2025-08-02 04:46:51
https://x.com/zarahsultana/status/1951214851478438252
2025-08-02 03:52:37
Here is the article:
Here is George’s LinkedIn profile:
It’s interesting that he argues about “right and left” – I am neither, but I have nearly 40 years of experience of tech and security and safety and privacy.
2025-08-02 03:30:18
“nothing to do with” does not mean the same thing as “has no impact upon”, Peter:
“These laws have nothing to do with censorship or policing adults seeking to access legal content. Those who suggest otherwise are playing politics with child safety and have no practical alternatives for protecting our children from content they should never see – content that can cause lasting, even fatal, damage.”
Archived at: https://archive.ph/mL2H8
2025-08-02 02:26:24
While Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are legal in the UK, according to this law, platforms have a clear responsibility to prevent children from bypassing safety protections. This includes blocking content that promotes VPNs or other workarounds specifically aimed at young users.
Alistair Campbell & Rory Stewart to face financial ruin?
Also it is very telling that they write:
The Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) reports that there has been an additional 5 million age checks on a daily basis as UK-based internet users seek to access sites that are age-restricted.
…when Peter Kyle went to extraordinary lengths to not state how many extra people had signed up for VPNs earlier this week, but now they are talking about “an additional 5 million age checks” without citing the base rate for that statistic.
It’s almost like they don’t want the comparison.
2025-08-01 18:11:22
Sonia is quoted by the BBC:
[…] an expert in children’s digital rights at the London School of Economics – said that companies might “get better over time at not blocking public interest content while also protecting children” as the law beds in over time.
She echoes conspiratorial thinking that platforms…
…that platforms are actively seeking to undermine the online safety act. My experience is that the platforms just want to work out some way to survive without incurring the disruptive and expensive wrath of regulators.
It is the people – individual citizens – who are actively seeking to undermine the online safety act. The problem is: the people don’t want obstacles to be in their way, and they are choosing paths of desire to walk around obstacles in the most efficient way.
It should not be and is not obligatory for sites like Reddit to editorially label individual content semantically – this is pornographic, that is not – when instead they can merely offer entire forums for being “adults only” thereby restricting the content to everything within.
Professor Livingstone possibly does not realise that she is proposing all platforms must assume a duty to label content individually with respect to a bunch of localised moral categories (violence, nudity, drugs, each with different definitions in different jurisdictions) – a challenge which not merely is problematic from a perspective of civil liberties and national jurisdictions, but also is prone to error and not economic to implement for any large platform.
Overblocking stems as a consequence of platforms legitimately restricting access by forum rather than individual content labels, and it is short-sighted and foolish of anyone to have not realised this before demanding age verification be applied to platforms.
Further demanding that all major platforms should now reappraise and reimplement their software to meet child safety activist notions of “how the internet ought to work” – a semantic web labelled and policed by platforms – is not proportionate nor realistic, and (however bizarrely) may actually be legally actionable in some jurisdictions.
Tech giants blocking some Ukraine and Gaza posts under new online rules – BBC News
2025-08-01 07:04:02
I’ve always critiqued age verification for creating a market for stolen credentials, but perhaps I’m too hasty: perhaps the credentials which are stolen from age verification sites can simply be recycled so that they go around in a circle and the information doesn’t have to substantially proliferate.