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Comment by beejiu | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea what this service is, but clicking around on their site they mention it's 18+, that they don't allow "Child pornography, Sexualized depictions of minors, Heavy gore, Bestiality, Sexual violence".

I don't agree with everything in the Online Safety Act, but if anything needed a risk assessment, it's surely this?

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Agreed. I read the article and I was thinking "this sounds pretty bad", but after clicking through to the main site my experience was "there's no explanation of what this is, but it looks like it probably falls within the need for some form of regulation".

Are there services which offer a less... risky... service that are similarly affected here?

Lobste.rs is a tech-focused website quite similar to HN, and it's also affected (although they decided that the risks of legal action are low enough to avoid geoblocking UK users entirely).

You can read their community discussion at https://lobste.rs/s/ukosa1/uk_users_lobsters_needs_your_help...

From what I understand, it is just giving people access to AI models with minimal censorship - so illegal content [0] is still disallowed, but otherwise you can do what you want. And I’m sure a lot of that will be sexual material, but that’s more about the nature of the market demand for uncensored AI than anything inherent to the offering in itself

[0] “law” here isn’t just laws made by governments, but also regulations made by e.g. Visa and Mastercard

They appear to be objecting to the scope and extreme cost of the risk assessment rather than its existence.

They're in scope because they provide a pornographic service, I don't see that is arguable. If you don't have the competence in house to follow the guidelines and need to hire expensive lawyers, then yes it's an "extreme cost", but that's not true of all businesses.

But that's the whole complaint, the overhead of compliance with the law (not necessarily the controls on protecting minors themselves but just the legal burden) is so high as to be untenable for anyone but big corps.

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