London fixed gear and single speed (LFGSS) is a great online community of fixed gear and single speed cyclists in and around London. Unfortunately, this columnist is not eligible for membership. He doesn’t live in (or near) a big city and needs a lot of gear to climb the gentlest slopes. That’s why we admire more rugged cyclists who disdain Starmie’s assistance. Archer or Campagnolo hardware.
But bad news is on the horizon. As of Sunday, March 16th, LFGSS will be retired. Dee Kitchen is a core developer at Software Wizards (and Cyclists).
microcosm is a platform for operating non-commercial, privacy-friendly, and accessible online forums such as LFGSS.
announced On that day, he announced that he would “remove the virtual servers hosting LFGSS and other communities, effectively immediately terminating the approximately 300 small communities I run, as well as a small number of larger communities such as LFGSS.” said.
Why does the kitchen do this? Answer: he read
statement
It was announced on December 16 by Ofcom, the regulator appointed by the government to enforce the provisions of the Online Safety Act (OSA). “Providers are currently obliged to assess the risk of unlawful harm to their services, with a deadline of March 16, 2025. Following the Code, which has completed a parliamentary process, providers will be required to assess the risk of unlawful harm to their services from March 17, 2025. “We must take steps to protect our users from illegal content and activity as set forth in our Terms and Conditions or use other effective means. If a provider does not act quickly to address service risks, we are prepared to take enforcement action. ”
Please wait a moment. OSA isn’t just about protecting children and adults from harmful content, bullying, pornography, etc. It’s not just about discussions about fixed gear bikes, cancer support, dog walking, rebuilding valve amps, etc. Is it? It may sound strange, but the answer seems to be no. of
act requires
Services that process user-generated content have baseline content moderation practices and use those practices to remove reported content that violates UK law and to prevent children from viewing pornography. And that applies to every Services that process user-generated content and have “links to the UK”.
Mr. Kitchen believes the online forums he hosts fall within the scope of this practice and, as he is based in the UK, there is “no way around it”. “I can’t afford to spend probably tens of thousands of dollars to get through the legal and technical hoops here for an extended period of time…The site itself barely gets in a few hundred donations each month, and it takes a little more to run it. It costs money…this is not a venture that can afford the compliance costs… If I did, what would remain is a disproportionately high personal liability for me that could easily be used as a weapon by disgruntled people banned for egregious behavior. ” That is why he believes he has no choice but to shut down the platform.
Some may think that he is overreacting, that common sense will prevail and that legal precedent will eventually emerge. But the OSA is a new piece of legislation, a meandering evolution of the 2019 White Paper on Online Harms and the chaotic passage of Parliament at a time when the Conservative Party was busy mismanaging the country. (One grizzled political insider described this to me as a “dog’s breakfast.”) In such a situation, the cost of being an early test case would give anyone pause. . I’ve been a blogger for decades, and from the beginning I decided not to allow comments.
my blog Partly because I didn’t want the burden of moderation, but also because I was worried about the legal ramifications of what people posted. So instead of the kitchen, I would like to do what he has decided.
Many years ago, I had an exchange with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, at a Royal Society conference. From a conversation with a new Labor Minister, I realized the following: This guy thinks the web is the internet! And I told Tim that. “It’s much worse than that,” he replied, “and millions of people around the world think so.” facebook It’s the internet. ”
The root of the problem with OSA is that it was framed and enacted by legislators who believe that the “internet” consists only of the platforms of a few big tech companies. So they passed laws supposedly to deal with these corporate thugs, without imagining the unintended consequences for the actual internet of people using technology for purely social purposes. And in doing so, they inadvertently raise the famous question posed by Alexander Pope in a letter to Dr. Arbuthnot in 1735: “Who breaks the butterfly on the wheel?” It will end up being put away.
what i was reading
British students at risk
Nathan Heller’s long, thoughtful new yorker essay On the plane from the American University of Humanities.
After newsletter promotion
don’t entrust your life
It’s really subtle LM Sacasas article What we can learn from 20th century cultural critic Lewis Mumford in the age of AI.
Musk meets Ross Perot
Incisive work by John Ganz Two engineers who thought they understood politics.
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Source: www.theguardian.com
