A brave new world: La sociedad por venir

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://elpais.com/tecnologia/2025-09-30/openai-ultima-el-lanzamiento-de-una-red-social-de-videos-generados-por-ia-similar-a-tiktok.html

Saludos.

[muyuu]

desde el 30 de septiembre no puedo ver imágenes de imgur desde el Reino Unido, y son la mayoría que yo mismo he posteado y las de Cadavre también

Brave New World indeed

encima imgur bloquea casi todos los VPNs, afortunadamente algún conservo alguno que no bloquea


https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gzxv5gy3qo

Image-hosting platform Imgur has blocked people in the UK from accessing its content.

Imgur is used by millions to make and share images such as memes across the web, particularly on Reddit and in online forums.

But UK users trying to access Imgur on Tuesday were met with an error message saying "content not available in your region" - with Imgur content shared on other websites also no longer showing.

The UK's data watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), said it recently notified the platform's parent company, MediaLab AI, of plans to fine Imgur after probing its approach to age checks and use of children's personal data.

The BBC has approached MediaLab AI for comment.

A help article on Imgur's US website, seen by the BBC, states that "from September 30, 2025, access to Imgur from the United Kingdom is no longer available".

"UK users will not be able to log in, view content, or upload images. Imgur content embedded on third-party sites will not display for UK users."

The ICO launched its investigation into Imgur in March - saying it would probe whether the companies were complying with both the UK's data protection laws, and the children's code.

These require platforms to take steps to protect children using online services in the UK, including minimising the amount of the data they collect from them.

A document published by the ICO alongside the launch of its investigation stated that Imgur did not ask visitors to declare their age when setting up an account.

It said on Tuesday it had reached initial findings in its investigation and, on 10 September, issued MediaLab with a notice of intent to impose a fine.

"Our findings are provisional and the ICO will carefully consider any representations from MediaLab before taking a final decision whether to issue a monetary penalty," said Tim Capel, an interim executive director at the ICO.

"We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing."

The watchdog would not elaborate on what its findings were, nor the details of the potential fine, when asked by the BBC.

"This update has been provided to give clarity on our investigation, and we will not be providing any further detail at this time," Mr Capel said in his statement.

'Commercial decision'

 

Some Imgur users and reports speculated as to whether Imgur moved to block UK users from its services, rather than comply with child safety duties recently imposed on some platforms under the Online Safety Act.

Among these are requirements for sites allowing pornography or content promoting suicide and self-harm to use technology to check whether visitors are over 18.

But both the ICO and Ofcom - the media regulator enforcing the Online Safety Act - said Imgur suspending access for UK users had been its own "commercial decision".

"Imgur's decision to restrict access in the UK is a commercial decision taken by the company and not a result of any action taken by Ofcom," an Ofcom spokesperson told the BBC.

"Other services run by MediaLab remain available in the UK – such as Kik messenger, which has implemented age assurance to comply with the Online Safety Act."

Imgur said in the help article on its US website that UK users could exercise their rights under data protection law and request to receive a copy of their data or request to delete their account.

https://old.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/1nufmze/imgur_now_blocked_in_the_uk_steam_workshop_pages/

[muyuu]

y ahora tenemos un pulso con 4chan del que me temo que Ofcom (el regulador de comunicaciones del RU) va a salir humillado

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/ofcom-update-on-online-safety-act-investigations

Ofcom envía amenazas veladas a los servicios que deciden simplemente bloquear al Reino Unido en lugar de plegarse a sus regulaciones de censura

In response to the Online Safety Act, we are seeing more and more companies simply blocking access to UK users as it is not worth their time to deal with UK regulation, or as we suspect with 4chan, they politically believe that such regulation is draconian and needs to be fought on a matter of principle.

Ofcom states that it has closed such investigations against four file sharing sites who have done this, confirming that blocking UK users is a legitimate response to its enquiries. They are saying that they will continue to monitor those sites to ensure the blocks remain effective. The regulator regards these blocks as success stories as it ” has significantly reduced the likelihood that people in the UK will be exposed to any illegal or harmful content”. This action has also meant a suicide forum is no longer available in the U.K.

We obviously have no way of knowing the extent of the problems in relation to those sites, however if they are distributing CSAM content (or promoting topics like suicide for that matter; albeit the topic is possibly a bit more nuanced given recent political discourse), very few people would take issue with their unavailability. Eventually however it’s likely this will veer into more grey areas around other types of content in terms of people’s views on censorship which may be more controversial.

