Very sorry, but I’ve now decided I need to block access to https://newsgrouper.org.uk/ from the UK, starting 16th March. This is because I find it impractical to meet the requirements of the UK’s Online Safety Act, which comes into effect then. See https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety and https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/
I’ve done a fair bit more homework on this, reading some of the guidance, but not all the thousands of pages that Ofcom has produced, and following their online seminars. Unfortunately very many aspects remain vague, and requests to Ofcom to provide clearer guidelines get answers like “It depends on your circumstances”, “We can’t advise individual sites”, “You have to make the judgement”, etc…
I’m afraid my conclusion is that trying to comply with the OSA is just too much effort. It’s not just the initial risk assessments and policy/system changes. It’s also that one is then required to respond to any reports that come in and judge whether that content is really illegal. You are required to remove anything that is illegal under a long list of categories, but also to protect users’ right to freedom of speech. It’s easy to think of cases where this balance could be very tricky. I simply don’t want to get into the business of having to police other people’s speech.
Ofcom have stated unequivocally that geo-blocking the UK will put a site outside the scope of the Act. So I put up a simple survey on the newsgrouper site, this appeared for UK users only, and I let it run for two weeks. There was just one question and a space for comments. I got 11 responses, as follows:
How would a UK block affect you? Answers 1: Not Concerned, I can follow Usenet by other means. 1 2: An Annoyance, but not the end of the world. 5 3: Oh No, that would be a disaster! 5
The comments were generally disappointed, but some also expressed understanding. So blocking UK access would be a real inconvenience to 5 people. I regret that, but they may be able to use one of the other web interfaces to Usenet, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sites_and_popularity . Also UK people are only about 15% of my users now.
I have seen comments that having a .uk address is enough to bring a site into the scope of the act. I’m not convinced about that, but to be on the safe side I have reregistered my site as newsgrouper.org with a redirect from newsgrouper.org.uk .
My software is available at: https://chiselapp.com/user/cmacleod/repository/newsgrouper/home so if anyone else wants to take on the job of running an instance that would remain open to UK users, they are welcome to do so.
A VPN is a must have for browsing the internet in the UK these days, our laws and only getting more Orwellian by the day.
By all means do what you must to avoid handing over data to our police-state government.
Our government is so goofy. These massive overreaches into privacy and fair use all while having zero resources to actually enforce anything.
Remember the ““porn ban””? Beyond ISPs changing some filtering settings I don’t think anything actually changed for 99% of internet users.
Hell, our copyright laws might be based on the DMCA (The EU copyright directives and DMCA are ratifications of the same treaties) but I have never received a single Copyright letter in my life, even whilst running a seedbox for the last 2 years from my boiler cupboard!
You’re already funneling it through a third party, so why not encrypt it (with bonus location spoofing)?
Because you’re trusting and paying two third parties instead of one? Like I say - my provider I imagine is dumping the copyright violations directly in the bin these days and if I wanted to really get off the clearnet and things went to shit I would simply spin up an I2P node/moar bandwidth if I was really concerned.
But I’m not currently, and find it weird how many want us to use things hosted in a different country which might be at any time under obligation to release all my details to a foreign entity. Each to their own and all.
