I doubt Ofcom are motivated by "concern for individuals well beings in the midst of a mental health crisis", but even then, it is clear in the context of the current discussion that they should be concerned with enforcing their legislation in their own country. The UK is free to build The Great Firewall of the United Kingdom and block half of the internet if their concern is so great.
What they cannot be allowed to do is tell organizations in other jurisdictions that they now suddenly fall under UK jurisdiction.
There are 195 countries in the world. If all of them followed a policy like UK's Ofcom, the internet would be gone in no time and world-wide user-to-user communication would become impossible for legal reasons. It's obviously not a sane position.
> I doubt Ofcom are motivated by "concern for individuals well beings in the midst of a mental health crisis"
Do you have evidence for that? Because when I search I do see them doing investigations concerned with abuse of people including mentioning coercive and controlling behaviors
> If all of them followed a policy like UK's Ofcom, the internet would be gone in no time and world-wide user-to-user communication would become impossible for legal reasons.
Sounds like a slippery slope fallacy to me. Again, not necessarily supporting the policy, but when such arguments are used against it, it’s not convincing.
It's not a fallacy since there is nothing special or noteworthy about the UK. If every other country sent out such letters, then you'd have to block every country except your own. That's a fact. There are 195 countries in the world, no law office could possibly ensure you're complying with the laws of all of these countries within your own country. The laws are not even consistent, for example you violate the EU's GDPR by complying with Ofcom's demands. The UK's behavior sets a bad precedent that other small countries might follow. It's already enough having to keep up with US and EU regulatory demands, and we have to, since these are markets we can't ignore. Even just a few more small countries coming up with demands like Ofcom could create insurmountable legal problems for small companies like ours.
Let me put it another way: Would you comply with a similar letter from North Korea? From Russia? From China? If not, your attitude is hypocritical and inconsistent.
We're taking those threat seriously and have decided to block all UK IP numbers and not to do business with the UK for the time being. News that Ofcom might ignore such measures are worrying to us.
What’s your company? Perhaps you have an ethical obligation to your users and should have these regulations in place. We’ve seen what happens when companies are underegulated (Facebook, etc etc)
And here’s why your argument is a fallacy:
“This type of argument is sometimes used as a form of fearmongering in which the probable consequences of a given action are exaggerated in an attempt to scare the audience” [1]
I don't have anything major to add to what I've already said. We have indeed an ethical obligation towards our (future) customers, that's exactly why we couldn't fulfill Ofcom's demands - that would literally be illegal in our jurisdiction. Sovereign countries have their own laws (not the UK's), and in addition to these we also provide strong moderation tools. So for now we have to block the UK. We're in closed alpha stage and have a long way to go so this is purely a matter of legal prudence.
By the way, I've worked closely together with argumentation theorists at university for many years, so I know quite well what a slippery slope argument is. You should know that not all of them are fallacies.
We're aggressively blocking UK IPs before we even have our product ready, neither our website nor our software will work for visitors from the UK, our ToS will prohibit use of our software for UK residents, and we will not sell or offer the software in the UK. Ofcom would have to put a lot of effort to circumvent these measures to even know we exist.
In a nutshell, I'm moderately confident that this will suffice to keep Ofcom away.
I'm building an application that allows you to send a file to your colleagues. That's hardly a revolutionary or unusual use case, and it definitely requires network access and full access to the local file system. I also need the ability to lock files, writing file locks anywhere on the system, and I need to be able to index the contents of files.
Not only are all of these functions and corresponding permissions completely standard for all kinds of applications, they belong to the core of what any system that calls itself an "operating system" should deliver to developers and end users.
You should definitely not run any apps that you don't trust. It's a no-brainer.
But in the end the file access issue is an operating system deficiency. They could offer more fine-grained access control but the common operating systems don't. It's ultimately a matter of user convenience.
Yeah, but Docker provides pretty good isolation if done right, it's a good start. MacOS sandbox is limited in functionality and poorly documented, but still looks promising.
The only problem is that nobody cares, so there's no evolutionary pressure for OS developers to make their products safer in the sense the applications are safe for user.