Ofcom also take issue with anyone who blocks UK users telling them how to work around the restrictions such as the use of services which may route your traffic via other countries. If you ask your favourite AI how to circumvent the OSA restrictions, it doesn’t want to help you, but does so anyway

“Today sends a clear message that any service which flagrantly fails to engage with Ofcom and their duties under the Online Safety Act can expect to face robust enforcement action.

We’re also seeing some services take steps to introduce improved safety measures as a direct result of our enforcement action. Services who choose to restrict access rather than protect UK users remain on our watchlist as we continue to monitor their availability to UK users”

Suzanne Cater, Director of Enforcement, Ofcom

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/4chan-fined-26k-for-refusing-to-assess-risks-under-uk-online-safety-act/

If 4chan continues to ignore Ofcom, the forum could be blocked in the UK. And 4chan could face even bigger fines totaling about $23 million or 10 percent of 4chan’s worldwide turnover, whichever is higher. 4chan also faces potential arrest and/or “imprisonment for a term of up to two years,” the lawsuit said.

It seems likely that 4chan won’t engage with Ofcom, arguing in the lawsuit that Ofcom is seeking to “control” the Internet, which is “predominantly an American innovation.” A lawyer for 4chan, Ronald Coleman, previously told the BBC that Ofcom’s enforcement of OSA threatened “the free speech rights of every American.”

[Saturio]

y ahora tenemos un pulso con 4chan del que me temo que Ofcom (el regulador de comunicaciones del RU) va a salir humillado

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/ofcom-update-on-online-safety-act-investigations

Ofcom envía amenazas veladas a los servicios que deciden simplemente bloquear al Reino Unido en lugar de plegarse a sus regulaciones de censura

In response to the Online Safety Act, we are seeing more and more companies simply blocking access to UK users as it is not worth their time to deal with UK regulation, or as we suspect with 4chan, they politically believe that such regulation is draconian and needs to be fought on a matter of principle.

Ofcom states that it has closed such investigations against four file sharing sites who have done this, confirming that blocking UK users is a legitimate response to its enquiries. They are saying that they will continue to monitor those sites to ensure the blocks remain effective. The regulator regards these blocks as success stories as it ” has significantly reduced the likelihood that people in the UK will be exposed to any illegal or harmful content”. This action has also meant a suicide forum is no longer available in the U.K.

We obviously have no way of knowing the extent of the problems in relation to those sites, however if they are distributing CSAM content (or promoting topics like suicide for that matter; albeit the topic is possibly a bit more nuanced given recent political discourse), very few people would take issue with their unavailability. Eventually however it’s likely this will veer into more grey areas around other types of content in terms of people’s views on censorship which may be more controversial.

Ofcom also take issue with anyone who blocks UK users telling them how to work around the restrictions such as the use of services which may route your traffic via other countries. If you ask your favourite AI how to circumvent the OSA restrictions, it doesn’t want to help you, but does so anyway

“Today sends a clear message that any service which flagrantly fails to engage with Ofcom and their duties under the Online Safety Act can expect to face robust enforcement action.

We’re also seeing some services take steps to introduce improved safety measures as a direct result of our enforcement action. Services who choose to restrict access rather than protect UK users remain on our watchlist as we continue to monitor their availability to UK users”

Suzanne Cater, Director of Enforcement, Ofcom

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/4chan-fined-26k-for-refusing-to-assess-risks-under-uk-online-safety-act/

If 4chan continues to ignore Ofcom, the forum could be blocked in the UK. And 4chan could face even bigger fines totaling about $23 million or 10 percent of 4chan’s worldwide turnover, whichever is higher. 4chan also faces potential arrest and/or “imprisonment for a term of up to two years,” the lawsuit said.

It seems likely that 4chan won’t engage with Ofcom, arguing in the lawsuit that Ofcom is seeking to “control” the Internet, which is “predominantly an American innovation.” A lawyer for 4chan, Ronald Coleman, previously told the BBC that Ofcom’s enforcement of OSA threatened “the free speech rights of every American.”

Mundo extraño este, en el que 4chan es un adalid de la libertad.

[sudden and sharp]

No sería la primera vez...






