> Two days later, US Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson warned big tech firms they could be violating US law if they weakened privacy and data security requirements by complying with international laws such as the Online Safety Act.
How will this work with chat control?
> "If Ofcom doesn't think this will be enough to prevent significant harm, it can even ask that ISPs be ordered to block UK access."
If you want to enforce stupid laws the burden should be upon you.
I think eventually we will reach a point where laws like the Online Safety Act become so prevalent that it is basically impossible to comply with all of them simultaneously and still have a unified internet across the globe. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 10 years or so every country has its own version of the internet only intended for their own people.
which might be the end goal - the internet, with freedom of communication, is a way that the plebs can organize and resist authoritarianism. And as countries are growing increasingly authoritarian (and i include UK here), they may be planning on preventing the old free internet that has enabled so much.
So as technologists here at HN, there needs to be a pre-emptive strike to prevent such an outcome from becoming successful. I would have said TOR, but for most people it's a non-starter. What other options are there?
I've said it for years and I'm sticking to it that you can't solve political "problems" (real or otherwise) with technology.
Not for the masses and not sustainabl,
It's always easier to have a paper say "do this" than finding a tech to circumvent it.
Politics is fundamentally people business and involves lots of people who can't or won't understand the details of what is going on but who may still be interested in the end results.
i also want believe the same, but i am increasingly disillusioned that there's a political process that is capable of reforming it - think about the fact that no one asked for these measures of censorship, but they keep creeping in, as though some vested interest has been pushing it through at every opportunity.
So the lack of ability to solve this politically has made technological solution the only out.
You can definitely create political problems with technology. Why can't technology have a role in solving political problems too?
The problem is when tech people try apply tech to political problems crudely, without understanding or without caring about the human aspect of it. You need sociologists and political scientists to study what impact a technology will actually have, and normal people to see how they feel about it, not just programmers who may incorrectly assume that e.g. designing an open and secure protocol will automatically and directly map to creating an open and secure society.
For example, in this case, the blunt approach is "How do we design a protocol that can't be censored/monitored?" The answer is TOR, which as parent comment noted, is socially a non-starter. But maybe a better approach could be, "How do we design a protocol which removes the incentives/makes it politically untenable for people to censor/monitor it?"
One way you might approach this is to create a system that's organically useless for bad actors. Clearly different platforms have different levels of "safe" and "awful", due to their structure. Could we design a platform with such strong prosocial incentives that authoritarians are not able to fearmonger about it?
Another approach could be to chain common citizen rights to authoritarian interests. For example, the US government cannot backdoor AES, because doing so would also compromise their own communciations. Can we make it so authoritarians are forced onto the same boat as us for our other communication technologies too, and therefore disincentivized from weakening our privacy because doing so would damage theirs too?
ActivityPub, ATProto, and blockchain could also be seen as technologies that are designed to create a social structure that incentivizes specific political outcomes, with varying degrees of success.
It's people business. So you design around questions like "Where is this technology going to put different types of people, and how are they going to feel about that?"
> So as technologists here at HN, there needs to be a pre-emptive strike to prevent such an outcome from becoming successful. I would have said TOR, but for most people it's a non-starter. What other options are there?
The option here is to stop trying to solve everything with tech when a lot of the time it's not viable and actively makes things worse. Start putting that time into the non-tech options. Not as fun though, is it?
Applications based on QUIC and/or P2P might be an option. QUIC is designed to not be as easy to filter as TCP + TLS. But then right now it can be blocked by just blocking UDP.
But if majority of the internet would use QUIC then blocking UDP would mean blocking most of the internet so the governments wouldn't be so eager do nationwide firewalls (hopefully).
Encrypted Client Hello is also a puzzle piece towards that - makes it much harder to kill TLS connections that are trying to reach specific websites. Also makes it easier to conceal proxies.
The adoption speed is critical, exactly because of what you're saying. It's easy for a wannabe authoritarian to make a decision to "just block all of ECH and QUIC traffic" if that breaks 0.8% of all traffic - but not if that breaks 80% of all traffic.
QUIC or any other technology still needs domain name and both the domain name ownership and DNS could be blocked by governments. Also IP could be blocked.
There is DNS over QUIC, and in case your current Connection ID or IP is blocked during the connection, QUIC can use multiple IPs and CIDs for single connection, and CIDs are negotiated in encrypted part of packet. It's a mechanism for migrating connection over changing networks. Servers can also take advantage of that.
Server could have multiple QUIC output nodes to migrate connection in case one of them is blocked. The output node network can be shared by many servers and DoQ endpoints so blocking it entirely would scare government.
This solution still needs to connect to some known IP in order to establish connection first. And the same goes for DoQ. To mitigate this we can use Encrypted Client Hello as other commenter mentioned and connect to a pool instead of single IP.
I am not talking man in the middle thing which DNS over QUIC solves, but lawfully telling the domain registrar to forcefully take over the domain. Also multiple IPs doesn't solve anything if all the IPs could be identified.
There is simply cutting all the wires that connect your guys to your enemy's guys. QUIC won't solve that. Protocols which hide routing information might, since then you can't tell where the right wires are.
Reticulum is interesting. It's basically flowing through all network interfaces available on the devices and routing data packets. Making it very easy to connect say lora and bluetooth to the global internet, even using i2p.
Yggdrasil is a decentralized mesh IPv6 network. It automatically forms one big network as more people connect together. It has end-to-end encryption, it's fast (unlike darknets), and it's pretty simple.
In such a "splinternet" scenario, it'd be a matter of setting up PTP links across borders. As long as a few people do so, it becomes one big network again.