After 18 years of Mac-abstinence, I just bought a MacBook Air and realized there is apparently no way to change the App Store language without changing region and payment method. WTF? That seems like the most basic thing one could imagine. What has happened to Apple?
I was able to switch the App Store language from English to Spanish by changing my primary language in System Settings > Language & Region > Preferred Languages.
It didn't require me to switch my region or payment method.
Why did you think Apple was user friendly or flexible...it's the Apple way or the highway. Most only stick around because of the currently superior hardware
That argument is not sound. English is an official language of India, of course Indians are much more likely to seek work in the UK and the US than people from Latin America. You have failed to present any evidence concerning the skill levels of Indian H1B holders, and, moreover, since India has the largest population of all countries, those 130M college graduates must have gone through some very tough selection.
> English is an official language of India, of course Indians are much more likely to seek work in the UK and the US than people from Latin America.
The U.S. is also much closer to Latin America, and has a large Latino community already. The disparity in H1bs (70% versus 2% for Mexico/Brazil/Colombia) is just too huge to explain by language preferences.
> since India has the largest population of all countries, those 130M college graduates must have gone through some very tough selection.
This is the most desperate and feeble attempt to save an argument I've seen in a long time. How about you try find some actual evidence to support your claims instead these wild constructions.
> The disparity in H1bs (70% versus 2% for Mexico/Brazil/Colombia) is just too huge to explain by language preferences.
You base your position on these kind "hunches"? "Just too huge to explain". No, it isn't just too huge to explain. It's really that simple. India is the largest country of the world in terms of population, English is an official language of India, hence there is a substantial amount of people with high qualifications who use those qualifications to seek employment in major English speaking countries like the US and the UK with visas like the H1B. There are also many Chinese people in those countries but the language barrier makes it much harder for them.
People from Latin America have a hard time getting hired for highly qualified jobs in the US for various reasons, one of them being the language barrier.
By the way, if there was some conspiracy to hire Indians with low qualifications, then you'd still have not done anything to explain why these people should be Indians as opposed to Latin Americans. The argument makes no sense. Can't you see that? I'm genuinely puzzled.
Now you're replacing a general statement about a whole subcontinent with one individual case of a company from this year. I'm done with that conversation. Have a good day!
Cognizant is the second largest recipient of H1bs, accounting for almost 5% of all H1bs approved in 2024. So we have outcomes that don’t make sense (one country receiving 70% of H1bs) plus proven discrimination against American workers by the second largest H1b visa recipient.
I’m an armchair commenter, not a federal prosecutor. But this all seems very fishy. If I were in the administration, I’d start investigating all the major H1b employers to see whether there’s preferential hiring of Indians going on.
> Otherwise anything one could trade could count as money.
But that's correct and often occurs on black markets for all kinds of reasons, for example coffee and cigarettes in Germany after WW2 and Hungarian salami and tires in the GDR. There are no alternative currencies because they are strictly prohibited by penal law, otherwise they would occur in all kinds of areas. Governments only allow highly regulated alternative currencies, and even then only under very rare circumstances. Crypto coins weren't an exception to this, they only emerged a bit faster than how legislation could be updated.
Do you argue that Trump was elected because the media supported him more than Harris? Although Fox News and X are fully pro-Trump, of course, my impression is that the majority of media did not support Trump. So, I find that media control thesis hard to believe.
Given how often the media would uncritically repeat upside-down nonsense like "Trump supporters say they're concerned with inflation" without any kind of analysis, yes, the overall media did tacitly support Trump.
I've no idea whether this was from the ownership class pulling strings to cut any real objective criticism of ZIRP corporate welfare, democrats uninterested in economics being blind to the fact that inflation actually has concrete causes, or from the writers having their brains steeped in things like racism-everywhere orthodoxy and thinking that referencing those narratives makes for a neutral objective article. But regardless of why, with friends like those...
What they cannot be allowed to do is tell organizations in other jurisdictions that they now suddenly fall under UK jurisdiction.
There are 195 countries in the world. If all of them followed a policy like UK's Ofcom, the internet would be gone in no time and world-wide user-to-user communication would become impossible for legal reasons. It's obviously not a sane position.
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