Yep. That online safety bill is working hard to protect the children.

megatron-uk wrote on 2025-09-30, 08:15:

Yep. That online safety bill is working hard to protect the children.

Do I hear the sound of chickens roosting 😀 ... https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre … -investigation/

And so begins the walled garden of the UK 'internet'.

Clowns in charge. The whole lot of them.

I agree. If they impose a penalty then imgur can just ignore it.

More sites will follow.

megatron-uk wrote on 2025-09-30, 08:15:

Yep. That online safety bill is working hard to protect the children.

Any chance the parents could raise their kids and get the government out of my damn business?

Precisely my position on this. I don't use "the internet" as a substitute child minder for my kids.

Big Pink wrote on 2025-09-30, 20:12:

Any chance the parents could raise their kids and get the government out of my damn business?

Apparently not. The latest trend of parents is to just put their children infront of a smartphone / tablet / internet connected appliance and walk off with as close to zero human interaction possible.

Hmm, that explains why some pictures in threads were popping up with the content not available message.
Seems like a heavy handed response from imgur on a GDPR equivalent compliance thing rather than the OSA directly, hopefully there's a solution or method to proxy soon since so many images will be missing now for us UK users 😒

The UK is slipping further and further into an authoritarian state.
I was talking to the guys I work with the other day and they had no idea just how much the internet is censored in the UK.

The government is now also talking about age-restricting VPNs. Is that doable?

Perhaps they thought that little novel by George Orwell was a "how to" manual...

It is getting worse by the day. We truly are living in the land of "thought crime" now, where saying the wrong thing on social media or upsetting someone can see you sent to prison for longer than if you were to actually cause physical harm to someone.

I cannot believe how far we have fallen in terms of civil liberties in the last decade.

I always thought I was a fairly liberal minded person, but the last few successive governments have just proceeded to trample all over us in the name of "safety".

The latest attempt to save us from ourselves is the banning of "2 for 1" deals on unhealthy food in England.....

You can always tell whether a government is serious about "protecting" people from X, Y, or Z bad thing if they go after the leaves vs. the roots.

The leaves being the users, and the roots being the producers.

If they wanted to ban pornography, for example, they would target the pornographers themselves.

But if they just wanted an excuse to have fine grained control over what you can view or say on the internet, so they can do whatever they want without having to deal with inconvenient public outcry, they would implement a system of control ostensibly to prevent users from viewing such content.

Labour lost power in 2010 in large part because of the internet. (They could censor newspapers and TV networks but not the internet.)

Guess what's the first thing they do on getting back into power?

Errius wrote on 2025-10-02, 12:56:

The government is now also talking about age-restricting VPNs. Is that doable?

Theyre talking about doing that because they know a VPN can be used to Circumvent the age verifications they have enforced.
Yes it would be possible for them to do it if they wanted to for the vast majority of the country. If you really wanted to you could still access a VPN without age verification.
Its all along the same lines as the BNCs we used to use on IRC.

Age verification might not be a bad thing in its own right, it stops those who should be there from being there, in theory. Most people who shouldnt be there wouldnt know how to use the work arounds, especially as a lot of them are quite old now.

Limiting access to VPNs was inevitable once they introduced age restrictions to any given web site.
VPNs were talked about in the house at the time the Online safety act bill was first tabled.

Its just the first few steps towards 1984.
The UK is half a dozen steps along that road and nobody is talking about it now because its taken one piece at a time.

Errius wrote on 2025-10-02, 20:40:

Labour lost power in 2010 in large part because of the internet. (They could censor newspapers and TV networks but not the internet.)

Guess what's the first thing they do on getting back into power?

It wasnt just labour who limited the internet.
The tories introduced the Digital economy act in 2017 which was the first genesis of the online safety act but it was dropped (later picked up and completed by labour)
They also introduced the Investigatory powers act in 2016, which crept under the radar for most people, but had sweeping powers to farm data from ISPs..
The Online safety act was started in 2023...
Counter terrorism and security act was a tory act, which introduced monitoring in our schools for extremism.
Public order act amendments is where we get a lot of people sent to prison for social media posts.

It doesnt matter if its labour or tory in charge at the time the people who are making the changes are ever present in the system, you can see that by the continuity in the changes made.
If they were incharge then it would look like a patchwork quilt, but it doesnt. The introductions and changes show singlemindedness of purpose in their introduction and amendments.

Errius wrote on 2025-10-02, 20:40:

Labour lost power in 2010 in large part because of the internet. (They could censor newspapers and TV networks but not the internet.)

Guess what's the first thing they do on getting back into power?

And the moved "theyve" made ever since have done nothing but close that loophole.

I completely agree - it's not just one party; it's all of them, and the hangers-on behind the scenes who are unelected and subject to no public scrutiny.

They are all as bad as each other in this regard.

We are sleepwalking towards a mass surveillance society where the government will be able to access and control every aspect of your life.

... and it is being facilitated by the uninformed masses who respond with "so what? I've got nothing to hide".

EU also has plans on mass control:
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

megatron-uk wrote on 2025-10-03, 07:01:

... and it is being facilitated by the uninformed masses who respond with "so what? I've got nothing to hide".

this is the worst part

Discussions are always couched in terms of the specific details of some current issue for which the restriction is being raised - few people point out that whatever the issue is the 'answer' is always the same. Such restrictions really do come up again and again for each new issue, eventually becoming law

People in general may have nothing to hide but fail to realise that laws can change (and do, and the past can be used), they fail to realise that their 'boring' data isn't being looked at by people but by computers, that mix ups (like credit data mix ups) can have awful repercussions, that they are more manipulatable than they realise (just think effectiveness of 'marketing') and actors with that data are in a position of influence over them (even if its not obvious).

There are so many dystopian media from greats like brave new world, 1984 to later works - The Circle, Snow Crash and films like equilibrium, brazil, elysium, black mirror and loads of young adult dystopia fiction too. You'd think people would be wary but i suspect many are welcoming or neutral about controls and the absence of privacy, having been conditioned to it through their use of social media etc and the increasingly authoritarian tendencies relating to behaviour and language across the whole spectrum of political viewpoints

Restrictions are coming to Australia later this year. If some site demands that I provide proof of who I am or my age, I will NOT comply. I don't trust these private foreign gigantic corporations with my identification documents.

If I therefore get blocked, then so be it. Better than being under some nameless bureaucrat's thumb.

The govt has said that any site that doesn't enforce its edicts will be fined $49.5 million. Luckily for those sites, they are all foreign ones, so they can just ignore the fines, and they can also ignore whatever the govt says. If they then get blocked, I'm sure the people will find a way around it. My message to those sites: don't cave in.