People here seem to be thinking this a UK/Europe-specific phenomenon, but there's plenty of examples of the US "seizing" sites that were never hosted in the USA either, and even put pressure on countries to extradite people involved even if they never broke any laws in the country they're living in.
One I remember was a site hosting streams of the 2022 football world cup. Or a number of Iranian-affiliated news sites just last year. Or offshore gambling websites in 2021.
People going "Those Crazy Brits! Thank God That'll Never Happen Here!" seem pretty ill-informed.
I have worked for a company that was threatened by the US to not offer services to several countries or face criminal charges in the US. I'm talking about a saas nothing strange.
We were too small and bent, also US customers were 30% of the total which made it a non choice.
You're serving US customers. You are doing business in the US, and therefore you are subject to US law. What about when a customer requests a refund, do you just pretend US consumer protection laws don't apply to that customer? Or to turn your logic around, can American corporations do business in Europe while just completely ignoring the GDPR and all other European laws?
Laws are not a buffet. You choose to do business in a market, you've opted to be regulated in that market.
You are absolutely free to sell your services to whoever you want, but the US is equally free to refuse to allow you to operate domestically if you're breaking their laws (and otherwise make your life difficult if you e.g. rely on US banking infrastructure). If you want to do business in Iran, don't expect to do business in the US.
You may be interested to learn about the EU Blocking Statute which is designed to protect EU companies from certain US sanctions:
> The European Union does not recognise the extra-territorial application of laws adopted by third countries and considers such effects to be contrary to international law.
(yes the irony is palpable)
> The blocking statute prohibits compliance by EU operators with any requirement or prohibition based on the specified foreign laws.
It is illegal to comply with certain US sanctions in the EU. This is most likely what GP
is talking about.
> You're serving US customers. You are doing business in the US, and therefore you are subject to US law
I don't think this is how the law works.
Think of it this way: any customer from Libya makes it customary for my female co-workers to wear hijab at the workplace.
Thus a customer who voluntarily purchases services from a company in a different jurisdiction does NOT automatically makes this company subject to his jurisdiction.
> Laws are not a buffet. You choose to do business in a market, you've opted to be regulated in that market.
I mean I find this quite plausible, but you should tell the guys in the thread above, who are all posting "ha, the UK thinks it can tell a non-UK website what to do, how absurd!" and metaphorically pouring their tea out in Boston Harbour.
I think there's a difference between a website that citizens from country a can access but who are not necessarily the group the website is created for, for free, and a paid saas that I sell to citizens of country a.
Maybe there's a moral difference (I doubt it personally), but there's clearly not a legal difference.
They're both examples of Country A putting a law on the books that constrains sites in Country B. "Don't sell", "don't serve", "don't stand on one leg while fulfilling orders", they're all the same class of overreach.
Zero difference. If someone is selling children's toys, and 30% of her customers are in the US, and then it turns out her toys are made entirely of lead and asbestos, should she not face US criminal penalties?
You choose to do business in a jurisdiction, you bind yourself to their laws. That means all laws, not just ones you like, or think that are relevant to your business. Laws are not a buffet.
Don't do business in jurisdictions where you feel like you cannot comply with domestic law. No one is requiring you to do business in the US. People choose to do business in the US so they can profit from US customers, and that's totally fine, but doesn't come with some magical immunity to US law.
1. This isn't about business but charges. There's no way in hell US can e.g. prosecute non us citizens from trading with Cuba e.g. the embargo applies to US individuals and companies. The rest of the world, e.g. European countries, have normal relations with Cuba and nobody gives two damns about the embargo.
2. The same thing happens in reverse and applies to US companies doing business overseas.
Anyone who sells to my enemies is my enemy. You yourself can be subject to embargoes.
Francesca Albanese cannot do banking with banks from her own country because the US said so. Read: third parties that have relations with the US are barred from doing business with you or else risk being blacklisted too.
