Announcement: TSBT Forum will be making compliance changes

[scole of TSBT]

Due to changes in the Online Safety Act, which will take effect in July of 2025 and would require an unknown expense to make the TSBT forum compliant, the TSBT forum will be shutting down until a feasible solution can be implemented. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[Megacruncher]

Yikes!

The Online Safety Act is a ridiculously complex and frankly unworkable attempt to address some real issues. If taken as written then it would shut down not only this forum but pretty much every other forum in the UK & in theory any forum any where in the world which might ever be visited by someone from the Uk (good luck with enforcing that).

The intentions behind the act are sound, nobody here thinks children should be encouraged to kill themselves or exposed to pornography or groomed by paedophiles, but the effects of the legislation could be to shutdown most of the internet sites in the UK. Obviously this would be a bad thing. And I doubt if the real bad guys would quietly give up and go away.

I suggest we ignore it and carry on in our low key & otherwise blameless fashion.

I shall communicate my thoughts as to how we could carry on in a more private forum.

[Dirk Broer]

"...until a feasible solution can be implemented..."
I do hope that such a thing can be implemented in not too long a period. The AMD Users forum is already dead for all practical purposes -most likely because of a DDOS attack earlier and constant too high visitor numbers since. Luckily we, AMD Users, also have a Facebook-page.

[admin01]

Fortunately a solution has been implemented

Basically, a geoblock for GB has been implemented. It has been heard from people dealing with OFCOM directly that geoblocking the UK/GB sidesteps all these requirements and therefore liability.

https://mastodon.neilzone.co.uk/@neil/1 ... 8663502700

[admin01]

Basically, the OSA & the hard age verification requirement is way too onerous and chances of possible liability are way too high for a hobbyist website, to start with. Not only does the website owner have to create a bill of risks and hand it to OFCOM when required, in order to comply with the OSA, but they have to update it every time the website changes.[0] Then they have to sign up with and keep maintained some personal data verification authority, at cost.[1] All this on top of the usual requirements of keeping software up-to-date and safe on the internet in TYOOL 2025.

[0] if a request for an up-to-date risk assessment fails, it's a crime.
[1] there are no official recommendations of what company or agency processes this
[2] nobody of whatever age should pass their hard creds to an unknown 3rd party for reasons which should be obvious
[3] try getting a FOI request for your data from a private company. You can't. What happens if it's incorrect?
[4] the act needs to be tested in court
[5] treating all websites like they're hard porn sites is spiteful and stupid, and to me says much more about the minds of the act's authors. Treating all websites as if they have a helpdesk and a budget is stupid.

They knew about the effects of this act and the hard age gating. It doesn't have narrowly target sites or narrowly defined content. It's deliberate and invasive. What the UK has is not about online protection for anyone. It's about muzzling dissent and freedom. It's about executive power. It introduces new risks to the people it says it'll protect. Remember, there are no privacy "rights" in English law. England & Wales "citizens" have no 'rights' per se, only those from EHRC (or is it ECHR) and similar. What they have, is 'permissions'.

For a look how age gating can be made non invasive, look at
https://ageverification.dev/
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/e ... ion-minors

[admin01]

some reading material:
https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/
https://www.ageverificationfacts.org.uk/
https://russ.garrett.co.uk/2024/12/17/o ... act-guide/
https://lobste.rs/s/ukosa1/uk_users_lob ... _help_with

[Megacruncher]

Thanks for that admin01!
So basically to see and contribute to this forum you need to either be outside the UK or, like me, using a VPN to give that impression.
How do we communicate that to people?
When I try to connect to this forum without a VPN I get nothing at all.
Can we put something in place advising UK users of the new status of the forum, so that they can make arrangements to move abroad, virtually or otherwise?

[admin01]

Can we put something in place advising UK users of the new status of the forum, so that they can make arrangements to move abroad, virtually or otherwise?

Yes this is something I was looking at earlier. I could make an error page for http code 451 which is a recent error code in the specs, it means "unavailable for legal reasons" see https://secure.wphackedhelp.com/blog/ht ... al_reasons

A technical reason to consider is that the UK has a lot of ip addresses. A .htaccess with all those ips would be re-read against every request, which would be a massive hit on resources. htaccess is useful when there's a block of say up to 30 ips. I'm working on a way to programatically return this error code for UK ips without loading the server. For now, UK is blocked at the firewall level in order to comply. That means the data packet is dropped at the firewall before the web server sees it, which is why no error code is seen.

tl;dr: I'm working on it