A late update – the debate transcript was posted here in December.
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Rather depressing that the “concerns of small sites and individuals” are constantly rejected by speaker after speaker with “but what about the children?”
Also, they seem unaware of the effects of the act on the Internet as a whole, where it comes to smaller sites/creators not even in the UK.
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The right hon. Poster makes a powerful and eloquent comment, a marvel of online discourse which I firmly believe ought to be written into the internet’s hallowed Halls of Astuteness for the enlightenment of generations to come. It is important that we listen to concerns. I was fortunate enough to meet with some of my constituents in San Junipero and hear their concerns on this vital issue. Does the right hon. Poster agree that the children are our future?
sorry
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From the benches: [[INCHOATE BRAYING]]
The debate transcript is incredibly long, so I just read the end, but it doesn’t look like the act is going away anytime soon.
It is entirely natural that the first attempt at regulation and legislation will not get everything right and that it will require evolution. The Online Safety Act was a landmark attempt to regulate online harms, but I think it is fair to say that the consensus that we have heard today is that it needs to evolve—that we should be looking not to repeal the Act but to evolve at pace and ensure implementation at pace, so that we tackle online harms in a way that is consistent with our British values and the freedoms of expression and association that we have heard about.
Bad times for digital privacy and free speech. I’d encourage everyone to get a VPN while they still can. There are a bunch of free VPNs for browsers, and stuff like Proton VPN for mobile. VPNs help people get around geographic blocking by making it impossible for sites or apps to tell you’re from the UK. Firefox, my browser of choice, also now has a VPN built in.
Sometimes I wonder if the internet of the future will look like China’s, with geographically distributed censorship everywhere.
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don’t worry about jumping to the end with a parliamentary debate: actually, I’m infamous in being “the one who read a parlamentary debate without falling asleep”…
brief but hopefully interesting tidbit on Information Technology is amazing how Italian Parliament (the infrastructure, NOT the instituition !) manage to interface an 1880s device to the modern IT system (to the point that the stenographic debate is in near-real time in the sites of Italian parliament, and the next morning the .pdf is generated and published (sorry, seems that there’s no English pages on the device in question):
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Insidiously, a lot of things are soft-blocking VPNS now. and it doesn’t matter which one you use, they know. YouTube is one that almost never works through a vpn, for ex.
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Well. R.I.P. to those IPv4 addresses never being available in the future, and R.I.P. to any company that gets saddled with them during network restructuring.
Living in the era of dying internet access points, I guess. Hope it was worth it.
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I plugged the Wikipedia page into English, and it’s a good read. The English word “keyboard” can refer to both a piano keyboard and a computer keyboard, but until now I never considered the idea of merging the two and typing with a piano keyboard. What an instrument.
(On a completely unrelated note, while I was trying to look up the Michela typing method without much success, I found some articles about a bizarre private [public, see jwalrus’s correction below] high school called Michaela Community School, described as the “strictest school in Britain”:
The school emphasises discipline and has a traditional style of teaching. There is a “zero tolerance” policy regarding poor behaviour. A “boot camp” week at the start of the year teaches the new year 7 pupils the rules and the consequences of breaking them. There is a strict uniform code and no group work. Children sit in rows, learn by rote and walk in single file between classrooms. Staff at the school “tend to reject most of the accepted wisdoms of the 21st century.” Pupils must be silent in school corridors and are forbidden to gather in groups larger than four.
…In March 2023, in response to pupils praying in the yard, the school introduced a ban on “prayer rituals”, stating that allowing prayers risked "undermining inclusion and social cohesion between pupils’. A Muslim pupil subsequently sued the school on discrimination and human rights grounds. In April 2024 the High Court upheld the ban on appeal. The school’s founder and head teacher Katharine Birbalsingh said the ruling was a “victory for all schools”.
Whenever I think my own high school experiences were bad, I’m reminded it always could have been worse.)
