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.
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.
A more sensible approach to this law would be to require adult sites to include a clear marker in either an HTTP header or an HTML meta tag. For example:
This would allow locally run browser content blockers to automatically detect such sites without blocking them individually, and it would be trivial for site operators to implement. Since it would be mandated by law, sites that refuse to comply could be subject to legal action.
Of course, this would still rely on parents taking the basic step of setting up a content blocker before allowing their children unrestricted internet access.
But you can do this now: I made this for my sisters kids and my friend his Alzheimer dad years ago. Agree: its not mainstream or installable by just anyone, but if you are on HN it will take an old laptop with linux and chromium and a few hours.
I'm able to do this using the Google Family controls for my kids' mobiles. I've tied it down so much that they use them rarely and for specific purposes.
This is already fairly trivial to do. There are many DIY and commercial off-the-shelf solutions. The problem with all client-side blocking is that it can be bypassed by just...using a different computer. People who want this legislation want restrictions to apply everywhere, not just on parent-managed devices, so shifting the discussion to client-side blocks just makes our arguments trivial to dismiss as irrelevant.
WHITELISTING. It's utterly infuriating the obvious, time tested strategy with all the technological pieces already in place and an easy slot-in for government isn't at the tip of everyone's tongue. Just setup a set of new TLDs, ".kids1", ".kids2", ".kids3" etc, with kids1 being appropriate for anyone ages 0-4 years old, kids2 ages 5-9, kids3 ages 10-14, etc. Or whatever permutation experts and the public say make the most sense. Governments can set the requirements for anyone or any organization who wants to register a domain there to ensure all content is controlled, no user submitted content (or only submissions from registered people/orgs like schools say), no algorithmic engagement usage allowed, no advertising or whatever else is desired. It's also trivial to add that in under country TLDs so every single nation that wants to regulate their own can do so to their own standards. An alternate similar approach would be to have a single ".[ccTLD].kids" domain and then legally required DNS txt info site-wide as well as standardized metadata tags at the top of every single page going into more granular detail about content by category (like if some parents though their kids were ready for a higher age bracket of world news before being ready for a higher bracket of something else).
With age-appropriate content under its own TLDs, all the other technical pieces are easy to slot in as well. It'd be absolutely trivial for OS makers to have parental control mode simply gate a given user into whatever TLDs match the age or content levels set by the parents. It's very easy to imagine a nice GUI at the router level combining TLD-restrictions with VLANs and PPSKs such that a parent can "add a child" and it spits out a separate WiFi password that gates the child into their own age appropriate stuff.
The general internet should be a free for all for adults (or adult level), period. Access at all should imply someone is ready to navigate it. Trying to restrict and sanitize it is evil, wrong, and also just plain fucking stupid since it'll never work well. We can easily make a child internet however.
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".
Regarding Wikipedia - the people in change of these recent anti-consumer laws and ideas would love to shutdown Wikipedia permanently. It is not immediately bad for them, but it is in general a source of objective information which they hate. They would rather warp public opinion through paid for media and social accounts.
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.
If age restriction technology is now being introduced to prevent kids *viewing* "inappropriate" websites, then why are gambling websites being given a free pass?
They’ve already found a loophole for that: If you gamble with fake money (acquired through real money and a confusing set of currency conversions) and the prizes are jpegs of boat-girls (or horse-girls, as I hear are popular lately) or football players, you can sell to all the children you want.
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.
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.
I think the risk is that it becomes framed as extortion, and would cause some proportion of voters - who at least right after the OSA was put in place remained relatively in favour of elements of it (though the polls have been wildly flawed) - to double down.
Hence, I think a total block would be better than a partial block, because that can be framed as legitimately risk mitigation and would be a lot harder to attack.
That said, some pressure would be better than no pressure, so if the alternative is no block, I'd prefer a partial block.
That could drive users to LLM services to fill in the gaps. I know a lot of people who just use LLMs instead of good ol internet searches because they are that lazy.
Many MUDs/BBSes operate via Telnet/SSH rather than HTTP, potentially creating a technical gray area in enforcement that highlights the law's poor adaptation to the diverse technical landscape of the internet.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, nor plot.
This is funny but actually has sort of existed for decades, in the sense of the TV watershed – no adult content before 9pm, after which point it's assumed children are in bed and not watching TV.
And yes, you are absolutely right that parents do often like these laws. Being a parent is hard, whatever the age of the kids, and parents will be in favour of things that make it easier. Whether that's making TV default-safe in the daytime, or making adult websites harder to access.
> 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?
"All providers of regulated user-to-user services that are likely to be accessed by children must comply with the following duties in relation to each such service which they provide—
(a)the duties about children’s risk assessments set out in section 11, and
(b)the duties to protect children’s online safety set out in section 12(2) to (13)."
What is the problem with it? When I was a kid I did look at porn, turned out fine. How is it a huge problem for kids in the UK exactly? Or what do you mean by "extreme" here? I did not look at "extreme porn" if I think I know what you mean.
> 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?
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.
No, that sense is not there, because we don't have any "no drugs for children" laws. Those don't exist - drugs are illegal across the board, unless they're prescribed, but prescription drugs are good for kids.
The closest thing we have is tobacco and alcohol. But that's still very far off.
Its true children can't buy alcohol, but they can't buy Internet access either. But, they can drink alcohol, and they can view the internet.
There's nothing stopping a parent from just giving little Timmy wine. All bets are off once you show ID at the corner store and go home.
Similarly, all bets are off after you show ID and proof of residence to your Teleco and they install Internet connection. ... Until now.
This is an entirely novel and never before seen type of law and type of reasoning. It may seem, on the surface, reasonable or done before. But if you think about it, it's not.
This isn't your typical brand of "think of the children".
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).
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"...
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.
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.
Rising since 2015, but legitimately barely. Enough to look into and attempt to remedy of course, but nowhere near enough to justify the absolutely unhinged rhetoric constantly being used to justify awful legislation and amoral crackdowns.
You can specifically look at people's assumption at violent crime rates charted against actual violent crime rates and see that the gap has never been wider.
Also, 1980 to 2025 is not a "very specific time frame" and it still shows the trend described above. Very large cliff in the 90s we are still nowhere near.
For England and Wales at least this is not remotely supported by the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which shows levels have mostly continued to drop since 2015 with the exception of a couple of minor upticks, to a level we not seen at any point since the Crime Survey started in 1982.
First thing is to question if the crime stats are not intentionally muddled by changing categories of certain crimes or not reporting them at all to make the numbers look better.
