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Neil Brown
774d614ebcf8fa1536805ff86bdbe7763f4f933e21608f14b43c2b1916f38403
English Internet, telecoms, and tech lawyer (https://decoded.legal). Linux / FOSS, legal stuff, Airsoft, and puns. Terrible puns. He/him. Cishet, lucky husband. #NoBot / #NoSearch / #NoIndex / #NoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoTheresNoLimit

In terms of answering questions, Ofcom says that there are constraints:

they are the regulator, and were involved in the development of the OSA.

they can provide guidance and support, but cannot make decisions. Ofcom can't take on that responsibility, and doesn't have access to all the information / evidence.

Ofcom doesn't want to be in a bind if it gives bad advice!

Ofcom opening by saying that they want to focus on the site/services causing the most harm, and that it is not their intention to impact adversely small, low risk, sites.services.

Ofcom is going to give a presentation which is probably similar to / the same as the one they gave last week.

I'm going to be live-tooting this afternoon's "small, low risk" session with Ofcom about the #OnlineSafetyAct, in this thread.

By all means mute it if you wish; I imagine it could get quite long.

And please, if you are from Ofcom and you are reading this, any frustration I express comes from a place of genuinely trying to help people running small, low risk sites and services meet the requirements of the OSA. I've spent literally all my free time for the past few weeks on this.

Replying to Avatar JamesB

nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpq98t8kgwqas59rvmnghzcdn6krzhxhpkyt2mt53e4g9sdnj74sszsv4x759 Do you have a list of the sites so I can... erm... add them to a block list. Yes, a block list.

nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpq6jupxu70nh0pg0wt4maseaf2fg3kv2tgcjal2kaaunms2ltdaxys3z4ycf

It's funny that you should say that, because if someone was looking for a freely-available list of porn sites (or, at least, suspected porn sites), they might start by searching for a block list!

(One I looked at recently had 250,000 unique items, although some were subdomains.)

This reminds me of a piece of academic research, on the undesirability of access to online pornography by children.

It seems that their research method consisted of asking children if they were familiar with / had accessed certain porn sites.

It included links to a lot of porn sites, many of which were new to me and, presumably, to many of the children involved in the research...

In case you wonder why I often think about "banned words" and poorly-implemented tools, I live in a lovely suburb of Newbury, called "Shaw-cum-Donnington".

Replying to Avatar nadja

nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpq98t8kgwqas59rvmnghzcdn6krzhxhpkyt2mt53e4g9sdnj74sszsv4x759 Funny, I would have presumed you to be quite tolerant of swears ^^

Given that my usual venacular can make a sailor blush (although, not around children, for many, many reasons) I will keep that in mind and watch myself ^^

nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqjuctpcn557w4kzdy0pwplnfqudtu64yvjtyjdt77zd5d0vw99thq38ule9

Please, continue to be you. I've never once thought badly of any of your replies to me!

New blogpost: "Using pandoc and typst to convert markdown into custom-formatted PDFs, with a sample template"

I've been tinkering with typst, to do PDF typesetting with a custom layout, for converting markdown files using pandoc.

I've a little more tinkering to go, but I'm pleased with it. Examples in the post.

(If I'm your lawyer, expect my advice notes to look like this in future. If I'm not your lawyer, well...)

https://neilzone.co.uk/2025/01/using-pandoc-and-typst-to-convert-markdown-into-custom-formatted-pdfs-with-a-sample-template/

#pandoc #typst #PDF #document #Linux #FOSS

Replying to Avatar Neil Brown

Have some quiet time and want a fun mini-project? How about:

Snikket: a self-hosted, encrypted, open standards chat system for friends and family: https://snikket.org/

Jellyfin: a self-hosted media server, with numerous clients and a web interface. Pairs well with yt-dlp for downloading from various sites. https://jellyfin.org/

#FOSS #selfhosting

Nextcloud: a versatile personal information management and file sync server, extensible with loads of add-ons: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/stable/admin_manual/

vaultwarden: a self-hosted, encrypted password manager, with support for TOTP and passkeys, compatible with Bitwarden: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden

FreshRSS: get back into reading RSS feeds, with this feed aggregator and web reader: https://www.freshrss.org/

#FOSS #selfhosting

Have some quiet time and want a fun mini-project? How about:

Snikket: a self-hosted, encrypted, open standards chat system for friends and family: https://snikket.org/

Jellyfin: a self-hosted media server, with numerous clients and a web interface. Pairs well with yt-dlp for downloading from various sites. https://jellyfin.org/

#FOSS #selfhosting

Does anyone know of a repository / collection of science fiction or similar short stories licensed under Creative Commons licences, or CC0, please?

#books #scifi

nostr:npub1lgfmnpwn287jsyga4pcxxdp3fnr6qa0hxj83hkphp0r82c2cwfhsvwlstr

Google (unavoidable with my 'droid phone)

Just in case it helps for the future, I have an Android phone, but not Google account - if you have a Pixel, Graphene OS might be worth a look?