For me, Youtube works on my phone, and on rare occasions it’s spotty on desktop, but it functions more often than not. Often I can clear cookies or switch the location to get around being blocked. I use a paid VPN on both mobile and desktop, so I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
I agree that VPN softblocks are immensely annoying, though. Reddit is a big one, as most of my available VPN locations can’t access Reddit links at all. They just refuse to load and instead present me with a message saying I can’t access the site due to a “security policy”. Ironically, I can access Reddit links if I use a London VPN location, though it means I’m subjected to UK Safety Act censorship. The London location is the only one I’ve found so far that works.
The other workaround I have is to use Tor. For whatever reason, even though I can’t access Reddit through my VPN, using Tor Browser works perfectly fine. I don’t know what the security team’s logic was behind that one. Fortunately Tor Browser is very easy to download.
I’ve actually run into this myself. The website that really annoys me when it comes to VPN softblocks is Wikipedia, since the official policy is that you can’t edit any Wikipedia article if you’re on a VPN. Not even if you’re signed in to an account. But for some reason, my normal home wifi is on the Wikipedia VPN blocklist even when I’m not using a VPN, so I have to resort to setting up a mobile hotspot on my phone and connecting to that if I want to edit anything. I like Wikipedia and would spend more time on it if it wasn’t for this. I know they do it to prevent trolls, spam, and motivated editing, but it’s still irritating to be on the receiving end.
This applies to Wikipedia articles in all languages and seriously impacts anyone who lives in a place where Wikipedia is blocked, since in that case you need a VPN to even access Wikipedia, which means you’re automatically restricted from editing it. You have to apply for a special exemption to get past the VPN block. I haven’t done it myself, so I don’t know how hard it is to get, but notably the English Wikipedia page about it says that it helps to have a history of constructive editing beforehand. Seems a bit catch-22 to me, if you can’t edit without the exemption in the first place.
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Spoiler? It wasn’t.
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On a mostly unrelated note to your completely unrelated note, Michaela is not a private school. It’s a state school (what countries other than the UK usually call “public school”) serving an area of very high deprivation and getting very good academic outcomes (those measures such as Progress 8 mentioned in the Wikipedia article are generally considered to be biased against schools taking in students with lower academic starting points, and yet Michaela consistently ranks highly in them).
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Huh, that’s interesting. Didn’t know that, I skimmed over the description and assumed it was some elite feeder private school for upper class parents who are determined to get their kids to Oxbridge. It explains more of the reasoning, though I still would have despised that kind of environment and wouldn’t have done well in it compared to where I actually went to school.
This is all rather offtopic… Mods, feel free to split the thread if need be.
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I’m not sure what disgusts me more, that such an institution of youth torture masquerading as a school is allowed to exist and does so on the tax payer’s dime*, or that they are apparently actually succeeding on the shallow metrics schools are so often judged on, giving the folks who are okay with doing horrible things as long as they get the results they want ammunition they can use to push similarly horrible things. Good ends don’t justify evil means and this school makes me think of school setting villains like Umbridge from Harry Potter or The Trunchbull from Matilda.
*Honestly, it feels a bit off to use the common name for the US 10 cent coin when talking about something in Britain, but best I can tell from a little googling, none of the modern British coins have catchy nicknames and are just a number of pence and I have no clue if this idiom has a British English equivalent.
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Since you did not read the whole thing, you won’t have read the bits where they contemplate age restrictions on using VPNs …
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Not really. We might use “from the tax payer’s purse” or “out of the tax payer’s pocket” but it doesn’t quite capture the same thing.
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For good reason. The authors got their inspiration from some place, after all…
Speaking of which, it sounds like today is the last day to weigh in on this! I can’t (I’m not from the UK), and I don’t know how much they actually care about public comments, but it seems worth signal boosting in case any Brits here haven’t already seen.
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I’m in the UK. Think not of left or right. The mood among the people here is to show your face. Trust, credit, reputation cannot manifest behind a veil.