These all are from BBC articles from 2024 and 2025:
- According to the Office for National Statistics, many crimes recorded against people increased between the years ending June 2015 and March 2025, including violence against the person (40%), possession of offensive weapons (23%), sexual offences (75%) and theft from the person (207%).
- The number of serious offences involving a knife or sharp object recorded in the year ending March 2024 in England and Wales was 54% higher than the figure for 2016.
- More than twice as many knife crime offences were recorded in Essex in the 12 months to March 2024, than the figure for 2016.
- Greater Manchester Police has recorded 1,345 knife-enabled robberies in the past 12 months, up from 1,288 recorded between July 2023 and June 2024.
- Rape Crisis has described a "staggering" 15% rise in the number of rapes and attempted rapes recorded in Scotland last year as "alarming". Official statistics published on Tuesday, show sexual crimes increased by 3% overall to the second highest level since 1971. The figures show the number of sexual crimes reported last year was 14,892, up from 14,484 in 2023-24 - a 45% increase in the last decade. Rape and attempted rape reports increased from 2,522 in 2023-24 to 2,897 in 2024-25, up 60% for the same figures 10 years ago.
- Police in England and Wales have recorded the highest number of rapes and sexual offences in 20 years. Forces recorded 194,683 sexual offences in 2021-22, including 70,330 rapes, the highest number since records began in 2002/03. The number of sex offences recorded by forces in England and Wales has more than doubled in the past seven years, from 88,576 in 2014/15 to 194,683 in 2021-22. Rape offences have nearly doubled in the past six years, from 36,320 in 2015-16 to 70,330 in the year to March.
- Personal theft up 22% in England and Wales, ONS says. Personal thefts recorded by police in England and Wales were up 22% in 2024 from the previous year, according to official figures. Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows police recorded 152,416 thefts from the person offences last year, the highest since the current data methods began in 2003.
- It estimated that there were 9.6 million incidents of what is described as "headline crime" in 2024 - which includes theft, robbery, criminal damage, fraud, computer misuse, and violence with or without injury.
- The latest CSEW survey reported that at the end of 2024: People's experiences of theft had gone up by 13% - including a 50% rise in theft from the person offences, such as mobile phone theft. Theft from outside a dwelling - such as courier packages being taken from people's doorsteps - went up by 19%
Fraud incidents, including bank and credit account fraud, were up by 33% to around 4.1 million incidents - with around 3 million incidents involving a loss and 2.1 million victims fully reimbursed in these cases
- More than 700,000 vehicles were broken into last year - often with the help of high-tech electronic devices, including so-called signal jammers, which are thought to play a part in four out of 10 vehicle thefts nationwide.
- Shoplifting hits record high in England and Wales
There were 530,643 reported shoplifting offences in the year to March, a 20% increase from the previous year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
- Pharmacies report surge in shoplifting and aggression
Around nine in 10 pharmacies have reported an increase in shoplifting and aggression towards staff in the past year. A survey of 500 pharmacies by the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) also found 87% had experienced at least one instance of intimidating behaviour towards workers, while 22% said they had seen staff physically assaulted.
But homicide rate (per 100K) dropped gradually after rising for 30 years to its record high in 2003, so, yay I guess!
You'll note that the majority of these rely on police reports.
You then mention CSEW for one year, ignoring that the overall long term trend is down from a high in 1994-95.
CSEW consistently captures a far higher rate of crime than police reports because it doesn't rely on police reporting changes, or peoples willingness to report.
In other words: Your wall of text is irrelevant.
Look at the CSEW data, and the trends all the way back to its start in 1982.
Doesn't mean there aren't problems, and hotspots, or specific crimes that have different trends, but overall we're near a historical low.
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".
Yeah it's odd and annoying. I realize the prisons are full but you could fine them £50k and have them pay it off over then next few decades or something.
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
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.
Assuming there are 9 million people in London, that means that 1/45,000 Londoners experience a phone theft on a given day.
We can then (very crudely) estimate the probability that a Londoner has their phone stolen over a ten year period:
1 - ((1-45000)/45000)^(365*10) = 0.08
So 200 phones a day translates to about a 8% chance of getting your phone stolen over a period of ten years.
I'm obviously not suggesting that the calculation above be taken too seriously. But it shows that 200 phones being stolen a day in a city of 9 million people is consistent with phone theft being a significant but not overwhelming problem.
(The adult population of London is around 7 million, and kids are obviously also victims of phone theft, so you won't get a radically different answer if you look at the population over a certain age.)
That number also doesn’t take into account the significant number of tourists that visit every year, which from what I can see amounts to around ~20 million people.
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.
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'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.
"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. These are just the places I've been to, West London is meant to be much worse.
Again, never heard it. Never felt remotely unsafe. Don't know anyone who has had issues with it.
And can't find any actual data to corroborate that robberies have somehow reached such endemic levels.
EDIT: It gets comical to see that Met stats are now somehow trustworthy after the number of people here making a big deal of distrusting them. But notably the data shows the numbers to be small - in the hundreds per month - and having dropped significantly between 2018 and 2023. Furthermore, most of these crimes are burglary or theft, rather than crimes such as robberies or violence, so the chance of having them taken off your wrist is substanlly lower.
The article then covers an increase in "high-value" watch thefts from 2021 to 2022. Between 2021 and 2022 the numbers did in fact increase, and they were lower in 2021 than in 2023 as well. But we're talking 4885 watches total (not restricted to "high value") in 2021, of which about 1/3 are robberies. So you're much less likely to have your watch taken off you than e.g. your phone stolen.
Just past the edit window, so let me also add that the article points out a number of "high-value" watch thefts that suggests about a quarter of these thefts on a yearly basis would be "high-value".
If anything, these articles have made me feel more secure rather than less secure - these numbers are tiny given the size of London.
Sure, maybe don't go around flashing your watch if it's worth tens of thousands of pounds.
> 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.
Yes, that's a lot. And yet per the Crime Survey, in London we are less likely to be a victim of crime than in the country as a whole, and crimes are at one of the lowest levels in decades based on interviewing people about whether they have been victims of crime, not police reports or press.
I would not care about the data. Just go out and see for yourself. Maybe you are lucky and you somehow manage to avoid these areas or you go there at the time when not much is happening, like early in the morning or whatever.
Additionally, being alert does not equal to living in fear.
A company is engaging in a marketing stunt for a problem that people perceive to be disproportionately high.
Do you think this tells us anything other than perception? Which several people have already pointed out we know are out of whack with actual survey of peoples actual experience with crime?
It's clear there are many phone thefts. It's also clear people believe the extent of crime is far higher than it is. It seems like a perfect thing for a company like Curry's to profit from.