> This isn't about business but charges. There's no way in hell US can e.g. prosecute non us citizens from trading with Cuba
Sure it can. It can do whatever it wants in its domestic courts. Turkmenistan can prosecute you and me right now for failure to pay insufficient deference to dear leader. Whether this impacts us in any way is the actual question. We presumably do not want to do business in Turkmenistan. But the OP wants to do business in the US. Ergo, the OP is subject to US law, irrespective of what he thinks US law should look like or what its limits ought to be.
OP doesn't have to do business in the US at all and be completely and utterly untouched by US law - he won't be extradited anywhere unless the offence in question is also an offence in his own country, which as you point out, the Cuban embargo (etc) isn't. This is how you and I stay safe from the many Turkmenistani indictments hanging over us.
This is not a case of someone bravely standing up for justice and freedom, this is a case of someone wanting to profit from US customers but somehow have total immunity from US law. And I'd respectfully point out that if the countries were reversed, and we were talking about e.g. Russia, the European countries would be apoplectic about anyone doing business there. Imagine a Brazilian company selling drone motors to Russia. Can its executives expect to travel freely through the EU without fear of arrest? Do business in the EU?
> In any case, since you're unaware, Canada and EU have legislation that prohibits Canadian and European companies from obliging with US embargo of Cuba. That is, I can face criminal charges in Europe or Canada for refusing services to Cuba.
Yet almost everyone in those countries falls inline with US law because frankly the US is the exception and it's laws de facto apply in Canada and the EU.
Uhhh... the person whose company has 30% of its customers in the US. See above.
> You sound like the lunatic president you have
> You're the usual case thinking US is an exception to the rules, where it can dictate it's terms beyond its borders and get away with the opposite.
Cool. I'm not American. I'm literally just quoting International Private Law (aka Conflict of Laws) to you. And I'm doing so while being careful to give other examples from other countries.
I've literally not once said I approve of any of these laws. But this seems to be the difference between you and me - I don't bend the rules to get to outcomes I like. You sell to Cuba, or you sell to the US. Do I like that? No. Is that the law? Yes. One would not be very effective in international business if they failed to realise this kind of thing.
> You're the usual case thinking US is an exception to the rules
And, conversely, I think you're the usual case in trying to make the US a unique big bad, when they're doing absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in this area, and certainly nothing that Europe doesn't constantly do when it regulates for foreigners and foreign businesses trying to interact with or through the EU. (Something the EU does more of, proudly and loudly, than anyone else on Earth.)
> It's obvious US laws would apply if you're serving US customers
So any customer from Libya makes it customary for my female co-workers to wear hijab at the workplace, right? Same logic.
No.
A customer who voluntarily purchases services from a company in a different jurisdiction does NOT automatically makes this company subject to his specific jurisdiction.
She does if you want to keep doing business there. That's the stick that's available. Either you follow their laws despite not being in their jurisdiction or you can't sell to customers in Libya.
I don't like it same as you because it makes doing business on the internet complicated but it's how it works in practice.
Why though? Libya has no jurisdiction over my business in the EU. I place no restrictions on who can purchase a subscription on my SaaS. I certainly can sell to customers in Libya.
All Libya can do is ban my business, but they can only implement that ban within their own sovereign borders.
I suppose inability for you to sell and inability for customers to buy are technically different but the end result ends up being the same. If you need to access that market then they have leverage over you to force compliance with their laws.
I'm not sure Libya has any solution to prevent their citizens from purchasing my services. Blocking access to my site, sure. But preventing citizens from using my service is going to be much, much harder.
> People going "Those Crazy Brits! Thank God That'll Never Happen Here!" seem pretty ill-informed.
Well the second part of that is ill-informed but the first part is just... informed?
As far as the US seizing sites, does that happen when the site is hosted outside of the US and without the cooperation of authorities where ever it is actually hosted? I don't think so but I'm happy to be proven wrong there.
If they can't undo the site at the tld level, the US can still compel the DNS servers nearby to erase their record, or redirect it to a "this domain is seized" page. In extremis. they could just poison the DNS addresses of blocked websites although they dot need to.
I think one advantage is you can directly appeal a court ruling. To challenge an administrative order you need to sue the government. In some cases, you need to sue the government in a separate trial first, in order to get permission to start suing them for cause in another one.
