Friday
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
gattsuru
2d ago
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.
FtSoA
3d ago
Right off the bat, let's see if you can admit a clear factual error or two. I really should have done this before writing the rest, but ah well.
Do you acknowledge that Iran's ballistic missile production facilities and launchers are not all underground? This is a very easy one.
Do you acknowledge that the volume of Iran's launches against Israel dropped off considerably? Here's a clue: https://jinsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Iranian-Ballistic-Missile-Estimates-6-26-2025-6.pdf
Frankly it's remarkable to see someone try to flip the script on one of the most one-sided wars in history, but then I suppose the Egyptians tried to pretend they had won the Yom Kippur War.
Also, both Israeli casualty reports and Qassam combat footage overwhelmingly shows the use of indigenous IEDs and other weapons that could only be manufactured locally. It would be silly for a cell based organization like Hamas to depend on imports.
Never did I say the majority of their stock was Iranian. But Iran has been a major supporter for decades.
The IDF very clearly tried to take Al-Khiam for a photo-op at the former detention center and failed.
That's not particularly relevant in evaluating the overall status at the end of the conflict, where Israel overwhelmingly kicked Hezbollah in the nuts by killing its leader, a bunch of its personnel, maimed a shit ton more of them, and also significantly reduced their missile stockpile, all while taking relatively light casualties and rendering the missile threat mostly ineffective.
Tellingly, they didn't do much to help out their pals in Tehran. Weird way to behave if actually they weren't hurting so badly. Kinda defeats the point of having an alliance.
If Iran were legitimately totally defenseless then why would Israel care about what Trump thinks?
Why would Israel care about what it's single most important ally thinks about a conflict it has been assisting with? Seriously? The stuff in Syria is small potatoes.
On the flipside, they had drones that were shot down so it's just as easy to imagine that Netanyahu simply didn't bother taking the risk. In this case the burden of proof that Israel was dropping bombs in Iranian airspace is on you, since basically all of the identified strikes look like the result of air launched missiles, not bombs.
The most retarded bit of logic here is that if we, for the sake of argument, grant that you're correct about only IAF drones poking around Iranian airspace then, wow, the IAF is really capable of doing a lot of damage to buildings using air-launched missiles at scale. Also, hitting the Mashhad airport at 1400 miles strongly implies operating within Iranian airspace even with ALBMs.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/israels-air-superiority-lets-strike-191600442.html
So all those photos of IAF aircraft loaded with bombs were just for propaganda purposes? Why? Who are they trying to convince? The U.S. and Iranian militaries know the reality regardless.
There's no good reason to believe the IAF is lying here, but you need it to fit your highly evidence-challenged view that actually Iran was the one winning this conflict. The real irony here is that the Iranians don't contest that the IAF was operating in Iranian airspace, they just pretended to shoot an F-35 or two down. You're doing more work than even the Iranian propagandists!
On the flipside, they had drones that were shot down so it's just as easy to imagine that Netanyahu simply didn't bother taking the risk. In this case the burden of proof that Israel was dropping bombs in Iranian airspace is on you, since basically all of the identified strikes look like the result of air launched missiles, not bombs.
Why send drones on obvious suicide missions if air defenses are not suppressed much at all?
The IAF demolished large buildings and took out at least one command bunker, we know. Hard and expensive to do that with merely missiles.
How many missiles do ya reckon this took? Would the IAF really use its fancy LORAs on a TV broadcaster?
Elbit Systems' share price rose by 5.43% in New York on Friday, and is currently up 5.94% on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-us-weapons-prove-themselves-in-iran-strikes-1001512893
There's plenty of evidence Israel dropped bombs in Iran, just none you find compelling enough that you have to accept it. You resist the obvious because your narrative collapses if actually the IAF did have air dominance and you can pretend they were going to run out of ALBMs before Iran ran out of its ballistic missiles.
Every indication is that he had no problem with Israel one sidedly bombing Iran forever, it was only when Iran started landing counterpunches that he became interested in deescalation.
Trump's change in preference came right after the U.S. strikes on the nuclear facilities, obviously. The volume of Iranian missile strikes was going down and Israel was not taking meaningful damage relative to Iran.
On the first day Israel went for a decapitation strike followed by regime change
Israel did not expect to get regime change that easily. Come on now. As far as we know, the Supreme Leader was not targeted (whether by impossibility or choice I'm not sure).
they reorganized and proceeded to return fire in sufficient volume to break Israeli AD nearly every day. They hit strategic sites at will
No, they very much did not. All those missiles, so few strategic sites hit. Blowing up grandmas doesn't win wars, even when they were able to do that.
on day 12 they were reduced to hitting a giant clock in Tehran
This is backwards logic. The IAF could afford to start hitting secondary targets on day 12 because they had been so successful the previous 11 days. It's not like they suddenly couldn't hit Tehran, as you've pointed out.
Had the war continued it would have continued to get worse and worse for Israel. Fortunately Israel was able to leverage the threat of direct American offensive involvement beyond choreographed bombings that result in zero injuries, otherwise the Iranians would have had little reason to agree to a deal.
There was no "deal" here. It was just an unofficial ceasefire. If Iran was on the verge of really turning the tide against their main enemy who did a surprise attack and killed a bunch of its top leaders and destroyed a bunch of their military and nuclear sites, why would they have stopped instead of getting even? They knew the U.S. really did not want to get drawn in beyond the attack on the nuclear sites. Why would Iran let Israel get away with it?
