What happens is that European companies buy services that are produced in the US, not in Europe. The European countries are free to ban and fine companies buying those services like Russia does. Italy, for example, can start by fining companies using Cloudflare, IP blocking Cloudflare and face the political consequences of it. But they don't want politicalconsequences which is the source of the friction. An Italian would be really pissed off for politicians if someone shows up their house and takes away computer because of watching football illegally.

The NatWest Three - UK nationals, working in the UK, for a UK company. "Defrauded" their UK employer and were convicted by a US court and jailed in the US for the crime.

There was that recent rant on twitter/x by the Cloudflare CEO that seemed to indicate otherwise (w.r.t. Italian DNS blocking)

I'm not sure what is "ridiculous and twisted" when I point out that obviously X does not facilitate CSAM "as a service".

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.

As far as I know gemini and chatgpt will also create these images, they just won't post them automatically as social media posts.

That is not accurate as far as I know.

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".

> Do the actually do this, or do they just say they do this?

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)).

Who says they don't?

It is my understanding that in response to this issue, X has tightened content moderation for their image generation features.

"Automated" can mean banned/escalated to human review after 20 users report it.

You really need to look at what is happening closer to home before engaging in such trolling.

EDIT: Look what is happening to those in authority who speak out and disagree with the US president.

Things would quieten down considerably if Twitter stopped showing them to the UK, as then the number of people being harassed by indecent images of themselves would drastically reduce.

I must admit that it was not.

I don't have to think it, because it does not apply to them in the same way. For all intents and purposes, they are merely on a kind of probationary hiring process or maybe a probationary period, depending on how you want to look at it. Hence, why ... you know... they can't vote. Any and all privileges they enjoy, are effectively just that, privileges, just like you extend them to a guest in your home.

For further context; technically a naturalized, i.e., given citizenship can be revoked from someone that was not naturally born an American.

Them are the rules, whether you like them or not, and just for not knowing that and having that smug attitude, you should be permanently barred from entry to the USA.

Are you referring to the 5th Amendment with "No person..."? It doesn't really matter regarding my counter point, but it only highlights that you may not have fully thought through what that implies.

If the standard is as broad as a person, any person, since it is not specified what kind of person, beyond the accused one in the 5A, then you must also for consistency, believe that the Constitution applies to the whole world and all it's "persons" since the Constitution also applies to all Americans all around the world, not just on US soil.

I am not a fan of that, although I think it would have been great if other countries had adopted the Constitution, but I must presume that many others in the world would not like very much that the USA starts seeing everyone on the planet that is person as falling under its jurisdiction.

It leads us down a rather dark hallway where things like the Maduro snatching and the snatching of any other person on the planet that cannot physically prevent it under the justification that every person is subject to the USA.

You may say, "well, it only applies to "anyone on U.S. soil", but that also does not hold water since any citizen around the planet is also technically subject to and protected by American law. Do you see the conflict emerging here? And that does not even address the other huge conflict that has corrupted the Constitution and the country for the last 60 years, the birth right citizenship that was simply deliberately and maliciously misapplied and citizenship was given out to tens of millions of people in direct contradiction to democracy, the law, and justice. But that's a whole other topic.

It's interesting, because we live in very interesting times in the USA regarding these matters. We are currently experiencing what will both test whether the USA still exists, i.e., it can control it's boundaries and whether or not invasions can and are repelled, even when they simply peacefully just waltz across the border; or if the USA does not exist and definitely not in a democratic republic kind of way when anyone from anywhere in the world can simply just wander across the border, have a child, and is then immediately just allowed to become a citizen at the detriment and without any kind of democratic input of and by the legitimate citizenry.

> So why then does the bank of England have and need the right* to print as many USD as they need, whenever they want.

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...

This is the first I've heard of this? Where's this legislated? Or is this misinterpreting contracted out physical printing services?

Quick search says it does not. What is your source for this claim?

>> The UK is extremely dependent on American LNG to […]

> "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-...

That does not make the distinction between pipeline gas and LNG, but I do not know if that is a distinction worth making

I suspect it absolutely could rebalance, resulting in some other country taking the US gas instead while we take their previous non-US gas.

Rebalancing US cloud services out is impossible, though. That's the real UK economy kill switch.

Their precious pipelines could just be blown up by an unknown actor the moment the US president says the UK will not get any gas through them.

The North Stream scenario could just repeat.

Does Canada have the port systems to load boats to the UK? Of not, can they add such facilities without raising the price?