wrong of course and prove what a stupid and concerning thing OSA truly is.
A ridiculous analogy but not entirely
Think it as a bit like GDPR but 1) much more expensive 2) with criminal liability 3) Makes even less sense than GDPR as it does nothing to prevent harm for minors 4) derimental for user experience and users.
"Funnily enough" the companies who lobbied for Online Safety Act, and former Ofcom employees, are now selling age verification check services and compliance services related to Online Safety Act. They have pretty good profit margins there, making even Google and Facebook look poor.
More here:
https://x.com/moo9000/status/1950866445186818209
> And for everybody out there who's thinking about using VPNs, let me just say to you directly, verifying your age keeps a child safe. Keeps children safe in our country. So let's just not try and find a way around. Just prove your age. Make the internet safer for children. Make it a better experience for everyone. That's surely what we should aspire to in this country.
It's a grave insult to think someone would even believe this.
EDIT: Pictured in the video is Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kyle
[1] https://x.com/GregHadfield/status/1878113938593730650?lang=e...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivor_Caplin
[0] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/contents
Get back to work Nicholas 30 ans. The Uniparty demands another day of sacrifice.
Is there any verification on submissions to this?
However, this is a list of "blocked sites" composed mostly of sites that are not blocked.
Canada and Australia are jumping in [2] [3].
[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
[1]: https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2024/france/la-loi-sren...
[2]:https://facia.ai/news/canada-proposes-age-checks-for-online-...
[3]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-11/age-verification-sear...
The best path is one of calamitous implementation that scares off other countries and embarrasses this one into a u-turn. But it's increasingly unlikely.
Sites block for GDPR because they want to abuse visitor data and privacy
Sites block for OSA because they don't want to abuse visitor data and privacy
If you are a local site by a local company on the other side of the world you don't need to block anyone, you just ignore foreign laws.
In the case of those news sites, though I suspect that most are owned by large multinational companies whose lawyers advised that blocking EU visitors is the only 100% sure way to avoid hypothetical retaliations by EU authorities.
However the privacy attacking malware they embed on there to mine data from their users would apply, and that's why they block it - because America allows abuse of their citizens data, but Europe doesn't.
Of course there is no enforcement for an entity attacking European citizens in this way so they could do it anyway, but like with cookie banners the point isn't to comply with a law, the point is to get citizens to blame the law rather than the abusers.
Source: Lived in India for 15 years.
You know, normal people like you and me.
E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords and so on.
So I ask myself - could I come up with a simple HTML page that would be illegal in the UK without age verification checks? I won't host pornography, but it seems to cover a lot more than that. Photos from contests? Calls to overthrow the government?
I'd put it under some creative commons license so other people could host the exact same content. What if there were thousands, or tens of thousands of sites that did it. It'd be wonderful if people were willing to put their money where their mouth is how them how impotent and illegitimate their laws really are.
Put up a page saying you support "Palestine Action". Given that group is (currently) a proscribed "terrorist organisation" (and therefore illegal to support, obvs.), your page would definitely be illegal in the UK.
(Although I suppose there's the light risk that MI6 might decided to rendition you with $LOCALCOUNTRY's assistance if they're feeling exuberant.)
Vandalism, property damage and trespassing. Illegal, sure, but terrorism? Really now...
I'd put that up on a page.
I also don't think it would take the UK too long to block sites like what you're describing. It's now totally doable that ISPs would run non-whitelisted websites through an AI screening before serving them to the user. Or they might choose to go after individuals accessing them multiple times, as repressive governments go after individuals possessing/viewing politically "harmful" material.
Do you think I could get them to send me a certificate and everything?
I'm sure someone could whip up some merch super quickly as souvenirs/protest
The King. Sorry to spoil The Crown for you, but Queen Elisabeth II has been dead for a few years.
The Online Safety Act has to be understood as a regulation of the Big Tech platforms that form what we might call the NormieNet. Your web page is unlikely to come to the attention of politicians, Ofcom (the relevant regulator) or the wider public, so you almost certainly would not suffer any adverse consequences, even if you were a resident of the UK.
Britain has a long history of libertarianism - it's where American libertarianism came from - but British libertarians don't make florid speeches about how free they are, they just quietly do whatever it is they want to do without telling anyone who might object. During the coronavirus pandemic, the UK had particularly strict lockdown regulations, because the Johnson government believed that most people wouldn't take any notice of them.
I'm sure someone will come along soon to tell me that this is a terrible principle on which to run a country, but the truth is that Britain is governed entirely by realpolitik, because the historical record shows that strongly principled government does not endure[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_of_England
Just need to come up with something to put on the page.
If Ofcom does decide to pursue you, they will start by asking to see your risk assessments and policy documents, and would then in theory proceed to legal action, but in practice would just ignore you, because you're just protesting, and they have no chance of getting the millions in fines out of you.
I'm not sure what content you could put on your page, but if anyone suggests a message of support for a protest group called Palestine Action, I most strongly recommend that you don't do this, because the nature of their protests has led to their proscription as a terrorist organisation, and the resultant legal action against you would be of a very different nature.
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The amount of geoblocked/shutdown sites by far exceeds the "intended" [0] targets.
