Comment by FridayoLeary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FridayoLeary | Hacker News Reader

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this is the message i got when i clicked on the link:

>Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act

The Online Safety Act imposes new compliance duties on web sites with the potential for staggering penalties. I'm concerned my blog might fall under the OSA's definition of a Part 3 regulated user-to-user service. It might also qualify as a Part 5 service which provides pornography. Unfortunately, Ofcom's guidance for small services has been exceedingly vague.

I don't have the time, money, or interest to set up highly effective age assurance on a personal blog; nor do I care to spend any more of my nights and weekends working through thousands of pages of guidance and writing up risk assessments. I'm geoblocking the UK instead; Ofcom indicates that's sufficient to comply with the law.

Geoblocking is not precise. If you are not in the UK and seeing this message, you can use Tor or a VPN service to access aphyr.com.

There's a lot of uncertainty among small sites regarding what the OSA means and how Ofcom will enforce it. If you run a web site and you're struggling to interpret the OSA guidance, you might want to reach out to Ofcom's Online Safety team at OSengagement@ofcom.org.uk.

I know it's off topic but i think it has some relevance since it shows how this poorly conceived law is actively degrading my experience online, as was predicted here on hn.

Kyle is a peerless genius when it comes to his technical content about distributed systems, but he has a tendency for histrionics when it comes to this stuff.

I think it's fair.

I can't read this article as well, but it's his right to not be bothered about the unhinged piece of legislation enacted by some foreign parliament.

Are you going to raise the issue with your MP?

No. I'm just a casual HN user and i assume few people currently in power have any interest in amending a law they only just passed. Also unfortunately there are other bills that this government is passing/wants to pass that will affect me far worse then this one, so whatever ettention i do have is directed at them.

It is disappointing that they went to this hassle but apparently didn't read the first link that comes up when you search this:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2025/226/made?hl=en-GB

Tl;Dr at the most stringent you need at least 3 million UK monthly users. Depending on what your site offers in terms of functionality it then allows 7 million or even 34 million UK monthly users before you need to care.

With respect, I doubt this blog has 3+ million active UK viewers. This legislation is designed for Facebook et al, not for random personal blogs on the internet.

But hey it's a free world so if you want to take the moral high ground go-ahead. Just be sure you understand first :)

This is a whole story unto itself. I (and a bunch of other small-site operators) actually got the chance to ask Ofcom directly about how small a site would have to be to declare itself out-of-scope of part 3/5 services, and in short: the law doesn't specify, Ofcom declines to say, and it could be as small as "a one-man band". Ofcom has indicated that they're interested in pursuing aggressive enforcement against small service providers (read: web sites). I wound up concluding that the forum I help run could be defensibly out-of-scope, but aphyr.com gets significantly more traffic, and I'm trying to limit risks.

I think in total I spent something like 80 hours reading the legislation, working through thousands of pages of Ofcom guidance, and corresponding with Ofcom trying to figure out whether and how compliance was feasible.

https://blog.woof.group/announcements/updates-on-the-osa

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