Look, they are not active all the time. 10 am in the morning on a Monday on a particular street, nothing might happen. It varies and I have no inside information.
If you look it up, you can see these snatching, it is recorded by CCTVs.
Looking at individual thefts is irrelevant. The aggregate data is what matters to my actual risk, and the actual data shows that the numbers are not significant.
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.
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.
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.
From The Guardian reporting on Crime Survey numbers for London relative to the rest:
"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 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.
The numbers I'm referring to are from the Crime Survey for England and Wales which surveys people rather than rely on crime reports, so police staffing is entirely irrelevant to these numbers.
This was literally pointed out in the comment you replied to.
When they are asked about their firsthand experience as victims of crime, they may still be untrustworthy but they're still going to be far more trustworthy than the alternatives.
The issue is there, they were just there at a time where these people who are snatching weren't there. 18 phone snatching per day on one street, but not at all hours, and not on all streets. It varies. But yeah, we want people's experiences. Maybe some of these people on HN did not experience it. Perhaps they could ask their friends and the friends of their friends.
The Crime Survey carries out large-scale surveys of a sample of 75,000 households. It's not some dinky little opinion poll.
It's not going to be perfect, but it gives a very solid snapshot of peoples experience with crime without the massive distortion we know we get from looking at similar sized samples asked what they think crime levels are.
> The Crime Survey carries out large-scale surveys of a sample of 75,000 households. It's not some dinky little opinion poll.
So? Sample size only addresses sampling error, not nonsampling error, for nonsampling error its exactly as bad as the dinkiest little poll on the same topic (and for sampling error, it's not much better; polls are the sizes they typically are because it doesn't actually take a very large scale to be fairly reliable when you only consider sampling error, and, again, adding more size doesn't help at all against nonsampling error.)
Ok, so what nonsampling errors in the Crime Survey make it unreliable in your view? What would you suggest as an alternative source of information about crime levels in England and Wales?
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.
Also... I literally just saw a cop walk past a lady overdosing as if all is fine, and did nothing to the woman who threw a bottle at the YouTuber. Who cares if it is on YouTube or not? I saw it regardless.
They aren't saying that crime doesn't exist, it's down compared to previously. You see how you and others can still experience crime even if it's down?
I'm guessing your solutions involve more police and anti immigration. While more social services and better prospects in life is what actually does something about the problem.
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?
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.
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.
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.
What makes you so confident that you have a more accurate perception of life in London than its inhabitants? You were very confidently dismissive of my report of my own personal experience, so I was a little surprised to find out that you don't even live here!
Let this be a salutary warning to HN readers that a huge amount of baseless nonsense gets written about crime in London.
I wasn't dismissive at all. I'm just noting that maybe the common HN visitor, which is most likely an academic with the means to live in suburbia or nicer districts, may live in a bubble. I haven't written anything about crime in london.
Let this be a salutary warning to HN readers that people get needlessly pissy when you question them about the backgrounds of their experiences.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well it's hyperbole alright, but a local measure helps not if it's not done the same way in all countries if you want to actually make a useful comparison.
Trying to find an international version leads me to ICVS and this[0] publication which likewise ranks London at the very top. By that data, the UK ranks average at per-capita crime but is second at the same people being victimized more than once, which I take points towards that the majority of the country is likely relatively normal, but a handful of cities have very concentrated crime rates that are raising statistics.
Do you have any other sources to show or do you just like pointing out that all of them are bad if they don't agree with you?
You conveniently left out that this ranking shows London top of 28 selected capital cities for a selection of 10 crimes in 2003/04, which we know from the Crime Survey for England and Wales was significantly closer to the UK all time peak.
You'll also note that the paper itself then provides data from additional capitals that it's conveniently not included in the main list. Several of those additional cities ranking above London. In other words, it's a sample that even the paper demonstrates isn't remotely comprehensive.
I don't need to provide any other sources - you're the one that made a claim that was based in "data" that was entirely worthless, and this new data still isn't even close to backing up the original claim.
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.
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.
Not really. There is consistent fearmongering about crime going on while crime rates go down. And consistent outcomes in studies where people feel safer where they live, but are totally convinced other places are massively dangerous. So, it is not just about people not reporting crimes.
Temporary or local issues are extrapolated and exaggerated (because some indeed arise) while improvements are completely ignored.
Ah yes, the politically motivated and non-replicatable studies that rely on ever-changing definitions of violent crimes through the decades, underreporting / police deciding not to prosecute or even show up (the rape and abuse of those poor girls in Rotherham didn’t show up in statistics for decades, or the rampant shoplifting in London) and the social studies pro-immigration echo chamber. Please tell me more.
The gold standard are surveys that just ask people "have you been the victim of the following crimes." This does not rely on police at all. This does not rely on a fuzzy definition of violent crime. People are not motivated to over or underreport things.
We can further cross check this data against things like insurance reports, since people tend to report things like vehicle theft.
People, when asked, report being victims of crime far less today than they did in the 90s.
Consistently replicated. Not dependent just on what was reported to the police either. Consistently having the same results in places where there is no immigration.
Just because you want the crime goes up does not mean it did. Just because you are scared of own shadow does not mean the reality of the world is so scary.
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.
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
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You appear to be connecting from an IP address in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately this site is no longer available to UK users. This is due to the requirements of the UK's Online Safety Act, which are not practical for this site to comply with. If you feel this is unjustified, I can only suggest that you write to your Member of Parliament. This site remains in operation for non-UK users, as they are outside the scope of the Act.
For more information see Ofcom's official site, and an unofficial guide.
Other web interfaces to Usenet are available, and may continue to allow UK users, see Wikipedia.
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.
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.
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.
Do keep in mind that the EUs approach is very different from the UK one.
The UK law is basically a "go figure it out", which inevitably leads to making shady deals with third parties that are now handling the data of citizens... privacy and data leakage issues abound.
The EU meanwhile is working on a whitelabel application that can confirm nothing other than "this user is above 18" (which they can do because the EU has national ID for basically anyone living in it. It also works for another set of age ranges, as the idea is to also use this to confirm stuff like buying alcohol) and is designed to be easy to implement for anyone without having to get approval from the EU first. (Technical specification is available here[0]). It's not perfect (last I saw, they're apparently tying it to Google Play Services for device verification), but it's a far better attempt than the UK/Australia are doing.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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].
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.
I have prepared a page that has a message of support for Palestine Action, as well as calls to dissolve parliament. I'll sleep on it, but I'll probably deploy tomorrow.
