Wikipedia Will Not Perform Online Safety Bill Age Checks (bbc.com) 26
Wikipedia will not comply with any age checks required under the Online Safety Bill, its foundation says. From a report: Rebecca MacKinnon, of the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the website, says it would "violate our commitment to collect minimal data about readers and contributors." A senior figure in Wikimedia UK fears the site could be blocked as a result. But the government says only services posing the highest risk to children will need age verification. Wikipedia has millions of articles in hundreds of languages, written and edited entirely by thousands of volunteers around the world.
It is the eighth most-visited site in the UK, according to data from analytics company SimilarWeb. The Online Safety Bill, currently before Parliament, places duties on tech firms to protect users from harmful or illegal content and is expected to come fully into force some time in 2024. Neil Brown, a solicitor specialising in internet and telecoms law, says that under the bill, services likely to be accessed by children must have "proportionate systems and processes" designed to prevent them from encountering harmful content. That could include age verification.
It is the eighth most-visited site in the UK, according to data from analytics company SimilarWeb. The Online Safety Bill, currently before Parliament, places duties on tech firms to protect users from harmful or illegal content and is expected to come fully into force some time in 2024. Neil Brown, a solicitor specialising in internet and telecoms law, says that under the bill, services likely to be accessed by children must have "proportionate systems and processes" designed to prevent them from encountering harmful content. That could include age verification.
Hey whatevs, UK (Score:5, Insightful)
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Get f'd UK
Way ahead of you. We voted for Brexit.
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I know UK likes to get f'd, but it really is more enjoyable when it's not a solo activity.
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I think it's a little naive to assume this isn't about stifling dissent. Have you paid attention to the structure of the UK government and how that manifests itself in who controls it?
Re: Wikipedia Immune (Score:1)
Because Wikipedia is very friendly to state sponsored messaging at the moment, it therefore gets a pass.
Wikipedia itself is fairly politically agnostic. This may not be the case for individual wikadors [urbandictionary.com]. But that should be handled on a case-by-case basis. Not hamstrings the entire site.
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In my experience even the most anodyne edits to any wikipedia page dear to leftists is instantly reversed. In my case that usually occurs when statements of opinions are presented as facts. I don't edit out the "facts," just point out whose opinion it was. Nope, excised immediately.
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even the most anodyne edits to any wikipedia page dear to leftists
What about the right-leaning ones? Deleted or left standing?
Wikipedia is supposed to be factual. Whether that hurts feelings or not. Even if it's labeled as an opinion, it belongs in a blog page. Not an encyclopedia.
I love these kind of vague laws (Score:3, Insightful)
Not sure about the UK, in America these kind of laws used to get struck down for vagueness, but after decades of right wing court packing they're standing up. I mean, at one point we had Dredd Scott.... When the courts are packed anything is possible.
next up: Florida (Score:4, Funny)
I mean, y'all just KNOW that Wikipedia is chock-full of Wokefullness and hatred for Whites /s
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When a site that is moderated and edited by the world at large does not align with your world view, chances are the majority of the world does not agree with you.
Evil, but *something has to be seen to be done* (Score:1, Insightful)
The important point for normal people is that those laws *will* do evil things, but *do not have to actually work* for the loonies to be satisfied.
And when they do not actually work, the nanny-state advocates just push *more* evil laws.
So the woke will pass
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Library Has No Age Limit (Score:2)
And so should the digital version of it. Period. End of discussion. Don't like it? Move to North Korea or Russia. Or better yet,kill yourself.
Intractable? (Score:2)
I could probably spend more time thinking about the corner cases, but in principle it seems to me that a government could provide a service that allows websites to validate not your identity, but only the fact that you are a person (and adult or not). I wonder if some cryptography in the browser could make this so that the government also d
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I could probably spend more time thinking about the corner cases, but in principle it seems to me that a government could provide a service that allows websites to validate not your identity, but only the fact that you are a person (and adult or not).
Very easily.
I wonder if some cryptography in the browser could make this so that the government also does not find out what websites you are actually visiting, only the fact that you are using the internet, but perhaps it would be impossible due to man-in-the-middle attacks.
Assuming you don't care about the possibility of someone MiTMing the request and faking an "I'm 18" response, you could do that without any crypto just by updating some web standards slightly:
It should be blocked! (Score:2)
If a nominally-democratic nation enacts laws to do not unreasonable things like give parties responsible for children actual effective tools to ensure they are seeing age appropriate materials ( and not all of Wikipedia fit for consumption by young children, and if it had to be would be a less useful resource ) those laws should be complied with.
If an organization specifically flaunts said laws than it needs to be blocked and the responsible parties should be penalized as the law prescribes.
If you disagree
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I'm not seeing where this law gives the parents tools to ensure the kids are seeing (what the parents consider to be) age appropriate materials. It just says "kids can't see that", whether the parents agree or not. Would you care to explain what tools you think this is giving parents? Or are you saying that the government is the party responsible for the children?
(Side note - I suspect you meant "flout", not "flaunt")
Realistically, Wikipedia isn't the intended target (Score:1)
I'm not saying there isn't any content on Wikipedia that's unsuitable for young children. There is. Any site with as much information on it as Wikipedia, is going to have some that isn't entirely suitable for all audiences. (If nothing else, Wikipedia has some extremely technical articles, that aren't suitable for undergrads let alone children. It also covers some rather dark historical events.)
ID card reader (Score:2)
Where i come from, people have electronic ID cards. A plastic card with a chip in it. USB ID card readers are sold for cheap and they work on windows, mac and ubuntu. We use them to access government sites, fill our taxes and that kind of things.
So, yes technically it is possible to check the identity and thus the age of a person. Limited to the use i described it is even useful. Generalized it would be harmful of course and probably technically less reliable as the incentives to hijack the system would be