> UK's Online Safety Act 2023 would require us to do a prohibitively complicated risk assessment for our service. We're talking reading through thousands of pages of legal guidelines.
> We're a volunteer operation and would likely be held responsible as individuals. There is talk of fines up to 18 million GBP which would ruin any single one of us, should they get creative about how to actually enforce this.
> Our impression is that this law is deliberately vague, deliberately drastic in its enforcement provisions, and specifically aimed against websites of all sizes, including hobby projects. In other words, this seems to us to be largely indistinguishable from an attempt to basically break the internet for all UK citizens.
> If we could afford to just hope for the best, we'd love to.
The way I understand this is that it's not feasible for them to assess how the legislation impacts them, so they would rather stay safe than risk having their lives destroyed.
For what it's worth I salute anyone blocking, whether through an excess of caution or just as a middle finger.
actually, it would ruin all of them collectively should "they" get creative enforcing it.
Would you pay their legal fees if they are sued? It's easy to say when you don't have your future on the line.
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/09/12/wikimedia-fo...
I'd say the right answer is to move/add a content addressed model/system for obtaining sources.
Isn't that almost what the nix file already is while being legal. Having a cache of all build files is not legal to do.
Having a content hash as (part of) the address is common way to this.
IPFS multihash is a well-known example. As opposed to HTTP.
https://github.com/magnet-linux/magnet-linux
Not really ready for prime time, but I think I have some interesting ideas there at least.
A distributed git object cache is what is really needed at the moment.
I suspect this law isn’t popular. Just the messaging of doing nothing is more unpopular. So it gets spun as this is popular.
https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...
The internet is full of dishonest "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."
That’s some incredible logic.
The internet is also full of bad takes like "the ends justify the means" and "the solution to this problem is obvious and no one has done it because they're evil/stupid/lazy".
I like an idea I first saw in Debian's general resolution process: all votes have a "further discussion" option, and often a "retain the status quo" option, and the voting system lets people use them effectively.
In the UK parliament (as in many contexts) a vote against something could mean that the person doesn't think there's a problem to be fixed, or it could mean that they don't think this is the right fix -- and that could be because it's too extreme or because it's not extreme enough. That's supposed to be addressed by the committee stages, or by amendments, but it's really hard to divine actual preference from a series of yes/no votes.
As opposed to the original suggestion that doesn't actually address the problem? How is proposing that in the first place more honest than calling it out?
The real answer is to repeal this nonsense (IMHO as a non-UK citizen)
It as always a stupid idea, see recent discord leak of ID’s.
