It is however a massive alarm that the UK cannot afford to use US cloud services for anything governmental, and especially should not be signing any contracts with Palantir. Perhaps revoking the Palantir one should be used as leverage here? Or do we just admit to being a sort of damp version of Puerto Rico, not a state but subject to US governance?
Then there's the F35s, the ""independent"" (not) nuclear deterrent, and so on.
We really are in a weird state of dependency with the US regarding deterrence - missiles sourced from US stocks, UK nuclear material built into warheads using a US design.
I wonder if there is a block in the missiles to stop them being used against the US?
Edit: I don't think there is any dependency on the US once a UK Trident sub is at sea - for the simple reason there no external dependencies (no codes or anything) - the crews have all they need to launch.
When test firing gets into the news, it's because it has the opposite problem and goes towards the US.
It's Donald Trumps SOP.
Have you thought about this for even a second?
They are sold in the EU, they need to follow the laws for the market where they are sold. I can't go to the US, produce a death trap of a car, and sell it in the US because it goes against US laws; I could produce the same car in the US, not sell it in the US, and be fine if I find a market where I can export it to, it's stupid but not against the law.
US companies want to sell to Europeans, they could choose to not do business here and wouldn't face any repercussions if breaking EU law. Since they do like the money from a very rich bloc of countries they do business in the EU and need to follow its laws.
It's very very simple, I don't know why you are trying to complicate a rule (or worse, victimise companies) that exists anywhere in the world. If I want to sell something in the USA I need to follow USA's laws regarding that, if I don't then I can't do business there.
Otherwise you are simply not allowed to sell it in the EU.
I'm also fairly sure that the Italian requirement only applies to blocking Italian DNS access.
> The authority set the multi-million euro fine with the resolution now published based on one percent of Cloudflare's global annual revenue. It justifies this calculation with the company's cross-border structure: Since Cloudflare's infrastructure is globally oriented and enables the circumvention of local blocks, the sanction must also have a corresponding "deterrent effect" and go beyond the national framework.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Cloudflare-record-fine-Italy-s-...
The only link that made them liable for US extradition was "wire fraud" relating to a message transmitted in the US. Exactly the sort of extraterritorial law that the US are complaining about when it happens to them.
Fixed that for you.
“We take action against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary,” X Safety said. “Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/x-blames-users-f...
It's an odd shadow war though, because the government haven't even pulled their own Twitter accounts from the service (which they can and should do).
I am told that in the US, possession of material that is "lewd" or intended to be sexually provocative can very well be a crime.
The UK is supposedly even stricter, with the law using the broad term "indecent".
And horny teens have always fantasist about celebrities, or that girl they have a crush one etc. And there always had been people people cutting physical images together to place the head of their obsession on some erotic magazine sourced body.
But like you saied it's creating a feed of all the people which have been sexualized against their will.
There is a huge difference between someone doing something in your mind (or room) and it staying there and it being posted international for billions of people to see (and download, and re-post, and cherry pick preferred pictures and then feed into AI model which will actually full undress people etc.)
and a huge company making money from not just sexualizing people against their will, but also putting creating a public feed about all the people they have sexualized against their will
and then the owner going out of their way to claim that that is all free speech they won't change anything and anyone who tries is fascist, communist, evil etc.
except that definitions of what free speech means vary largely between countries and huge parts of the world have definitions where stuff like "creating sexualized images of people against their will" (or systematic harassment, cyber mobbing, death threads, and a bunch of other things) are very clearly _not_ covered by free speech.
realistically speaking this is also AI output, i.e. not speech of a person (weather natural or legal/company), i.e. it's questionably if Grok posting generated images does even count as speech (in the US and many other countries)...
Such content includes anything using the word cisgender, posting pictures of Herr Musk from before their gender reaffirmment surgery, and referring to the Grand Pedophile in Chief in a non-brownnosing manner, I presume.
If they do it, why don’t they preemptively block it instead? I know they don’t have anywhere near the manpower to find this stuff manually so it would have to be automated. If it’s automated then they could detect it as it’s happening and prevent it from being made in the first place.
they do it within limits
- you trick it into generating actual naked people (instead of bikini pictures or sexualized poses etc.)
- it blows up (bad press, a lot of abuse reports)
which means effectively for most of this pictures there are no consequences
heck Elon has personally argued they fall under free speech and nothing need to be changed.... (but in EU, UK, and large parts of the world they don't. Also in a round about way free speech probably doesn't apply to it in the US either: because speech needs a speaker which is a person (natural or legal) and AI doesn't count as a person (and hence can by itself not hold copyright either)).
It is my understanding that in response to this issue, X has tightened content moderation for their image generation features.
initially they outright said, there is no problem
and Musk went further saying it's free speech and implying if you try do anything against it you are fascist
and you could check the Grok "~feed" and get tons over tons of examples of them _not_ doing anything. And if that changed, then it did very recently. I mean the UK is not the only country where the topic of regulating X to to them failing to self regulate and outright intentionally ignoring local laws was opened up. And as much as Musk might say he don't care and it's implied that the US will retaliate against any country which enforces actions against X for not complying with their law when doing business in their country, it still is a huge headache for X (company) and it's not like people in the US are supper happy about that either.