While I'm very interested to see what the outcome of your experiment, I think this choice of content will be a bad test. Calls for the dissolution of Parliament are innocuous, but support for a proscribed terrorist organisation is beyond the scope of Ofcom and, if it is investigated, would be investigated by the Secret Intelligence Service. Depending on the relationship that the country where you live has with the United Kingdom, you may be denied service by financial institutions, for example.
Starting with less extreme content, such as a how to buy drugs guide, and gradually escalating to provoke a response, would be wiser.
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.
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.
To "fall foul", i.e. be required to add highly effective age assurance, there's a number of tests you have to pass
One of the tests is:
> Are there a significant number of children using the service or is the service likely to attract a significant number of children.
I'd guess that HN would be in scope for the act overall - they provide user-to-user functionality and have a lot of users in the UK. Either they answer no to the questions above, or they answer yes and should have performed a risk assessment where they look at things like what kind of content is allowed, how the site is moderated, how do users contact each other etc etc.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I thought I remembered a current Reform UK MP voting in favour of something to do with the Online Safety Act, in the current parliament – but it couldn't have been the debate on the current parliamentary petition, because that hasn't happened yet.
I have since had another look. Lee Anderson was in power (as a Conservative), and abstained from https://votes.parliament.uk/votes/commons/division/1416#notr... – though I'm not sure what this vote was actually on, and this doesn't support my original claim (that Reform MPs voted in favour of the Online Safety Act). Perhaps someone with more understanding of British Parliamentary Procedure could look through the relevant votes and see whether my claim was actually correct.
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.
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
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
What is the answer?
To online safety for children? The same as offline safety; parenting and education. There's not much money in those though.
https://x.com/moo9000/status/1950866445186818209
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.
A more sensible approach to this law would be to require adult sites to include a clear marker in either an HTTP header or an HTML meta tag. For example:
<meta name="OnlineSafetyAct:SiteClassification" content="adult;nudity">
This would allow locally run browser content blockers to automatically detect such sites without blocking them individually, and it would be trivial for site operators to implement. Since it would be mandated by law, sites that refuse to comply could be subject to legal action.
Of course, this would still rely on parents taking the basic step of setting up a content blocker before allowing their children unrestricted internet access.
You can do something like this currently with schema.org metadata:
- https://schema.org/WebPage- https://schema.org/PeopleAudience
- https://schema.org/AdultOrientedEnumeration
But you can do this now: I made this for my sisters kids and my friend his Alzheimer dad years ago. Agree: its not mainstream or installable by just anyone, but if you are on HN it will take an old laptop with linux and chromium and a few hours.
I'm able to do this using the Google Family controls for my kids' mobiles. I've tied it down so much that they use them rarely and for specific purposes.
This is already fairly trivial to do. There are many DIY and commercial off-the-shelf solutions. The problem with all client-side blocking is that it can be bypassed by just...using a different computer. People who want this legislation want restrictions to apply everywhere, not just on parent-managed devices, so shifting the discussion to client-side blocks just makes our arguments trivial to dismiss as irrelevant.
I wish it was as simple as that
Definitely not current legislation at least, which is making things worse for everyone.
>What is the answer?
WHITELISTING. It's utterly infuriating the obvious, time tested strategy with all the technological pieces already in place and an easy slot-in for government isn't at the tip of everyone's tongue. Just setup a set of new TLDs, ".kids1", ".kids2", ".kids3" etc, with kids1 being appropriate for anyone ages 0-4 years old, kids2 ages 5-9, kids3 ages 10-14, etc. Or whatever permutation experts and the public say make the most sense. Governments can set the requirements for anyone or any organization who wants to register a domain there to ensure all content is controlled, no user submitted content (or only submissions from registered people/orgs like schools say), no algorithmic engagement usage allowed, no advertising or whatever else is desired. It's also trivial to add that in under country TLDs so every single nation that wants to regulate their own can do so to their own standards. An alternate similar approach would be to have a single ".[ccTLD].kids" domain and then legally required DNS txt info site-wide as well as standardized metadata tags at the top of every single page going into more granular detail about content by category (like if some parents though their kids were ready for a higher age bracket of world news before being ready for a higher bracket of something else).
With age-appropriate content under its own TLDs, all the other technical pieces are easy to slot in as well. It'd be absolutely trivial for OS makers to have parental control mode simply gate a given user into whatever TLDs match the age or content levels set by the parents. It's very easy to imagine a nice GUI at the router level combining TLD-restrictions with VLANs and PPSKs such that a parent can "add a child" and it spits out a separate WiFi password that gates the child into their own age appropriate stuff.
The general internet should be a free for all for adults (or adult level), period. Access at all should imply someone is ready to navigate it. Trying to restrict and sanitize it is evil, wrong, and also just plain fucking stupid since it'll never work well. We can easily make a child internet however.
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
Regarding Wikipedia - the people in change of these recent anti-consumer laws and ideas would love to shutdown Wikipedia permanently. It is not immediately bad for them, but it is in general a source of objective information which they hate. They would rather warp public opinion through paid for media and social accounts.
You may see the discussion here, please be civil:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...
> 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?
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.
You <-------> The point
If age restriction technology is now being introduced to prevent kids *viewing* "inappropriate" websites, then why are gambling websites being given a free pass?
The answer is to follow the money:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=gambling%20industry%20lobb...
They’ve already found a loophole for that: If you gamble with fake money (acquired through real money and a confusing set of currency conversions) and the prizes are jpegs of boat-girls (or horse-girls, as I hear are popular lately) or football players, you can sell to all the children you want.
Even if they don't, maybe go black for all weekends.
That wouldn’t address their liability.
It would raise awareness in the general population and increase justified resistance against this stupid law.
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.
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.
I think the risk is that it becomes framed as extortion, and would cause some proportion of voters - who at least right after the OSA was put in place remained relatively in favour of elements of it (though the polls have been wildly flawed) - to double down.
Hence, I think a total block would be better than a partial block, because that can be framed as legitimately risk mitigation and would be a lot harder to attack.
That said, some pressure would be better than no pressure, so if the alternative is no block, I'd prefer a partial block.
That could drive users to LLM services to fill in the gaps. I know a lot of people who just use LLMs instead of good ol internet searches because they are that lazy.
Many MUDs/BBSes operate via Telnet/SSH rather than HTTP, potentially creating a technical gray area in enforcement that highlights the law's poor adaptation to the diverse technical landscape of the internet.
Does the law specify HTTP specifically?
No.
>Wikipedia would just go black for the UK.
Five eyes says no.
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”
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.
Right now it is his ministers supporting this law when challenged in the media. The last out owns the smell.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, nor plot.
God, I hate so much these videos. My son son used to ask for these when he was younger, they were so bad...