De como un pornógrafo cambió la Justicia Estadounidense
https://prisioneroenargentina.com/de-como-un-pornografo-cambio-la-justicia-estadounidense/

El 24 de Febrero de 1988 la Corte Suprema de Estados Unidos vota 8-0 para revocar el acuerdo de $ 200,000 otorgado al reverendo Jerry Falwell por su angustia emocional al ser parodiado en Hustler, una revista pornográfica.

En 1983, Hustler publicó un artículo que parodiaba la primera experiencia sexual de Falwell como un encuentro infantil ebrio e incestuoso con su madre en una letrina. Falwell, un conservador religioso y fundador del grupo de defensa política de la Mayoría Moral, demandó a Hustler y a su editor, Larry Flynt, por difamación. Falwell ganó el caso, pero Flynt apeló, lo que llevó a que la Corte Suprema conociera el caso debido a sus implicaciones constitucionales.

Grande... Larry.

-----------

[muyuu]

Wikipedia se une a 4chan y Kiwifarms

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65388255

https://expose-news.com/2025/10/28/online-safety-act-wikipedia-will-not-comply/

Jimmy Wales is a co-founder of Wikipedia.  Speaking of Ofcom’s determination to implement the UK’s Online Safety Act, Wales said:

“We’re in talks with Ofcom, but we will not be identifying users under any circumstances. We will not be age-gating Wikipedia under any circumstances. So, if it comes to that, it’s going to be an interesting showdown, because we’re going to just refuse to do it. Politically, what are they going to do? They could block Wikipedia. Good luck with that.

“We didn’t cave into the Turkish government; we didn’t cave into the Chinese government. We have users we know of who are editing in Iran. We have users who are editing in Russia. Their personal safety depends on their privacy. And we think it’s a human rights issue that we’re not going to identify those people.”

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales warns that a “political showdown” with the Labour government he backed at the last election may now be necessary to protect a free and open internet.

Jimmy Wales is a Labour supporter. He married into the party when he tied the knot in 2012 with Kate Garvey, who was Tony Blair’s diary gatekeeper in No. 10 for a decade. He knows Keir Starmer and Peter Kyle personally, and likes them. Yet he is now threatening a “political showdown” with the government.

The Online Safety Act, legislation passed under the Conservatives and enthusiastically taken up by Labour, aims to protect internet users by boosting the transparency from major platforms and the control of people over what kind of content they see.

The most significant restrictions will apply to Category 1 services – those with over seven million average monthly active users and the provision for them to share their content with each other, both of which Wikipedia has. These rules include introducing the ability of users to filter out non-verified users.

On social media, if a user blocks another, they no longer see their content. Simple. But applied to Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that relies on collaborative editing, it looks a lot more complicated.

“This makes no sense whatsoever,” says Wales. “If you and I are in a debate about the contents of an article, and we’ve both been editing it, and I decide to stop you from doing any further editing on the article, I can just block you. You wouldn’t even be allowed to read the article. This is crazy.”

“It’s really very poorly thought-out legislation. It feels like it was passed because they felt like they needed to do something, and this was something,” he adds.

“The problem it’s trying to solve of people in social media harassing you – well, this is not a problem in Wikipedia. You can’t harass people on Wikipedia. You get banned immediately. And so that whole framework applied to Wikipedia is just nonsense, and yet Ofcom don’t seem to be able to find a way to see their way around that.”

Related: How To Avoid Concreting Cowpats (And Other AI BS)

Ofcom, the regulator responsible for implementing the legislation, has not yet determined that Wikipedia is Category 1. This was a key reason that the legal challenge brought by the Wikimedia Foundation (the charity founded by Wales which hosts Wikipedia) failed over the summer: the judge said it was “premature” to rule on the proportionality of the regime before it had been enacted.

But what if those rules do apply to Wikipedia, as the wording of the act currently suggests it should?

“We’re in talks with Ofcom, but we will not be identifying users under any circumstances. We will not be age-gating Wikipedia under any circumstances. So, if it comes to that, it’s going to be an interesting showdown, because we’re going to just refuse to do it. Politically, what are they going to do? They could block Wikipedia. Good luck with that,” says Wales.

“We didn’t cave into the Turkish government; we didn’t cave into the Chinese government. We have users we know of who are editing in Iran. We have users who are editing in Russia. Their personal safety depends on their privacy. And we think it’s a human rights issue that we’re not going to identify those people.”