I'm not that cynical about BPD. As cases go, hers is far from the worst I've seen or heard of. At just about the exact same time, my best friend was having his ex throw dishes at him and breaking his MacBook in fits of rage, all while doing regular self-harm.
Neither of us were telling the other quite how bad it was, because we knew, as best friends, that we'd be obliged to intervene.
She didn't attack me with a knife, didn't steal from me, didn't cheat on me or anything remotely as bad. If she didn't provoke the fucking stupid and seemingly interminable arguments, that alone would be enough for me to accept her other failings. I'm hardly perfect myself.
I ran into some characters shortly after the breakup. I talked two people out of suicide, which really makes me wonder if they found dating apps after autocorrect switched away from doctor.
Hell, here's a rather detailed breakdown.
I meet crazy chicks inside the hospital, and crazy women outside. At this point, I'm beginning to wonder if the medical definition of 'sanity' even exists anymore, or if the entire space of possible psyches has been claimed. I tell myself I've had really bad luck, and that I'm not Captain Save-A-Hoe.
(The ones who seem sane are all taken.)
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
3d ago
...Not gonna lie, you have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and- no, wait, wrong script.
Regardless, thank you/fuck you for illuminating this possibility. I feel like this post is unironically a Basilisk-tier cognitohazard, maybe an even bigger one by virtue of plausibly working on any human with a heart instead of just aspies. Suddenly the lack of uh, visual imagery from my last failed LDR looks more like a blessing than an attachment-shaped hole, I would absolutely cheerily slide down the mountain of skulls to try this if I had decent material.
Although there's a second immediate thought, which I idly had before - I do have megabytes of emails and Discord logs, and did make/use character cards before, and did try re-enacting a particular typing style... hmm. Surely at this point I am too based and desensitized to AI to go full gosling.jpg, what's the worst that could happen? <- clueless
HereAndGone
4d ago
After all, few men are so much into MILFs that they would not enjoy a blowjob from a busty 16yo.
Yeah, but the allegations are not "blowjobs from 16 or 17 year olds who would be legal, depending what jurisdiction you were in", it's "Trump and Epstein raped twelve and thirteen year olds".
If it were just "sexy hot 17 year old" nobody would much care. It has to be "frightened coerced beaten thirteen year old" or nothing, because the mud has to be the blackest, dirtiest, stickiest mud to throw.
Politico, back in 2019, did an article on all the assault allegations (as of then) against Trump. While there's plenty of gross, disgusting, and immoral acts (by my sex-negative prudish religious anti-fun judgement), there's only two (unless you go by the updated definition of rape) charges of rape: 'Katie Johnson' with the Epstein allegations, and E. Jean Carroll with her Bergdorf Goodman adventure - which, let me say, I don't believe or at least do not think it proven. Read her account, replace "Trump" with "Biden" and imagine for yourself all the media articles ripping the holes in the story wide open and claiming she was trying to smear a decent man for nefarious reasons, ranging from trying to extort money to being a Republican plant.
The rest are all of the "grab 'em by the pussy" kind: groping, kissing, unwanted touching, invitations to go back to his room. Distinct lack of "I was only twelve and he raped me in the hotel bedroom" accounts:
Sixteen women have come forward with allegations against President Donald Trump, each accusing him of inappropriate conduct. The most recent, from writer and columnist E. Jean Carroll, appeared in NY Magazine on Friday.
The women’s charges range from unwanted touches and aggressive, sudden kissing to the latest accusation against Trump — that he attacked a woman in a dressing room and forced his penis inside her. Donald Trump, his campaign and the Trump White House have insisted all of the stories are fabricated and politically motivated.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6d ago
Is this a record number of comments for a Friday Fun Thread? It's >300 at the time of writing.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
6d ago
Now this is Friday Fun!
Recreational bunker shellings when?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6d ago
About a year ago, in a discussion of Ireland's rabid support for the Palestinian cause, I argued that it's primarily caused by misguided post-colonial solidarity and that "I've never gotten the feeling that Ireland is an antisemitic country".
That's a position I'm now revisiting:
A Jewish man was hit by a stranger shouting antisemitic insults on a Dublin city bus on Friday [the 18th of July], according to a video circulating on social media. The assailant shouted “genocidal Jews” and other slurs at the man.
He also said he recognized that the man was a Jew “because of his face.” The Jewish man – who recorded the incident – can be heard saying, “I get used to it; they are all like this.”...
The assailant then slapped the Jewish man in the face and tried to take his phone.
Comments on social media said the driver called the police and that the man was arrested.
An officer told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that it does not comment on material circulated online by third parties but confirmed that “shortly after 11 p.m. on Friday, 18 July 2025, [police officers] from Rathmines responded to reports of a disturbance on a bus in Rathgar, Dublin.”
For reference, Rathgar is a very posh suburb, with houses going for €1 million at the minimum.
A few weeks ago, my dad quoted some Israeli politician (whose name escapes me) at me who supposedly claimed that his proudest achievement was drawing an equivocation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the public consciousness. I accept that the two are not strictly equivalent, but I don't think anyone can dispute anymore (in Ireland or anywhere else) that the former can often serve as a cover for the latter. I am quite confident that the assailant made no effort to ascertain his victim's political affiliation (i.e. whether or not he was one of the "good Jews") before harassing and assaulting him.
As an aside, I can't help but marvel at how self-defeating this behaviour is. Whenever you assault someone because they look like they might be Jewish, you are precisely demonstrating Israel's entire raison d'être, the moral necessity of its existence.
The Ludditism stems from spending so much time on the computer for work... but here I am on a Friday night replying to a forum post instead of doing luddite things...
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