> Next up: the Bedtime Is At Nine PM Act 2026
This is funny but actually has sort of existed for decades, in the sense of the TV watershed – no adult content before 9pm, after which point it's assumed children are in bed and not watching TV.
And yes, you are absolutely right that parents do often like these laws. Being a parent is hard, whatever the age of the kids, and parents will be in favour of things that make it easier. Whether that's making TV default-safe in the daytime, or making adult websites harder to access.
> 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?
The most shameful thing is that the only websites actually harmful to children, aka social media, aren't banned or behind an ID check.
This is not correct: the law primarily regulates what it calls "user-to-user" services, i.e. social media.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50
"All providers of regulated user-to-user services that are likely to be accessed by children must comply with the following duties in relation to each such service which they provide—
(a)the duties about children’s risk assessments set out in section 11, and
(b)the duties to protect children’s online safety set out in section 12(2) to (13)."
They are literally all accessible without any ID check.
I agree to an extent, but extreme porn is a huge problem for kids, in the UK at least.
Is it? I think the non pornographic misogynist content is actually a more serious issue. I've heard plenty of teachers complaining about Andrew Tate.
(so-called ""extreme porn"" was banned entirely by UK law a year or two ago)
What is the problem with it? When I was a kid I did look at porn, turned out fine. How is it a huge problem for kids in the UK exactly? Or what do you mean by "extreme" here? I did not look at "extreme porn" if I think I know what you mean.
A huge number of lemmings screaming "Think of the Children!" does not actually mean there's a huge problem.
And Meta et el will happily serve it to you also.
> 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?
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.
These are two different things though
It's the same "but think of the children and their safety" kind of thing.
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.
It's never about children safety, it's about installing a totalitarian regime using children safety as an excuse to silence the opposition.
No, that sense is not there, because we don't have any "no drugs for children" laws. Those don't exist - drugs are illegal across the board, unless they're prescribed, but prescription drugs are good for kids.
The closest thing we have is tobacco and alcohol. But that's still very far off.
Its true children can't buy alcohol, but they can't buy Internet access either. But, they can drink alcohol, and they can view the internet.
There's nothing stopping a parent from just giving little Timmy wine. All bets are off once you show ID at the corner store and go home.
Similarly, all bets are off after you show ID and proof of residence to your Teleco and they install Internet connection. ... Until now.
This is an entirely novel and never before seen type of law and type of reasoning. It may seem, on the surface, reasonable or done before. But if you think about it, it's not.
This isn't your typical brand of "think of the children".
Literal cultural suicide.
I like it - request that greek statues cover up in case children see
Or start breaking statues penises again
That would at least help change size expectations!
Easier to just destroy it all like ISIS did.
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).
I don’t think it has 4k videos of rape porn on loop tho
Did you comment in the wrong thread? How is Michelangelo's David "rape porn on loop"?
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"...
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.
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.
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.
Rising since 2015, but legitimately barely. Enough to look into and attempt to remedy of course, but nowhere near enough to justify the absolutely unhinged rhetoric constantly being used to justify awful legislation and amoral crackdowns.
You can specifically look at people's assumption at violent crime rates charted against actual violent crime rates and see that the gap has never been wider.
Also, 1980 to 2025 is not a "very specific time frame" and it still shows the trend described above. Very large cliff in the 90s we are still nowhere near.
For England and Wales at least this is not remotely supported by the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which shows levels have mostly continued to drop since 2015 with the exception of a couple of minor upticks, to a level we not seen at any point since the Crime Survey started in 1982.
And the Telegraph and most right wing sources. Sadiq Khan is a popular scapegoat for it all.
First thing is to question if the crime stats are not intentionally muddled by changing categories of certain crimes or not reporting them at all to make the numbers look better.
These all are from BBC articles from 2024 and 2025:
- According to the Office for National Statistics, many crimes recorded against people increased between the years ending June 2015 and March 2025, including violence against the person (40%), possession of offensive weapons (23%), sexual offences (75%) and theft from the person (207%).
- The number of serious offences involving a knife or sharp object recorded in the year ending March 2024 in England and Wales was 54% higher than the figure for 2016.
- More than twice as many knife crime offences were recorded in Essex in the 12 months to March 2024, than the figure for 2016.
- Greater Manchester Police has recorded 1,345 knife-enabled robberies in the past 12 months, up from 1,288 recorded between July 2023 and June 2024.
- Rape Crisis has described a "staggering" 15% rise in the number of rapes and attempted rapes recorded in Scotland last year as "alarming". Official statistics published on Tuesday, show sexual crimes increased by 3% overall to the second highest level since 1971. The figures show the number of sexual crimes reported last year was 14,892, up from 14,484 in 2023-24 - a 45% increase in the last decade. Rape and attempted rape reports increased from 2,522 in 2023-24 to 2,897 in 2024-25, up 60% for the same figures 10 years ago.
- Police in England and Wales have recorded the highest number of rapes and sexual offences in 20 years. Forces recorded 194,683 sexual offences in 2021-22, including 70,330 rapes, the highest number since records began in 2002/03. The number of sex offences recorded by forces in England and Wales has more than doubled in the past seven years, from 88,576 in 2014/15 to 194,683 in 2021-22. Rape offences have nearly doubled in the past six years, from 36,320 in 2015-16 to 70,330 in the year to March.
- Personal theft up 22% in England and Wales, ONS says. Personal thefts recorded by police in England and Wales were up 22% in 2024 from the previous year, according to official figures. Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows police recorded 152,416 thefts from the person offences last year, the highest since the current data methods began in 2003.
- It estimated that there were 9.6 million incidents of what is described as "headline crime" in 2024 - which includes theft, robbery, criminal damage, fraud, computer misuse, and violence with or without injury.
- The latest CSEW survey reported that at the end of 2024: People's experiences of theft had gone up by 13% - including a 50% rise in theft from the person offences, such as mobile phone theft. Theft from outside a dwelling - such as courier packages being taken from people's doorsteps - went up by 19% Fraud incidents, including bank and credit account fraud, were up by 33% to around 4.1 million incidents - with around 3 million incidents involving a loss and 2.1 million victims fully reimbursed in these cases
- More than 700,000 vehicles were broken into last year - often with the help of high-tech electronic devices, including so-called signal jammers, which are thought to play a part in four out of 10 vehicle thefts nationwide.
- Shoplifting hits record high in England and Wales There were 530,643 reported shoplifting offences in the year to March, a 20% increase from the previous year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
- Pharmacies report surge in shoplifting and aggression Around nine in 10 pharmacies have reported an increase in shoplifting and aggression towards staff in the past year. A survey of 500 pharmacies by the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) also found 87% had experienced at least one instance of intimidating behaviour towards workers, while 22% said they had seen staff physically assaulted.
