adamskii_uk wrote:
There's alot of technology that the Government keeps classified, so I believe it may be possible to do it, at least at a very basic level.
Currently, there are no known and unpatched TLS exploits. Even if the government knew about one, they'd have to share knowledge about the existence of it with every ISP in the UK.
Even if they manage to somehow keep it secret and unnoticed for more than a few hours (which is highly unlikely; even if no one leaks any info about it, a sudden increase in latency for everyone in the entire country would be quite obvious), Xbox-huge warning flags would be raised as soon as they start banning people who's only been pirating things with encrypted connections. The exploit would become public knowledge within a day, and a patch would be released for most browsers within hours.
Sure, they could try to make TLS illegal, but that would put everyone who uses online banking (i.e. 99% of the population) at a huge risk. The general public may be sheep, but if they knew that their government prioritise foreign copyright holders' wallets above their own security, things would get really bad really quickly. Especially when you consider the fact that this law was passed in the first place without a democratic vote.
adamskii_uk wrote:
Anyway, laughing aside. This still doesn't alter the fact that this law is real, and on June 12, osu! members in the UK will be breaking the law by visiting this website.
Beatmaps are already stored on a separate server, AFAIK. If even linking to copyrighted material counts, peppy could always bypass this by redirecting British visitors to a version of the site where the Beatmaps section is greyed out. Users who want to download beatmaps would be advised to manually go to another subdomain (e.g. osu2.ppy.sh), where they'd be able to download beatmaps at their own risk.