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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   496 thread views

Transnational Thursday for July 31, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Some items I'm looking at this week, as always provided on a best-effort basis.

Geopolitics

Americas

Drug cartel operatives from Mexico and Colombia joined the International Legion in Ukraine to gain experience with first person view drone usage.

Trump says Russia has '10 days from today' to end Ukraine war, or face penalties

Europe

UK threatens to recognize Palestine as a state

UK prisoners are bringing goods into jail via drone

Niger signs a nuclear cooperation deal with Russia

Chikungunya spreads from Indian Ocean islands

Spain and Greece are facing a health alert due to rising cases of Crimean Congo haemorrhagic fever (CCHF), an illness with a mortality rate of about 30%

Middle East

Gaza

Israeli military announces 'tactical pause' to Gaza attacks amid mounting global pressure

At least 46 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire in Gaza, officials say, as hunger crisis grinds on

Aid trucks resume flow from Egypt to Gaza via Rafah crossing for 3rd consecutive day

Trump's envoy meets Netanyahu for Gaza aid push

Testimony of a former employee of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation paints them as deliverately shooting into crowds.

Marjorie Taylor Greene labels Israel's actions as genocide

Egypt, UAE, Jordan airdrop aid over Gaza

Israeli army says 52 aid packages airdropped in Gaza

Famine threshold reached in Gaza

Yemen

Yemen's Houthis said on Sunday they would target any ships belonging to companies that do business with Israeli ports, regardless of their nationalities

Asia

Canada intends to recognise a Palestinian state in September

Taiwan is building up its drone capacity (but reporting doesn't point out how they will just be built by China)

Africa

Militant islamic groups have reportedly killed 155K people over the last decade

Cholera outbreaks in Africa

Attacks in Kordofan states (Sudan) cause hundreds of deaths, mass displacement and the collapse of essential services

Cholera Rampant Among Displaced and Refugees in Darfur and Eastern Chad

Bio

"Article looking at AI drug discovery. Much has been made about the potential for AI to produce pandemics, but they also make defense easier.

Tech and AI

Hierarchical reasoning might be a new architecture that does better.

New powerful open source models

Ah, I remember a period when people in India, overly indexing on the name, thought Chikungunya was spread by poultry.

The UK's Office of Communications has become an international problem.

I've mentioned the UK's 'oi, bruv, can I see your porn loiscence'. Recently, I also admitted that the US beat them to it, and pondered if perhaps this was one place where the UK might not end up the embarrassingly backassward one.

We have an answer. Politico reports:

The UK’s Online Safety Act took effect Friday to shield minors from “harmful” content — not just pornography, but also material that is hateful, promotes substance abuse or depicts “serious violence.” The rules apply to any site accessible in the UK, even those based in the U.S. This means sites like Reddit, Bluesky and even Grindr now have to abide by the OSA’s speech regulations to stay online in the country.

Over the weekend, major U.S.-based platforms implemented measures to comply with the law, and promptly became harder to access. By using a VPN to simulate UK web browsing, DFD was able to confirm reports that content relating to Gaza on X and cigars on Reddit was more restricted in the UK than in the U.S. Some required verification checks necessitating a photo ID or a selfie to verify age. Other content was blocked entirely, though some X posts on Gaza were later restored. The UK law may not strictly apply to such content, but social media companies apparently aren’t chancing it. Gab, a U.S.-based platform that hosts Nazi and other extremist content, has gone completely dark in the UK to avoid financial and criminal penalties under the safety act.

Ostensibly, the law has a relatively constrained set of content service providers must block, and a larger-but-still-defined section that providers must keep away from minors. In practice, the paperwork and overhead costs are significant even if the UK never enforces the law other than to demand reports and just circular-bins them, and the banned content ranges from the steelman (CSAM) to the marginal (choking porn?) to the are we the baddies (sales of knives), and very little is well-defined ('foreign disinformation'). Media coverage of several police actions by the UK have already been restricted.

In turn, Gab (and some other targets) have provided those notices to reporters:

I attach a formal request (‘Notice’) for information under Section 100 of the Act addressed to Gab AI Inc. The Notice includes further details on the background to this information request, and Annex 1 to the Notice sets out the information we require from you. The deadline for providing the information is 11:00 GMT on 29 April 2025[...]

We acknowledge your legal representatives’ email of 26 March 2025 setting out your view that your service is not subject to the Act as you have no presence outside of the United States. We also note your intention not to respond to future correspondence from Ofcom. We would like to bring it to your attention that wherever in the world a service is based, if it has ‘links to the UK’, it now has duties to protect UK users. This includes if a service has a significant number of UK users, or UK users are a target market. These rules will also apply to services that are capable of being used by individuals in the UK and which pose a material risk of significant harm to them. As noted above, the Act only requires that services take action to protect users based in the UK – it does not require them to take action in relation to users based anywhere else in the world.

What are the penalties?

Failure to comply with this Notice may result in Ofcom taking enforcement action against you, such as requiring you to take certain steps to comply and/or imposing a financial penalty. The financial penalty could be up to whichever is greater of £18 million or, in certain circumstances, 10% of the person’s qualifying worldwide revenue. A daily rate penalty may also be applied in addition to a fixed rate penalty[...]

Other offences in relation to the Notices include: knowingly providing information that is false in a material respect; providing the information in an encrypted form so that Ofcom cannot understand it, with the intention of preventing Ofcom from understanding the information; or suppressing, destroying or altering information that is required under the Notice, to prevent Ofcom from obtaining the information or obtaining the information in the unaltered form. A person who is convicted of any of these offences may face imprisonment for a term of up to two years, or a fine (or both).

The British defense has revolved around saying that this isn't a free speech matter. Which, in turns, tells you about as much as you need to know about that 'foreign disinformation'.

This probably isn't the only reason that YouTube, Spotify, and a wide variety of other sites are spinning out age verification approaches of varying levels of credibility. But that's only because Australia's gone nuts, too.

Can one hope that this whole thing introduces a new generation to the magical world of BitTorrent?

Why would you hope for that? A normie flood into piracy would probably bring more government attention to it, and they'd try harder to stop it.

Since we talk about tattoos here from time to time I thought it would be amusing to link to the story about this man who has face tattoos is unable to pass the photo verification checks.

https://needtoknow.co.uk/2025/07/30/britains-most-tattooed-man-claims-he-is-unable-to-watch-prn-as-new-age-check-system-mistakes-his-ink-for-a-mask/

There's a video where someone got a gmod Wallace Breen to do their face scan: https://x.com/Dexerto/status/1950662036087783541

AI would surely be quite helpful here.

There have been quite a few funny stories coming out of this entire clown-show. I've seen comments on reddit about people using pictures of Keir Starmer to pass age verification.

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