But homicide rate (per 100K) dropped gradually after rising for 30 years to its record high in 2003, so, yay I guess!
You'll note that the majority of these rely on police reports.
You then mention CSEW for one year, ignoring that the overall long term trend is down from a high in 1994-95.
CSEW consistently captures a far higher rate of crime than police reports because it doesn't rely on police reporting changes, or peoples willingness to report.
In other words: Your wall of text is irrelevant.
Look at the CSEW data, and the trends all the way back to its start in 1982.
Doesn't mean there aren't problems, and hotspots, or specific crimes that have different trends, but overall we're near a historical low.
[dead]
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".
Yeah it's odd and annoying. I realize the prisons are full but you could fine them £50k and have them pay it off over then next few decades or something.
They don't want you to be able to talk about their incompetence or organize protests.
There's a great documentary on the topic, it's called "Yes Minister"
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
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.
200 phones a day doesn’t sound like that many given the size of the population and the number of tourists.
Supposedly 39% of phone thefts in Europe happen in the UK https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/26/mobile-ph...
but it could be like Tokyo....
WTF yes it does.
10 million people live in London. Surely you'd expect at least some theft of belongings
Let's do some back-of-an-envelope stats on this.
Assuming there are 9 million people in London, that means that 1/45,000 Londoners experience a phone theft on a given day.
We can then (very crudely) estimate the probability that a Londoner has their phone stolen over a ten year period:
So 200 phones a day translates to about a 8% chance of getting your phone stolen over a period of ten years.I'm obviously not suggesting that the calculation above be taken too seriously. But it shows that 200 phones being stolen a day in a city of 9 million people is consistent with phone theft being a significant but not overwhelming problem.
(The adult population of London is around 7 million, and kids are obviously also victims of phone theft, so you won't get a radically different answer if you look at the population over a certain age.)
> 1 - ((1-45000)/45000)^(36510) = 0.08
I think you mean:
Whilst it doesn't matter if the exponent is even (such as 3650 above) using (1-45000)/45000 will give a wrong estimation for odd exponents.That number also doesn’t take into account the significant number of tourists that visit every year, which from what I can see amounts to around ~20 million people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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. These are just the places I've been to, West London is meant to be much worse.
Edit: Here are some links I found
- "Machete-ban petition launched as London watch robberies rise" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-64991862
- Statistics for stolen watches from 2018 to 2023 https://www.met.police.uk/foi-ai/metropolitan-police/disclos...
Again, never heard it. Never felt remotely unsafe. Don't know anyone who has had issues with it.
And can't find any actual data to corroborate that robberies have somehow reached such endemic levels.
EDIT: It gets comical to see that Met stats are now somehow trustworthy after the number of people here making a big deal of distrusting them. But notably the data shows the numbers to be small - in the hundreds per month - and having dropped significantly between 2018 and 2023. Furthermore, most of these crimes are burglary or theft, rather than crimes such as robberies or violence, so the chance of having them taken off your wrist is substanlly lower.
The article then covers an increase in "high-value" watch thefts from 2021 to 2022. Between 2021 and 2022 the numbers did in fact increase, and they were lower in 2021 than in 2023 as well. But we're talking 4885 watches total (not restricted to "high value") in 2021, of which about 1/3 are robberies. So you're much less likely to have your watch taken off you than e.g. your phone stolen.
Just past the edit window, so let me also add that the article points out a number of "high-value" watch thefts that suggests about a quarter of these thefts on a yearly basis would be "high-value".
If anything, these articles have made me feel more secure rather than less secure - these numbers are tiny given the size of London.
Sure, maybe don't go around flashing your watch if it's worth tens of thousands of pounds.
> 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.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/26/mobile-ph...
If you do not like The Guardian, search for "central london phone snatching".
Yes, that's a lot. And yet per the Crime Survey, in London we are less likely to be a victim of crime than in the country as a whole, and crimes are at one of the lowest levels in decades based on interviewing people about whether they have been victims of crime, not police reports or press.
You are free to believe that, but I would still be on alert.
I'm not going to live in fear due to the fevered fictions drived by the gutter press and not supported by any data.
I would not care about the data. Just go out and see for yourself. Maybe you are lucky and you somehow manage to avoid these areas or you go there at the time when not much is happening, like early in the morning or whatever.
Additionally, being alert does not equal to living in fear.
I have "gone out and seen for myself" and what I see has consistently matched the data.
What you're describing here reads very much as cowering in fear to me.
And this kind of fear-mongering with no relation to reality is actively harmful and part of what is seriously damaging the UK as a society.
https://crimestoppers-uk.org/news-media/news/2025/aug/currys...
Thoughts?
A company is engaging in a marketing stunt for a problem that people perceive to be disproportionately high.
Do you think this tells us anything other than perception? Which several people have already pointed out we know are out of whack with actual survey of peoples actual experience with crime?
It's clear there are many phone thefts. It's also clear people believe the extent of crime is far higher than it is. It seems like a perfect thing for a company like Curry's to profit from.
Look, they are not active all the time. 10 am in the morning on a Monday on a particular street, nothing might happen. It varies and I have no inside information.
If you look it up, you can see these snatching, it is recorded by CCTVs.
Looking at individual thefts is irrelevant. The aggregate data is what matters to my actual risk, and the actual data shows that the numbers are not significant.
>most of the areas that used to be sketchy are now not
That's just gentrification of those areas. Others became in the process.
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.
It's become a feedback loop of "crime", "erosion of trust", "polarisation of communities".
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.
I haven’t personally noticed London getting any more dangerous over the past 10 years that I’ve lived here.
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.
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.
From The Guardian reporting on Crime Survey numbers for London relative to the rest:
"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 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.
The numbers I'm referring to are from the Crime Survey for England and Wales which surveys people rather than rely on crime reports, so police staffing is entirely irrelevant to these numbers.
This was literally pointed out in the comment you replied to.
People are inherently unstrustworthy sources of such data.
When they are asked about their firsthand experience as victims of crime, they may still be untrustworthy but they're still going to be far more trustworthy than the alternatives.
So if "people's experiences" are an untrustworthy source of data
and "official figures" are an untrustworthy source of data
pray tell us just what could possibly be a trustworthy source of data??
"Go outside and look for yourself" that's people's experiences
> So if "people's experiences" are an untrustworthy source of data
People's experiences are, as yet, an inaccessible source of data.
People's claims about their experiences are an often untrustworthy source of data.
> pray tell us just what could possibly be a trustworthy source of data??