Another advantage as the other reply has mentioned is that courts have broad authority but must narrow the effect of their rulings to the minimum necessary to address the suit. In this case it would certainly lead to 4Chan being blocked by UK ISPs by order of a UK court. I think even 4Chan would be fine with that.
The US arrested and imprisoned the bosses of multiple UK-based gambling sites that were not only legal in the UK – they were listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Yes. Hollywood is mad, but piracy sites are still up and unblocked. Book publishers are mad, but Anna's Archive persists on CCTLDs.
The US by and large doesn't censor websites even if the content is illegal in the US. They'll get a warrant and seize servers or domains if it's in the country, or maybe poke international law enforcement for cooperation, but it doesn't really extend beyond that.
> It is further ordered that all ISPs (including without limitation those set forth in Exhibit B hereto) and any other ISPs providing services in the United States shall block access to the Website at any domain address known today (including but not limited to those set forth in Exhibit A hereto) or to be used in the future by the Defendants (“Newly Detected Websites”) by any technological means available on the ISPs’ systems. The domain addresses and any Newly Detected Websites shall be channeled in such a way that users will be unable to connect and/or use the Website, and will be diverted by the ISPs’ DNS servers to a landing page operated and controlled by Plaintiffs (the “Landing Page”).
Then why doesn't the US seize the domains of the Iranian government? They should be able to just seize every .ir domain, if your accusation is correct. The fact is it isn't. It looks that way because most people blindly choose .com without thinking about what country the TLD registry is located in.
I think people here are also more fond of 4chan than the average citizen, and also in general rather fond of technological freedom of anything. Makes sense, being players basically in the team about to get a red card. Like it or not, the global internet became a convenient way to skirt local laws and I don't see any reason why exempting something in one place only because it originated in some other place. Is now enforcing a law "the CCP way"? Should internet be kept lawless only because... internet?
Of course, because they're not proposing "apply our laws in our country" they are proposing "apply our laws in another country". If you want to enforce this law you need to do it the CCP way (punish your ISPs for alllowing it into the country and monitor your citizens for accessing it) because you don't have the jurisdiction to enforce it otherwise. Let's not forget how many UK criminals have made fun of Kim Jong Un's haircut and are getting away with it because the UK is such a lawless place that doesn't enforce DPRK law.
If a country has media or broadcast standards laws, and you distribute or broadcast content in that country that violates those laws, that’s on you. The country can just fine you if you chose not to comply. Just the same as they would if you were doing it while living in that country. You’re not obliged to care about the fine if you don’t live there and never intend to travel there. But if you do then you’re going to be subject to their laws at that point, for violating those laws when you distributed that content in that country.
The hardware that propagates the data transmission is owned partly by the UK and partly by Canada. The Canadian website operator has turned off the transmission to the UK on their side and has fulfilled their obligations. The UK is complaining that they didn't turn off transmission on their side.
What you're saying is that the website operator should travel to the UK to enforce UK law from Canada. It's nonsensical.
Edit: If this wasn't clear enough here is a cartoonish version:
Ofcom: Your site violates UK law. By allowing UK citizens access, you must abide by UK law.
Website operator: I do not care about serving UK citizens and am now blocking UK IP addresses. Thank you for notifying us.
Ofcom: We have decided that we will not block access to your website from the UK. Therefore it is theoretically possible to access your website anyway, which is a violation of UK law. No matter how much effort you spend on ensuring that UK citizens do not gain access to your website, we will make sure that there will always be a non zero possibility of violating UK law. Since we are not blocking anything, the blame cannot lie in UK users circumventing a UK side block, which would force us to prosecute UK citizens rather than you as the website operator.
Please shut your website down to ensure compliance.
Website Operator: Okay so you're telling me I have to build the great firewall in the UK, make all ISPs adopt it and lobby a change in UK law to make the firewall mandatory, just so I can host my website?
The insolation requred to get decent return is often overstated on the internet - you generally see over 1000kwh for a 1kw system over a year, only dropping to ~900 in scotland. California only really gets 40-50% more useful energy out. Sure, it's less, but often close enough that it can still make sense - and more dependant on local energy and PV system costs than anything else.