[0] Everyone knows that the collateral damage is intentional and this was never about porn.
It's an even worse idea to make the block list public lmao
In the case of E2E encryption, it's definitely a hill to die on, there is no way to make a backdoor "only the good guys" can access. But in this case, the long standing refusal for the tech industry to engage in even the lightest of lobbying towards having legal regulation for standards seems to bite us in the ass every now and then. We've seen it time and time even for things that are non controversial and would clearly benefit everyone: why is BCP 38 not mandated by law in any country? Why is IPv6 at the ISP consumer edge not mandated by law?
All of this could have had the same effect if instead of putting the onus of age verification on millions of websites, you instead put it onto the "customer end device", with some definition as to have it only apply to anyone who sells devices used to access online content with more than X% market share (meaning effectively Microsoft, Google on behalf of all Android OEMs and Apple, plus TVs and console makers).
You'd also put into law what content providers need to do to become compliant. It drops from "having a robust system of age verification" into "if you're serving content over HTTP and your content is for over 18, you need to send a specific over 18 header". If you're publishing an app on a walled garden app store, you need to specify the age rating (as one does already). If you state your page is good for under 18s when it's actually over 18, you then incur a fine.
Then it's really just up to OS makers to build support for the above into the parental controls functions that mostly already exist. Implement the header checking on the browser. Then restrict over 18 apps and outside app store that aren't explicitly authorised: this ensures no alternate browsers could be installed or ran by a child, while leaving them freedom to roam the web and install under 18 apps. The issue with existing parental controls is twofold: the web is a wild place and manually vetting every single app your kid wants to install is overbearing so everyone gives up on parental controls.
Then it's a matter of, when you buy a phone for your kid, you click a button "the user is a child, enable parental controls, set the grown up password". If parents fail to even do this, then clearly it's their own fault?
You'd specifically leave out non-HTTP protocols and leave a bunch of technical loopholes that could be exploited by technically minded people. It would both limit the amount of wreckage to things the common people doesn't even know it exists and make sure this wouldn't creep into places it doesn't belong. Sure, teenager who downloads Arch into a USB pen drive and boots off it can then access whatever they want, or someone who finds they can get into IRC and XDCC a bot for hot JPEGs, but at that point they clearly earned it.
I get the feeling that we've fucked it, left very important regulations up to people who have no clue and now we get the most onerous and worst implementation possible of things every single time put into law. We could have done the same with cookies, there's like, three browsers. Remember P3P? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P
This is another draconian powergrab designed by a Tory government and supported by a Labour government.
The Uniparty is real. The control freak technocrats are cut from the same cloth.
As things stand, it's coming:
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/...
Reform UK will repeal the Online Safety Act.
Zia Yusuf, tech entrepreneur and head of Reform UK Department of Government Efficiency explains this here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3JRuAh4jeY (36:05)
You guys seem to be right behind the US when it comes to fascism 2.0 though.
Crap times ahead!
There are blocked sites but you have to look for them in different sections of the site.
One site shown at the start of the other pages, adult friend finder is showing as blocked, however I can access it from my UK provider so honestly not sure what value this site brings (yet) apart from highlighting those that have a self-enforced blackout due to "451 Legal Reasons".
I'm on mobile so difficult to copy and paste - but that site was the top of an alphabetical list after I made my way past a few VPNs.
I'm far more bothered by this being yet another nail in the coffin of web forums. The issue is the burden the regulations place on any site which hosts user-generated content. For small low-risk sites the burden isn't all that great - OFCOM have some guidance on their website - but it's still enough to be offputting. A 100-user web forum isn't going to want to bother with it, so those run by UK nationals are just pulling the plug, while those run elsewhere are just blocking UK users because it's the easiest solution.
Which reminds me, I should go and disable comments on my blog...
In an extreme case, they could potentially blacklist your ID to prevent you from spreading "harmful" political opinions, cutting you off the web entirely.
Also, any hypothetical attempt to abuse the OSA to rein in political dissent would almost certainly be subject to legal challenges under the ECHR.
It requires everyone to upload either ID and/or high quality photos & videos of themselves to a random company. Not just one company one whomever a website chooses for age verification, which can include doing it themselves. This creates multiple massive treasure troves of IDs that will attract hacking attempts (for example the Tea app breach). It creates opportunity for blackmail from this data (for example the Ashley Madison breach but much worse). For those age verification services that require a photo/video, that creates a resource for deep fakes. Plus any 15 year old boy worthy of their digital device will be able to get around age verification using fake id/photos or a VPN, whilst a less savvy adult trying to access information about quitting drinking or drug abuse will face a barrier.
And this is for ANY website that has a very broad range of content that the OSA mandates age verification for. It's easier for a website to err on the side of caution and just block the UK. That especially includes websites that have zero reporting back to Meta/Google/etc... for usual marketing profiling. If anything it pushes more people into the limited, monitored and advertising driven Meta/Google web.
Oh look, that foreign entity now has a profile of you, and what sites you've visited.
Fast forward a year, they get hacked (or maybe even just sold), a copy of your personally identifiable details are pinched along with your browsing history.
I really really hope you weren't being naive enough to go down the utterly stupid "nothing to hide" route with your line of thinking.