EDIT: Look what is happening to those in authority who speak out and disagree with the US president.
When the pot calls the kettle black, as we say in the UK, it's fair to tell the pot about it's own soot residue.
Of FFS. What a ridiculous and twisted thing to say.
Try replacing "intentionally permit" with "massively facilitate".
Xitter is a sewer.
No, X is not a sewer.
It's a perfectly usable platform that I find pushes less political content to my feed than other alternatives, such as Reddit.
They also offer AI services with less guardrails than more risk adverse competitors. It appears this may have been a mistake in combination with image editing capabilities.
The debate is whether to ban X, not Grok though.
The last thing you want to do is play right into the hand of psychopathic narcissists by "de-anonymizing" everyone. You simply do not understand what you are proposing and thereby condemning your children and all of humanity to with that mentality. It is advocacy for tyranny.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46374248 ("Former EU commissioner and activists barred from US (theguardian.com)")
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-moderation... ("EU warns Elon Musk that being too lax on Twitter moderation could get the platform banned in Europe" (2022))
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-elon-musk-donald-trump-in...
It's like when you are a member of some club, let's say a wholesale club. If you are a member, you are allowed to enter and follow the rules of the club. If you are not a member, you do not get to do that and must leave.
You are free to create your own wholesale club with your own rules, but conflict arises when you demand or even force entry into our club illegally. That is where we have been for many decades now and security is enforcing the rules because the members of the club that have been paying are getting extremely pissed off after having had to pay for freeloaders for decades now and be abused and disrespected by them for it on top of it.
It's not hard to understand, it just seems most people are intentionally and deceptively feigning ignorance. If they are not, we have a way bigger problem that will invariably result in open conflict at some point.
If you want to free speech, I suggest you start your own free speech club wherever you are, or if you gain entry to our free speech club, you have to follow the membership rules and if it were up to me, you would have a trial period, restricted rights, and you would have to pay a freeloader rate.
These are all very reasonable things to abide by in order to keep peace, but we are now all having to learn the hard lessons of what happens when you allow bad behavior to get away with things, and you do not enforce clearly defined rules against those who even blatantly defy them and disrespect you and what you have created, and even do so in your own home. It didn't need to be like this, but it seems most humans are incapable of simply letting well enough be. It seems one of the most universal human characteristics. It applies from the personal to the government to the ideological/psychological level and it is the origin of all human conflict; you have something someone else wants and they'll end up stewing over it until they try to take it from you by hook or crook if you allow them to. The peace comes from keeping a balance. There has been no balance for as long as anyone is old and then some.
This is just a new front in this war.
https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/election-excl...
Maybe you have problems with the UK exercising the right to control borders? :)
If they only use sterling?
* - along five other central banks
The BoE does not even "print" the GBP (except paper/coins through the mint), never mind the USD. Money in the UK, like most countries, is created by banks through credit issuance (loans, mortgages):
* https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/how-is-money-crea...
Thank you for your condescension: it helped convince me the error of my ways…
> Actually I see its 14 central banks that have this USD FX swap facility (but the BoE, ECB, and BoJ are essentially uncapped).
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46616169
I am aware of swap lines, and how they were used in the GFC (2008/9) and COVID (2020/1):
* https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/central-bank-l...
* https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2023/03/coordinated-central-bank...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank_liquidity_swap
Swapping ≠ printing.
And if the US wants to cut swap lines, thus making people more nervous about using and holding USD, thus reducing USD as a considered safe haven… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Actually I see its 14 central banks that have this USD FX swap facility (but the BoE, ECB, and BoJ are essentially uncapped).
My sources:
1. I did some early work in a very early precursor of this with Reuters
2. The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) https://www.bis.org/speeches/sp230324a.pdf
3. The Federal Reserve Banks (Richmond) https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...
How it works is:
The BoE needs USD, say $10 billion, so it SIMULTANEOUS conjures out of absolute thin air a single ledger entry:
- GBP ₤ 7,437,400,000 - liability to US FED
- USD $10,000,000,000 - asset to UK BoE
It then:
- lends the $10 billion to whoever needs it in the UK
- later (so not immediately*) lets the Fed know it has a new GBP asset.
It later promises to pay it all back. If it can.
But, be very clear, 14 central banks, can and do conjure up USD out of thin air. They call it something boring ("FX swaps").
The modern fiat monetary system is weird. (And I want to be a bank).
But to my earlier point - this print on demand, let us know later facility is only needed because of the demand for USD.
> "Extremely dependent" seems to be overstating things a bit - 11% of imported gas comes from the US with is about a fifth of what we import from Norway and a third of domestic production?
If the GP wants to hold to his logic, then the US would be "extremely dependent" on Canada, given that 25% of all crude oil refined in the US comes from their northern neighbour:
* https://www.afpm.org/newsroom/blog/how-much-oil-does-united-...
Could the UK not rebalance its imports from LNG to more pipeline-based gas? It seems like the UK has managed to cut out Russian LNG imports completely already.
Rebalancing US cloud services out is impossible, though. That's the real UK economy kill switch.
The North Stream scenario could just repeat.