The idea that you need constant, overhead, wall-to-wall sunshine isn't really true for current systems. In fact, somewhere nearer the equator the effeciency drops significantly for PV systems (even if the total power output increases slightly) as the "extra" light isn't really useful.
Selling back to the grid, maybe. But if displacing your own use, 10p/kwh is a pipe dream in the UK, more like 25p+.
And my point is more that in that example price/kwh, the "best" location only returns $150 or so for that same system.
Sure, worth keeping in mind for payback calculations, but not really a "category change" - power prices vary more than that proportion between the countries involved. And certainly not the whole multiples a pure insolation chart might imply.
There's no (state) school giving out tablets that aren't pretty much single-use locked down devices.
That's the parents.
The expectation that "Parenting" is now outsourced to Teachers, to the Government, to anyone else. People seem to expect they just have a kid, and somehow magically they'll grow up to be a perfect person without any work from themselves. So there's over-reach, there's pressure on making "unworkable" soutions, because the people they're trying to force "solving" the problem aren't the people in the best position to do so.
Your comment seems working from that very same assumption.
Yes, all the "technical" part of content filtering etc. is very much a solved problem. The issue is that's not a "zero effort" solution - they still need to be enabled and managed. And I'm not sure that's a "technical" problem than can be solved.
There's huge pressure on teachers etc. to "solve" these sort of problems - just go to any PTA meeting and there's a lot of loud voices asking for stuff like the laws the original post is highlighting. And politicians listen to the loud voices, and feel they have to be "seen" doing something. Even if that "something" is impossible, unworkable, and fundamentally harmful.
> The expectation that "Parenting" is now outsourced to Teachers, to the Government, to anyone else. People seem to expect they just have a kid, and somehow magically they'll grow up to be a perfect person without any work from themselves. So there's over-reach, there's pressure on making "unworkable" soutions, because the people they're trying to force "solving" the problem aren't the people in the best position to do so.
Yeah, because the parents' time is now dedicated to their employers. When parenting wasn't outsourced, families typically had a parent at home doing it full time.
Don't blame the parents and ignore the story of reduced family capacity.
> Yeah, because the parent's time is now dedicated to their employers. When parenting wasn't outsourced, families typically had a parent at home doing it.
This seems to imply that the problem is that we started letting women work, but I suspect the actual problem is back to restrictive zoning again.
If you let people actually build housing, and then some people have two incomes, they use the extra money to build a big new house or drive newer cars etc. If you instead inhibit new construction, the people with two incomes outbid the families with one income for the artificially constrained housing stock, and then every family needs two incomes and like flipping a switch you go from "women are empowered by allowing them to work" to "women are oppressed by requiring them to work".
I don't think just building more housing is sufficient. That might decrease the cost of living somewhat, but probably not enough to remove the need for a second income.
I think ideally most families should be able to survive on the income of one parent, regardless of which parent that is. But I'm not sure how to get there, although I think the problem is closely tied to wealth inequality.
I also think in a better world, it would be practical for both parents to work, but work fewer hours, each working 20 hours a week. But in the US at least that generally isn't practical because most such jobs don't provide health insurance or retirement plans, and are typically very low paying jobs.
>I don't think just building more housing is sufficient. That might decrease the cost of living somewhat, but probably not enough to remove the need for a second income.
While shadowy special interest groups and large corporations are able to write text directly into the laws of anglophone countries, The People can't even talk about one instance without fragmenting into a trillion pieces covering topics such as the affordability of housing.
This is the thing where bad proposals are easier to come up with than good ones. If you want to actually fix it you need to identify the root cause, come up with a viable, efficient, effective means of addressing it, and then get it enacted.
If all you want to do is pass a bad law, all you have to do is pay money.
I don't disagree with you about affordability of housing. I just don't think that that by itself is sufficient to solve the problem of households needing two incomes.
The left wing constantly says “we started letting women work”. Women have worked for thousands of years. The phenomenon of manipulating women into believing working for a corporation is some kind of “higher calling” is relatively new, and it’s been a disaster for the family unit.