The absence of an trustworthy, accessible source of data does not make untrustworthy or inaccessible sources of data trustworthy or accessible.
> "Go outside and look for yourself" that's people's experiences
No, its not "people's experiences", but its also not a broad, general, representative source of data.
I think the problem here is N = 1..4 or whatever.
The issue is there, they were just there at a time where these people who are snatching weren't there. 18 phone snatching per day on one street, but not at all hours, and not on all streets. It varies. But yeah, we want people's experiences. Maybe some of these people on HN did not experience it. Perhaps they could ask their friends and the friends of their friends.
The Crime Survey carries out large-scale surveys of a sample of 75,000 households. It's not some dinky little opinion poll.
It's not going to be perfect, but it gives a very solid snapshot of peoples experience with crime without the massive distortion we know we get from looking at similar sized samples asked what they think crime levels are.
> The Crime Survey carries out large-scale surveys of a sample of 75,000 households. It's not some dinky little opinion poll.
So? Sample size only addresses sampling error, not nonsampling error, for nonsampling error its exactly as bad as the dinkiest little poll on the same topic (and for sampling error, it's not much better; polls are the sizes they typically are because it doesn't actually take a very large scale to be fairly reliable when you only consider sampling error, and, again, adding more size doesn't help at all against nonsampling error.)
Ok, so what nonsampling errors in the Crime Survey make it unreliable in your view? What would you suggest as an alternative source of information about crime levels in England and Wales?
My point is that we don't really have reliable data.
> 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)
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.
Also... I literally just saw a cop walk past a lady overdosing as if all is fine, and did nothing to the woman who threw a bottle at the YouTuber. Who cares if it is on YouTube or not? I saw it regardless.
Is an £800 watch sufficiently expensive enough? I've been for a walk and nothing happened.
It does not happen at all hours, or on all streets.
They aren't saying that crime doesn't exist, it's down compared to previously. You see how you and others can still experience crime even if it's down?
I'm guessing your solutions involve more police and anti immigration. While more social services and better prospects in life is what actually does something about the problem.
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.
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]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP6tygFIQq0
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP6tygFIQq0&t=1794s
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Have you considered that you live in a bubble?
I live in London (Tower Hamlets to be specific). Your profile says that you live in Munich.
Of course, no one who lives in Munich ever dares to venture into London. Silly me!
What makes you so confident that you have a more accurate perception of life in London than its inhabitants? You were very confidently dismissive of my report of my own personal experience, so I was a little surprised to find out that you don't even live here!
Let this be a salutary warning to HN readers that a huge amount of baseless nonsense gets written about crime in London.
I wasn't dismissive at all. I'm just noting that maybe the common HN visitor, which is most likely an academic with the means to live in suburbia or nicer districts, may live in a bubble. I haven't written anything about crime in london.
Let this be a salutary warning to HN readers that people get needlessly pissy when you question them about the backgrounds of their experiences.
Ok, to your question: no, I do not live in some kind of upscale zero crime bubble. I live near Mile End station.
(And also, where on Earth did you get the idea that academics in London can afford to live in the nice districts, or that most HNers are academics?)
> 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.)
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.
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.
How convenient for governments to point to crime statistics that they themselves control while police in instances doesn't even respond to calls.
Out of the top four crime ridden cities in entire Europe, three are British.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/region_rankings_current.jsp?reg...
Based on crowdsourced data.
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
Well are you aware of any better metrics?
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.
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.
Well it's hyperbole alright, but a local measure helps not if it's not done the same way in all countries if you want to actually make a useful comparison.
Trying to find an international version leads me to ICVS and this[0] publication which likewise ranks London at the very top. By that data, the UK ranks average at per-capita crime but is second at the same people being victimized more than once, which I take points towards that the majority of the country is likely relatively normal, but a handful of cities have very concentrated crime rates that are raising statistics.
Do you have any other sources to show or do you just like pointing out that all of them are bad if they don't agree with you?
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282573613_Criminal_...
You conveniently left out that this ranking shows London top of 28 selected capital cities for a selection of 10 crimes in 2003/04, which we know from the Crime Survey for England and Wales was significantly closer to the UK all time peak.
You'll also note that the paper itself then provides data from additional capitals that it's conveniently not included in the main list. Several of those additional cities ranking above London. In other words, it's a sample that even the paper demonstrates isn't remotely comprehensive.
I don't need to provide any other sources - you're the one that made a claim that was based in "data" that was entirely worthless, and this new data still isn't even close to backing up the original claim.
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.
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.
https://policinginsight.com/feature/analysis/most-crime-has-...
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.
That’s some grade A gaslighting you’re attempting.
Not really. There is consistent fearmongering about crime going on while crime rates go down. And consistent outcomes in studies where people feel safer where they live, but are totally convinced other places are massively dangerous. So, it is not just about people not reporting crimes.
Temporary or local issues are extrapolated and exaggerated (because some indeed arise) while improvements are completely ignored.
Ah yes, the politically motivated and non-replicatable studies that rely on ever-changing definitions of violent crimes through the decades, underreporting / police deciding not to prosecute or even show up (the rape and abuse of those poor girls in Rotherham didn’t show up in statistics for decades, or the rampant shoplifting in London) and the social studies pro-immigration echo chamber. Please tell me more.
The gold standard are surveys that just ask people "have you been the victim of the following crimes." This does not rely on police at all. This does not rely on a fuzzy definition of violent crime. People are not motivated to over or underreport things.
We can further cross check this data against things like insurance reports, since people tend to report things like vehicle theft.
People, when asked, report being victims of crime far less today than they did in the 90s.
Consistently replicated. Not dependent just on what was reported to the police either. Consistently having the same results in places where there is no immigration.
Just because you want the crime goes up does not mean it did. Just because you are scared of own shadow does not mean the reality of the world is so scary.
Based on your last paragraph, thanks for confirming your attempts at gaslighting. Just fyi, we see through it, and we are sure not falling for it.
You do not know what gaslighting is.
I do.
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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.
Any country or city can be made to look safe if crime is not prosecuted or policed.
Some similar discussions from earlier this year,
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)
Lobsters hasn't been blocked here in the UK.
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
> 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?!?
I think it is based on tags, so if you tag stuff as NSFW then you get an age challenge.
So if we want to troll Brits online we just post mildly inappropriate stuff in a any random thread and they're instantly locket out until they ID?
That would be hilarious.
Reddit also likes to randomly tag posts and subreddits as NSFW to force people to make accounts.
The Reddit link works fine with old.reddit. New Reddit has always required an account for nsfw subs.