This “poorly drafted legislation,” he warns, could lead to “a ridiculous political showdown.”

Wales suspects, and hopes, it will not come to that. But the government declined to write an exception into the law and, as things stand, it would seem that Wikipedia could only avoid Category 1 if it cut the number of UK people who can access it by about three-quarters, or radically change the functionality of the site.

This must be a shock for the 59-year-old Internet entrepreneur. Originally from Alabama, he has lived in London for over a decade and these days runs in the same circles as the Prime Minister. While Labour was in opposition, The House was told Wales had been invited to join an informal digital advisory board and had accepted. He confirms that, but says, “I never heard from them again.”

How does he now feel about having backed Labour at the election? “I’m not a single-issue voter. Maybe I should be.” He did not agree with the entire Labour manifesto but was “fed up” with the Tories: “That picture of the Queen alone at her husband’s funeral and then finding out the night before they had a party in Downing Street, I was like, ‘That’s it. I’ve lost trust.’”

Wales has now penned a book about that exact subject. ‘The Seven Rules of Trust’ explores the founding of Wikipedia, from the personal reasons for its creation to the philosophical underpinning as shared by businesses like Airbnb. It reads a bit like a self-help book – sometimes for the reader, at other times for society.

Compared to the era of Barack Obama versus John McCain, when “sensible” people reigned and Wales was “quite proud of the US”, he is depressed – as you would expect from this centrist dad – by the current political climate. “We’ve gotten to quite a bad place,” he concludes.

His stated mission has been to educate governments, policymakers, about the importance of a free and open internet. Does he see that as a failed one in the UK?

“When we see Graham Linehan arrested at the airport by a bunch of armed officers for tweets he made,” he replies, referring to the Irish comedy writer whose arrest over social media posts about trans people led to the Metropolitan police ending non-crime hate investigations, “that’s pretty symbolic to a lot of people that freedom of expression is seriously under assault in the UK.”

He points also to the case of Lucy Connolly, who was jailed for inciting racial hatred in the wake of the terrible Southport attack last year: “The tweet was horrible and bad, but I don’t think there’s any reasonable way to interpret it as anything other than an inflammatory remark on Twitter. It wasn’t a direct threat of violence.”

At the suggestion, he sounds somewhat like Elon Musk here, Wales hits back: “Elon Musk, though, is all over the map on this issue. He has also called for journalists from 60 Minutes to be in jail. His free speech credentials are very, very thin, so I don’t want to be lumped in with that.”

Asked if there are any limits to the internet he would support, Wales draws the line only at activity that is already illegal, such as revenge porn (“That’s not freedom of expression, that’s abuse”) and direct threats of violence.

Wikipedia was hit in 2019 by a DDoS (distributed denial of service) cyber-attack, which overwhelmed the website and brought it down temporarily in several countries, including the UK.

Wales does not know much about that or any potential recent increase in malicious activity – he has stopped working on the technology end – but confirms that web crawlers are a live problem. “The number of bots crawling Wikipedia, and pace at which they’re crawling Wikipedia, has dramatically increased,” he says.

A million people looking at the same page when a big event happens is no problem, but when a million pages that are not usually looked at are being crawled, it becomes expensive: “We can’t cache all of Wikipedia.” It’s the difference between the behaviour patterns of humans and those of bots. (He encourages crawlers to use Wikipedia’s own tools for developers instead.)

ChatGPT this year surpassed Wikipedia in monthly visits. Wales is confident, however, that Wikipedia can survive the age of artificial intelligence.

“The hallucination problem is still really bad,” says Wales, who finds large language models most useful for brainstorming. He regularly tests ChatGPT by asking it, “who is Kate Garvey?” (his wife) and gets answers that are “always wrong, always amusing, and always plausible”.

It once claimed Garvey had set up a non-profit to promote women’s empowerment in the workplace, with Miriam González Durántez, Nick Clegg’s wife. This is perfectly credible and on-brand: the two couples know each other “from the school gates” and from Clegg’s Facebook work; and Garvey runs an agency that promotes the UN’s sustainable development goals. But it was not true.

He also asks to whom she is married. One answer was James Purnell, the Brown era Cabinet minister, who she did actually live with “back in the day”; another was Lord Mandelson. “I said, ‘Isn’t Peter Mandelson quite famously gay?’, And it got very woke with me, and said, ‘Oh, it’s not appropriate to speculate about people’s personal sex lives, and gay people can get married in the UK’,” he laughs.