One is that people tell women it's good to work for a corporation, some of them believe that to be true and choose to do it, the others retain and exercise the option to do something else.
The other is that we set up an artificial scarcity treadmill so that if some families have two incomes, they outbid the ones that don't on life necessities and then women have to take a job at a corporation in order to be able to afford to live indoors even if that's not what they would otherwise choose to do.
I disagree. You simply increase the supply of labour by double digit percentage points. Thinking this will not affect the price, all else being equal, is magical thinking.
You're ignoring the other side of the ledger. If the supply of labor increases, but then those people get paid money, then they spend it and create additional demand for labor.
How do you suppose a country with 100 million people can have the same standard of living, if not higher, than a country with 10 million people despite having ten times the supply of labor? Or for that matter that large populous cities can have higher paying jobs than small towns?
> The left wing constantly says “we started letting women work”.
I’ve literally never seen anyone on the left (and rarely even the liberal capitalist center-right) say that. I’ve seen people on the hard right, when complaining, use that framing, though.
And, look, here its part of a complaint glorifying the defects of the capitalist-patriarchal family and whining that more equal treatment of women in the economic sphere hurt the “family unit” rather than recognizing that capitalism wrecks the family unit and greater equality for women just reduces the particular systematic of oppression of women within the capitalist-patriarchal system, but neither cures nor causes the damage to the family unit that comes from capitalism.
You’re of course free to pretend to be unaware of embarrassing left wing rhetoric. But the idea that capitalism hurt the family unit doesn’t really square with reality. The first order of Marxism is the explicit destruction of the family unit in favor of “chosen family” and the state.
> The expectation that "Parenting" is now outsourced to Teachers, to the Government, to anyone else. People seem to expect they just have a kid, and somehow magically they'll grow up to be a perfect person without any work from themselves. So there's over-reach, there's pressure on making "unworkable" soutions, because the people they're trying to force "solving" the problem aren't the people in the best position to do so.
NOT giving children addictive devices isn't not outsourcing parenting, it's basic social responsibility. Like not giving them cigarettes. I find it encourating that most other commenters understand this.
> There's no (state) school giving out tablets that aren't pretty much single-use locked down devices.
False, and this betrays that you have no experience with what you're talking out.
In theory „There's no (state) school giving out tablets that aren't pretty much single-use locked down devices.“
In practice, most schools lack anyone with enough technical literacy to lock down the device. So they just hand out unlocked cheap android tablets with all the stock spyware and advertisement pre-installed.
They don't "hand out" anything really - probably the closest thing is government programmes to fund laptops/tablets for low income families, but not a single school locally "gives out" tablets to kids. But they're all just "normal retail" devices.
They have some things used in lessons, but they're all given out at the beginning of the lesson, then gathered at the end.
You could argue that it's a problem they they assume home access to such things anyway - especially in later years - as things like online 'homework' is the norm.
Again, this is not true. Some public schools do buy ipads and licenses and do hand them out and some times they're unlocked. You COULD do a basic google search and learn about the topic on the news, you're you don't actually care to learn, you're just spreading noise.
Again my experience with local schools doesn't match that, though I'd acknowledge that local authority can cause a lot of differences. And I'm talking about state schools - not public schools. Remember that means a very different thing in the UK, and might suggest your own distance from the claims you seem to be making.
And googling only seems to find examples of the low income programmes. I struggle to find a single instance when devices are handed out to kids and not keep at school and only used in specific tasks - like the old trolley of laptops was a few years ago.
Or breathless reactionary commentary without any actual examples of course.
Parents don't have the right tools to minimize harm to their kids online. The parental controls offered by Apple and Google were intentionally designed to be full of holes.
“There's no (state) school giving out tablets that aren't pretty much single-use locked down devices.”
They try, but kids are smart and there are holes in the tools to lock things down. You would not believe the inventive workarounds that kids find to circumvent content filters. It’s a losing battle to lock everything.
You're talking about a solved problem and a few comments down there's a bunch of people in this very comment thread losing their minds about Linux devs working on implementing parental controls.
I believe training currently costs significantly more than inference to all the current vendors, so I'd be surprised if it doesn't also use more power.