Yeah it’s nsfw tag based on reddit. So not particularly fine grained or accurate
On this note, how does this work? Do they terminate TLS now?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
They didn't block it. The site owners have chosen to not show the site to UK users for Legal Reasons.
A bit like choosing to give up your wallet with a gun to your head
A ridiculous analogy but not entirely
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.
More here:
https://x.com/moo9000/status/1950866445186818209
The official narrative is beyond ridiculous: https://x.com/AkkadSecretary/status/1950318214258516161
> 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
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.
[1] https://x.com/GregHadfield/status/1878113938593730650?lang=e...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivor_Caplin
Every accusation is a confession is not even funny anymore at this point
You are right, my bad.
This is insane, how long will it take them to overreach and abuse their power for political gain?
This is already part of a long line of laws specifically used for abuse of power and political gain...
They already are...
Considering that this already constitutes an insane overreach and abuse of power, not long.
c2000 with the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act[0]?
[0] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/contents
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.
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.
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.
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.
There was an entry claiming, as far as I could tell, that all of Reddit was shutdown.
Note that this is not just a UK thing but also in several US states: https://avpassociation.com/4271-2/
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.
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.
Here's my geoblock message for https://newsgrouper.org -
Blocked due to UK Online Safety Act
You appear to be connecting from an IP address in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately this site is no longer available to UK users. This is due to the requirements of the UK's Online Safety Act, which are not practical for this site to comply with. If you feel this is unjustified, I can only suggest that you write to your Member of Parliament. This site remains in operation for non-UK users, as they are outside the scope of the Act.
For more information see Ofcom's official site, and an unofficial guide.
Other web interfaces to Usenet are available, and may continue to allow UK users, see Wikipedia.
I learn about nice sites / pages there I did not know before.
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?
sites have been allowed to estimate age based on account age and digital fingerprinting.
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.
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.
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.
Also the EU's population is 450 million, while the UK's is 69 million. So losing the users stings 85% less.
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.
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...
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.
Do keep in mind that the EUs approach is very different from the UK one.
The UK law is basically a "go figure it out", which inevitably leads to making shady deals with third parties that are now handling the data of citizens... privacy and data leakage issues abound.
The EU meanwhile is working on a whitelabel application that can confirm nothing other than "this user is above 18" (which they can do because the EU has national ID for basically anyone living in it. It also works for another set of age ranges, as the idea is to also use this to confirm stuff like buying alcohol) and is designed to be easy to implement for anyone without having to get approval from the EU first. (Technical specification is available here[0]). It's not perfect (last I saw, they're apparently tying it to Google Play Services for device verification), but it's a far better attempt than the UK/Australia are doing.
[0]: https://ageverification.dev
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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
There are so many large sites which use consent-or-pay with no enforcement action taken though.
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.
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.
Would you mind elaborating on your statement? How is the GDPR invasive? Invasive from the content providers' POV?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Blocked. By Order the Queen.
I'm sure someone could whip up some merch super quickly as souvenirs/protest
> By Order the Queen
The King. Sorry to spoil The Crown for you, but Queen Elisabeth II has been dead for a few years.
Chuck Trey (is that lese majeste?) has male heirs, too. Unlikely that we'll see another Queen of the commonwealth in our lifetime.
What rock are you living under; our Queen died a while ago now. It will be by order of the King these days : - )
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.
Block Save the King
> 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.)
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.
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].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_of_England
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.
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.
I have prepared a page that has a message of support for Palestine Action, as well as calls to dissolve parliament. I'll sleep on it, but I'll probably deploy tomorrow.
While I'm very interested to see what the outcome of your experiment, I think this choice of content will be a bad test. Calls for the dissolution of Parliament are innocuous, but support for a proscribed terrorist organisation is beyond the scope of Ofcom and, if it is investigated, would be investigated by the Secret Intelligence Service. Depending on the relationship that the country where you live has with the United Kingdom, you may be denied service by financial institutions, for example.
Starting with less extreme content, such as a how to buy drugs guide, and gradually escalating to provoke a response, would be wiser.
Extend all your thoughts to Europe. UK and Australia are just the "bad cop".
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.
Yes, the UK is so unsuccessful a large number of Indians want to move there every year.
Being a better place to live than India is an extremely low bar.
Source: Lived in India for 15 years.
Just for economical reasons, not because of great culture or anything like that.
Haha. The "Magic Soil" theory. The UK (and Western culture in general) is the cause of the economic success. They are indivisible.
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If the aristocrats were in control we wouldn't have these problems. They stopped running things a long time ago.
The aristocrats were removed long ago. Bankers have run the UK since the Age of Sail.
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.
Fine, it's not as much an aristocracy as a more general nobility, to an extent competing with foreign oligarchs and governments for control.
E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords and so on.
Anyone know why news.ycombinator.com hasn't fallen foul of this legislation?
To "fall foul", i.e. be required to add highly effective age assurance, there's a number of tests you have to pass
One of the tests is:
> Are there a significant number of children using the service or is the service likely to attract a significant number of children.
I'd guess that HN would be in scope for the act overall - they provide user-to-user functionality and have a lot of users in the UK. Either they answer no to the questions above, or they answer yes and should have performed a risk assessment where they look at things like what kind of content is allowed, how the site is moderated, how do users contact each other etc etc.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
reddit/x.com/4chan
Being British sounds genuinely awful.
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.
Starmer is as authoritarian as the Tories at this point. There is no difference here.
I'm resigned to the fact we need the next four years to be sufficiently awful, that voters will want radical change in 2029.
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)
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.
Do you have an example, please?
I wasn't aware that any Reform MPs were in power back in 2023 when the Online Safety Act passed through parliament?
I thought I remembered a current Reform UK MP voting in favour of something to do with the Online Safety Act, in the current parliament – but it couldn't have been the debate on the current parliamentary petition, because that hasn't happened yet.
I have since had another look. Lee Anderson was in power (as a Conservative), and abstained from https://votes.parliament.uk/votes/commons/division/1416#notr... – though I'm not sure what this vote was actually on, and this doesn't support my original claim (that Reform MPs voted in favour of the Online Safety Act). Perhaps someone with more understanding of British Parliamentary Procedure could look through the relevant votes and see whether my claim was actually correct.
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.
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.
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!
It is.
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
It's the J's.
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
> 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.
You can make a backdoor that only the good guys can access--it's not even hard thanks to public key cryptography. The problems are:
(1) The good guys might be sloppy in how they handle you data, so they might leak or or they themselves might get hacked.
(2) The good guys might later become the bad guys.
Eh? Why the lobste.rs?
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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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because it's going to a third party.
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.