(When The House performed the same experiment, ChatGPT answered that Garvey was married to former Conservative minister Rory Stewart. “The couple are well connected across politics, media and humanitarian circles,” it asserted confidently.)

Wales is a strong advocate of VPNs – virtual private networks, which he says everyone should use for their own online safety – and says he would “never use an AI based in China and trust that the data is safe at all.”

He is wary, in fact, of all cloud-based services and concerned by Meta’s plans to use information from users’ chats with AI bots embedded in its platforms to personalise ads. “I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really quite a thing, because a lot of people do talk about very personal things with AI, and they probably shouldn’t’.”

The Wikipedia co-founder’s technology prediction is that over the next few years, it will become common for the ordinary laptop to run a “decent local AI model,” as he already does.

It is not just the Online Safety Act and AI that proposes to radically change the course of Wikipedia’s future, though. Larry Sanger, the other co-founder of Wikipedia who has been very critical of the project since leaving it a year after its launch, has proposed a set of fundamental reforms. (He explored some in an interview with conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson, whom Wales “can’t bear.” )

[Related: Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has started a database of encyclopaedias to challenge Wikipedia’s dominance and Transcript: Wikipedia Co-Creator Larry Sanger’s Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show, watch HERE.]

One of his accusations is that the site has a left-wing bias, which should partly be addressed by scrapping its sources blacklist.

“First of all, the idea that I’m left-wing is a mistake. I’m not. I’m very, very centrist,” says Wales, who recalls that when he first moved to the UK, he found it “hard not to be a Tory” under the Cameron government. “I could only wish my political opinions had some sway in Wikipedia. They don’t.”

He rejects the demand to drop the blacklist, saying “the idea that we should take sites that routinely publish crazy conspiracy theories and nonsense just doesn’t make any sense.” While Breitbart News and American conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation are blacklisted, corporate UK publications The Sun, The Daily Star and The Daily Mail are among Wikipedia’s “deprecated” sources.

“Deprecated doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to use it. It just means you should prefer a better source if you can find one. And I 100 per cent stand by that. That’s not about the political stance of the Daily Mail – it’s about the quality of the publication. They defend by saying they rarely lose a libel case. I’m like, that’s not good enough,” Wales says.

“My suggestion to any serious, thoughtful conservative billionaires is they should be funding some seriously intellectual right-wing sources.”

How about letting the public rate articles? That “doesn’t sound like a completely terrible idea,” he says, but adds that such systems are usually gameable and do not produce useful results.

Sanger’s suggestion of a Community Note-style system, as on Musk’s X, is dismissed on the basis that is what Wikipedia already is. (Wales likes Community Notes and reveals he spends most of his time on X doing them.) “Another thing he said is that we should do away with consensus as the standard. I just think that’s completely mad,” Wales adds.

The most pointed critique, perhaps, relates to the anonymity of administrators who govern Wikipedia. Sanger claims that 85 per cent of the most powerful accounts are anonymous and they can “libel people with impunity” in the US, as legal protections there often shield the Wikimedia Foundation from liability for user-generated content.

“I think it would be very, very dangerous for some administrators to be publicly identified, and I think they would quit,” replies Wales. “That’s particularly true when we see a rise in political violence on all sides.”

Wales has started his own social networking service, Trust Café, but it is small, and they are still working on the software. His distaste for Musk is clear, but does he ever look at the tech billionaires and think, “Why am I running a nonprofit?”

“No, I don’t!” Wales replies. “I’m not poor, I mean, I live in Kensington.” As an afterthought, he asks: “How many bankers in London make far more money than I ever will, and how boring must their lives be compared to mine?”

Lo que muy probablemente ocurra es que hagan una excepción con Wikipedia temporalmente, para no hacer el ridículo y para que se normalice la idea de que "claro que el gobierno tiene que controlar cada visita a cada web" - la única forma de que esto se detenga en el Reino Unido es un gobierno de "extrema derecha" porque hay un consenso total de los tories y Labour en este asunto.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://cincodias.elpais.com/fortunas/2025-11-01/del-perfume-de-dolcegabana-a-los-aperitivos-con-colageno-el-creciente-negocio-de-las-mascotas.html

Saludos.