FRESH

Hacker News

The Ofcom Files, Part 4: Ofcom Rides Again

83 points by parliament32

by felixfurtak

2 subcomments

This reminds me of the Kim Dotcom saga where US attorneys accused Mega of copyright infringement when he was living in New Zealand and his company, Mega, was based in Hong Kong. Dotcom had never stepped foot in the US but somehow that was enough grounds to extradite him and force him to comply with local laws. There are plenty of examples of judicial overreach in all parts of the world. The US is no exception.

by jimnotgym

1 subcomments

> UK’s censorship agency, Ofcom
I think that is a bit of a stretch. Ofcom is the telecommunications regulator. They are responsible for censorship, but to be a censorship agency it would have to be your primary role. Starting a blog like this, suggests everything below is going to be a bit OTT. Instead of censorship we have propaganda.
Ofcom license amateur radio, but spend no time censoring it that I know of. Last week they fined Virgin media for making a hash of converting vulnerable people from analogue to digital phone lines, without regards to their telehealth monitoring systems. That sort of mundane thing is Ofcoms raison d'etre

by dmix

0 subcomment

> Prompt and voluntary cooperation with law enforcement on child safety issues, including UK law enforcement, is what really matters for children’s safety online. That work happens quietly and non-publicly with officials who are tasked with performing it, namely, the police. My client will not be working with you on that important work because your agency is a censorship agency, not a law enforcement agency. Ofcom lacks the competence and the jurisdiction to do the work that actually matters in this space.
Well said

0 subcomment

by chatmasta

0 subcomment

Calling these letters toothless is missing the point. Ofcom doesn’t expect 4chan to comply. They are creating a paper trail to justify the next step of forcing UK ISPs to block the content at a network level.

by FridayoLeary

1 subcomments

This whole bill is about increasing government control. Now the civil servants get to geoblock our internet. Something they've been desperate to do. I feel it's part of a wider pattern along with the police deciding recently that the law allows them to police social media like the stasi. Not a new law, just a creative interpretation of one that has been around for a while. Then you have that horrible idea with mandatory digital id. I'm not sure what exactly is going on because we are still a democracy. I think it's just a lot of people living in an ivory tower.
It's not about child safety at all. If anything our government has shown time and again that that is simply not a priority for them.

by GaryBluto

1 subcomments

Ofcom is effectively humiliating the United Kingdom (further) to the world by doing this. There's nothing more pathetic that demanding somebody do something under threat and them just shrugging it off.

by dmitrygr

0 subcomment

If you needed to ask the permission of every apparatchik in the world before you said anything online, you wouldn't even be allowed to say "no comment". Glad someone is fighting this and doing so publicly. And the GRANITE act looks interesting: https://prestonbyrne.com/2025/10/18/the-granite-act-how-cong...

by hexbin010

2 subcomments

Seems like a lot of needless drama. What real legal threat did they pose that warranted a federal suit in the US against Ofcom?
Just ignore Ofcom?

by tguvot

0 subcomment

ofcom is "fun". been working on implementation UK Telecommunications Security Code of Practice that been managed by ofcom. There are some very undefined controls with rather vague examples (that say "for example" and "not exhaustive list"). I tried to get from them clarification about how it should be applied, as controls/examples not clear. they wrote me back that I should simply look at example as they explain everything

0 subcomment

by quantummagic

1 subcomments

The U.K. has descended into madness. The legalities of this don't even really matter, it's disappointing that there is any support for this sort of thing in the first place.