And by the look of it, that'll be the norm pretty much forever - unless something fundamental about how models can be trained/updated, an "older" model loses value as it's knowledge becomes out of date, even if we no longer get improvements from other sources or techniques.
But other things likely change based on "lifetimes" and usage patterns too - e.g. a large battery for an electric car may have a higher upfront energy cost in manufacturing than a small ICE + fuel tank, but presumably there's a mileage that the improved per-mile efficiency overcomes that, and then continues to gain with each additional mile.
All laws are vague and interpreted, and in common law (as in the UK and US) interpreted based on precedent rather than the specific text of the original law.
If people with power over you want to "selectively punish you" they don't need new laws.
And if you want perfectly proscriptive, defined laws in all situations with no "human interpretation" you're in the wrong universe, and may as well be shouting at clouds. The world, and especially human society and interactions, just doesn't follow strict definitions like that.
There are degrees of vagueness, but laws generally attempt to avoid being vague with many definitions and strict construction. If a law is sufficiently vague it may be invalidated, or it is at least required to be interpreted to the benefit of the defendant under lenity.
Yes - AI has completely destroyed the set of "Signals" people used to judge quality of much software. They weren't ever 100% accurate, sure, but they were often pretty good heuristics for "level of care", what the devs considered important (or didn't consider important) and similar.
And I mean that as both "end user" software signals, and "library" signals for other devs.
I assume that set of signals will slowly be updated. If one of those ends up being "Any Use of AI At All" is still an open question, depending on if the promised hype actually ends up meeting capability as much as anything.
This is true beyond software. It used to be that the proof of the thinking process was in the resulting artifact. No longer can you estimate from the existence of a piece of text and the level of polish behind it that the apparent author has put at least a reasonable amount of thought into it. This applies to comments, blogs, emails, and most troublingly I've seen this happen at my job with things like requirement specs. Now, the veneer of quality makes it much harder to know what is the appropriate amount of skepticism to judge the contents with. And it's too tiring to be maximally skeptical about everything.
Humans have the ability to ignore and generally not remember things after a short scan, prioritize what's actually important etc. But to an LLM a token is a token.
There's attempts at effectively doing something similar with analysis passes of the context - kinda what things like auto-compaction is doing - but I'm sure anyone who has used the current generation of those tools will tell you they're very much imperfect.
That may help with tokens being "ignored" while still being in the context window, but not context window size costs and limitations in the first place.
AMD's implementation very much doesn't have that issue - it throttles slightly, maybe, but it's still a net benefit. The problem with Intel's implementation is that the throttling was immediate - and took noticeable time to then settle and actually start processing again - from any avx512 instruction, so the "occasional" avx512 instruction (in autovectorized code, or something like the occasional optimized memcpy or similar) was a net negative in performance. This meant that it only benefitted large chunks of avx512-heavy code, so this switching penalty was overcome.
But there's plenty in avx512 the really helps real algorithms outside the 512-wide registers - I think it would be perceived very differently if it was initially the new instructions on the same 256-wide registers - ie avx10 - in the first place, then extended to 512 as the transistor/power budgets allowed. AVX512 was just tying too many things together too early than "incremental extensions".
LLMs have always been great at generating code that doesn't really mean anything - no architectural decisions, the same for "any" program. But only rarely does one see questions why we're needing to generating "meaningless" code in the first place.
This gets to one of my core fears around the last few years of software development. A lot of companies right now are saddling their codebases with pages and pages of code that does what they need it to do but of which they have no comprehension.
For a long time my motto around software development has been "optimize for maintainability" and I'm quite concerned that in a few years this habit is going to hit us like a truck in the same way the off-shoring craze did - a bunch of companies will start slowly dying off as their feature velocity slows to a crawl and a lot of products that were useful will be lost. It's not my problem, I know, but it's quite concerning.
One I remember was a site hosting streams of the 2022 football world cup. Or a number of Iranian-affiliated news sites just last year. Or offshore gambling websites in 2021.
People going "Those Crazy Brits! Thank God That'll Never Happen Here!" seem pretty ill-informed.
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