Haven't really wanted to talk about this too much, I don't want to scare our own host too much (if he's not already openly aware and considering if it applies to him then I'd rather he have deniable ignorance of the matter while he picks up on the connotations regarding B12), but one of my other haunts just got (imminently) hit by UK law:
https://urbandead.com/shutdown.htmlEdit: Hmmm, probably says a lot about me that only the above is what drive me to break my typical usual silence on this matter, rather than merely internally SMHing.My current presence there is almost fifteen years old.
That was a login created after two or three years absent, the forgotten (both password
and username) original must have joined within months of it starting up (and I had a Borehamwood(?) account there, during the time of that spin-off "no revives" map).
Can I imagine 'issues' with the wide-open nature of interactions and sign-ups? Yes. Have I ever seen anything that looks like a Nut of the kind the legal Sledgehammer involved was designed for? No. Moreover, can I imagine anybody successfully grooming anyone on that platform? No. Especially given that prospective 'victims' are largely indistinguishable from far more savvy members of the playerbase, so a predatory login is going to find it hard not to wade through plenty of targets that are as likely to be able to reverse the deception, and out-gambit them, as anything.
Really, there's more chance of abuse starting on a wiki I frequent (even though it's a friendly and sensible place, currently,
and there's no expectation of privacy within its own system, to commit any related offences by). Though, in that case, there appears to be no way
to comply-or-shut-down, as there's no active administrator with that level of access, only 'baseline' moderators who can only react as much as (and a
tiny bit more than) everyday editors.
The whole "user-to-user" focus always seemed like overreach. And though the threat of offcom intervention[1] is apparently
not going to be
immediate £18million fines[2] on the operator(s), nor the blocking, all I personally will see is the voluntary dismantling (or locking down) of good-faith platforms that never had the problems that the "Big Few" social media platforms more clearly suffer from, and seemingly have no actual way of complying[3].
Yes, there are problems to solve. As to whether more of these problems will be solved than babies thrown out with the bathwater, I highly doubt. European regulation with practical responses (c.f. device data/power-connectors, perhaps GDPR) can shift the world, UK regulation just doesn't have the required heft to it. "Ignore or avoid" is probably going to be the response from the RoW, out there, leaving the rest of the Wild Wild Web just as bad as it always was (see also what happened in .au, and other territories[5], from
their attempts to regulate known internet-related issues).
[1] Whoops, there goes unfettered UK access to 4chan! ...not saying that's a bad thing, but gonna be as much Whack-A-Mole in the end as apparently was ThePirateBay and its imitators for copyright issues.
[2] More if they actually
have significant site-revenue, but thst doesn't apply to
any of the places I do actually care about.
[3] Except for total exclusion of the UK, such as Apple's move with its encryption options.
[4] Though I'm not sure how many "do you want our cookies?" popovers actually
are to both spirit and letter of the given laws, in the end.
[5] The most provably capable probably being China. But hardly an equivalent model, or one to aspire to.
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Topic: United Kingdom Bunker Thread - Politics & Economics (Read 57553 times)