Imgur blocks access to UK users after proposed regulatory fine - BBC News
Imgur blocks access to UK users after proposed regulatory fine - BBC News
Imgur blocks access to UK users after proposed regulatory fine - BBC News
Image-hosting platform Imgur has blocked people in the UK from accessing its content.
Imgur is used by millions to make and share images such as memes across the web, particularly on Reddit and in online forums.
But UK users trying to access Imgur on Tuesday were met with an error message saying "content not available in your region" - with Imgur content shared on other websites also no longer showing.
The UK's data watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), said it recently notified the platform's parent company, MediaLab AI, of plans to fine Imgur after probing its approach to age checks and use of children's personal data.
Not to like be a conspiracy theorist, but WTF is going on that everyone everywhere all at once is introducing weird censorship laws? And now the UK with digital ID? What is coming that they don't want us talking about? We don't have this in the USA yet, but they keep trying to pass KOSA... what's really going on?
Suppression of the populace is the only real reason.
They want to limit, even if secretly, the ability of the people to easily disseminate information and act on it by organizing protests or unifying themselves against an (unknowing) oppressive government.
If the government can fully read along with the chat channels and easily identify who is who and where they live, it can catch 90% of public anger in chats before it spreads amongst citizens in a wildfire.
For years now governments have spied on chats and open facebook messaging where they could, to stop or redirect fights or riots from being organized.
But they had to do it by directly planting someone inside the groupchats so they could read along, still it would not catch all chats between just two people.
Now with the growth of encryption(and related protective laws) that job is getting harder, so the way to control all this is to legally break open the encryptions and have an AI import, read, decide on, and forever store them for use as evidence years later. And an AI is not one single government worker but scales to be able to intercept and process billions of messages so its far easier to catch unwanted "behavior".
So it never was/is about "the children" or terrorism, these topics are precentage wise so low its insane to force strict regulations on everyone, these new laws are for what comes next, the opening of the doors to search for everything that the government decides is unwanted.
From being angry about forced immigration that comes with negative effects for the existing population, to public anger about an executive stealing people's pensions and getting off with just a fine.
From people organizing a riot to fight the opposing sportsteam fans just to get some excitement in, to people organizing blocking a polluting company's doors because they want to make a statement against unregulated pollution.
Every form of protest can be caught before it happens and redirected into manageable situations where the government gets its way or can prepare with a positive social media brainwash campaign or just introduce new laws.
Very underrated response.
Rise of fascism
Okay, here's a wild conspiracy theory I've just made up.
Epstein's photo and video blackmail material has been lost/stolen/duplicated or otherwise out "in the wild". Before someone data dumps that on the internet they want to make sure they can quickly squash it from being accessed and put their own rules in place to be able to heavily punish and shut down those who don't quickly comply.
I have another theory: a large portion of politicians now prefer yes-men to competent assistants. The result is that when they try to make laws that could make sense (like protecting kids from porn) they end up with the stupidest solutions ever, and do not even listen to the experts who try to warn them.
I also have one. AI hallucinations were expected. They just anticipated it would take longer for us to notice it because AI has been deceiving us from the beginning.
That explains why child pornography is the excuse for chat control (I mean it's always either that or terrorism with these things, the playbook never changes)
There's at least 4 "original" versions out there:
Epstein himself had originals at his island, (confiscated at the time of the investigation). And most likely a backup at his manhattan offices (taken from the safe under suspicious circumstances by an unknown party after the "fbi" raid left the filled safe open overnight, the next day the safe was empty).
Gislaine Maxwell, as a fully involved assistant, had a (partial, non video?) copy somewhere, for safekeeping, unclear what happened to it.
Then there was a rumor Russia pressured Epstein into "selling" them a copy.
Epstein is documented to have traveled to Russia and met with government officials well before his evil empire came crashing down.
The thing is, most of these original files are used to keep the other owners in check, if any one releases them they compromise everyone on there by mutual destruction.
I suspect even if Russia, or whatever other state has them, would leak it all it would come back to burn them, if this was not the case it would have been out there publicly already.
Have a look at the world views of tech billionaires like Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel. They've been going on about control of peoples digital life for at least a decade now, even before the popularisation of LLMs. These guys are laying the brick work for a deus ex style corpocracy.
If we’ve learned anything from cyberpunk, this is always the endgame for corporations. The more technologically advanced they become, the easier it is for them to subjugate the masses. Corporations are built for long-term control of assets long after their founders die.
What we should be currently figuring out is that once corporation become sufficiently wealthy and allowed to donate endless amounts of money to politicians, they become more powerful than the governments ability to control them.
Personally, I think it's just a result of the political machinery becoming more technology proficient. It was inevitable that governments were going to (at least try to) regulate more and more of the Internet at some point. Now the knowledge and tools are aligning themselves to make this a reality.
My conspiracy theory.
All that 'kompromat' that exists out there,
1 - They are pushing massive $$$ into AI to get it good enough that the old kompromat is meaningless, because you wouldn't be able to prove its AI or not
2 - Putting in the foundation of censorship, so when that kompromat gets released, they can have the legal framework already in place to remove it as much as possible.
After all that kompromat is rendered meaningless, who knows which way the world will go then. We basically return back to the days the world ran uninfluenced by pictures/video because either pictures/video didn't exist back then, or the means to distribute it to the general populace to make that kompromat effective didn't exist.
To retort:
In addition, by replacing internet search with AI, they can try to bend the results to their wants and desires, much like how Hollywood movies largely represent the desired focus of producers and executives.