Well, it's also what has enabled foreign nations to spread misinformation, what enabled people to disappear into their own bubbles filled with falsehoods, etc. Since these things are now tearing at the fabric of democracy, I wouldn't say it's a clean win for the internet so far.
We do still have limited entry and exit points to other Countries internets. You could end up with Great Firewalls across the globe if it got bad enough. It doesn’t deter VPNs though
> And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
The actual great firewall deters VPNs. Western internet blocking tends to be weaker for some reason (cheaper?) but there's no reason they can't be just as effective if the political will was there.
> impossible to comply with all of them simultaneously and still have a unified internet
We'll have 2 kinds of apps and websites.
One will be super nice products that only work in your country and you can't use it to communicate with outside people.
The other kind will work worldwide but because they would be spending so much more on compliance their product would be a bare minimum ad riddled crap.
> How will this work with chat control?
There is no POC for a chat control E2E-compliant chat app and there will never be. this will just kill EU made software because they will be forced to comply, while US software will use real E2E as marketing.
As others gave said the UK left the EU 10 years ago.
Chat control (which isn't (yet) a thing) would not in fact lead to the outcome you describe.
Any company would be forced to comply or get the boot from EU market. Apple and Google will happily enforce that and that's probably good enough initially.
US Vendors could also decide to create an EU only version of their services.
It's a US company - tell the UK to pound sand if they think they're going to tell businesses here how to operate because they want to run the UK like a draconian hell-hole.
4chan got hacked a while back because they were running a totally outdated software stack. It's been pretty much abandoned by its owner hiromoot.
If they aren't going to update the site for basic maintainance, they definitely aren't going to implement all this chat control/ age verification bullcrap.
I suppose a resistance to change is good when your competitors are burying their own graves.
An outdated stack is a not-up-to-date version of Wordpress I foolishly set up because it was the last one compatible with a certain plugin used by a client on their website that I was recreating from the Wayback Machine.
The domain was put on a black list of dangerous sites (rightfully so, considering that the bot that hacked into it replaced the site with spam).
4chan got hacked because of some outdated dependency used for uploading PDF files, which was some obscure feature only available to some boards. The actual website does get maintained.
If the owner doesn't care about it and it's got such a strong network effect, what's stopping somebody from buying it and implementing the SomethingAwful monetization model, where it's free until you get banned and then $10 for every unbanning?
>Users on 4chan refer to him commonly as 'hiro' but also by the ethnic slur "gook moot", or the nickname "Jackie 4chan", "Hiroshima Nagasaki," or simply "hiroshimoot".
That's kind of misleading because it lists hiroshimoot alongside blatantly racist nicknames. But hiroshimoot simply appears to be the names of two people mixed together.
The UK government has lost control of what happen in the physical world on their own island so now the bureaucrats play a fantasy game where they are gonna enforce their rules and dominion in their former colonies or the digital world.
Same thing has been happening for a long time in America. Politicians are typically risk adverse and the real world has complicated problems so they make up a 'virtual' problem to 'fix', or to turn into a new political football.
Politics has become its own end: politicians have job security, and nothing changes except for the worse because constituents keep falling for the same tired shit.
This is demagogy 101: invent or exagerate a problem, and offer yourself as the only true solution. It's a recipe as old as bread, nothing particularly US centric.
It's peaking again in the USA though and it's immigrants. They have replaced the "Commie" (when it last peaked in the 50s) as an imagined threat that lies around every corner that seems to appeal to a certain large minority in the USA that needs something to blame for everything other than their own inaction and choice to not adapt.
That's so true with the current Republican controlled Congress bending a knee every time to the Mango in charge. Other than the occasional furrowed brow or momentary pause.
I don't know if that's really it. In the US, sure, there was a direct line of communication between all the large social media companies and the federal government. It was used to censor what was deemed "conspiracy theories" around covid and election interference. That could be seen as protecting politicians.
But in the UK, what I read about is cases where it offended someone, like the case of a an autistic teenage girl who was arrested after she made a comment to a police officer, reportedly saying the officer looked like her "lesbian nana." Obviously this doesn't threaten government control or politicians, so it doesn't exactly fit the same mold.
4chan is a major part of the reason why the guy who's currently destroying the USA has the power to currently destroy the USA. That's not nothing. That's very far from nothing.
“just one more law bro. i promise bro just one more law and we’ll be safe bro. it’s just a little more surveillance bro. please just one more. one more law and we’ll stop all the threats bro. bro c’mon just give me access to your data and we’ll protect you i promise bro. think of the children bro. bro bro please we just need one more law bro, one more camera, one more database, and then we’ll all be safe bro”
I heard things about UK arresting people for social media posts but thought it was just a few cases cherry picked. But I recently looked up the scale of arrests and it's really insane.
Police are arresting over 12,000 people each year for social media posts and other online communications deemed “grossly offensive,” “indecent,” “obscene,” or “menacing.” This averages to around 33 arrests per day.
These arrests are primarily made under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, laws which criminalize causing “annoyance,” “inconvenience,” or “anxiety” to others through digital messages.
It is hard to get good data on this, but it is probably a combination of overzealous policing (which is indeed bad) and an increase in arrests for behavior that arguably is a police matter, such as domestic abuse, harassment, etc. I would not be surprised to discover that there is more online harassment now than there was in 2010.
That's a good point! The growth in arrests shown in the article I linked starts in 2017, though. I think internet usage has gone up significantly by some measures since 2017, but whether or not that's sufficient to explain the increase in arrests, I am not sure.
> The DHS statement says that Ms Kordia had overstayed her student visa, which had been terminated in 2022 "for lack of attendance". It did not say whether she had been attending Columbia or another institution.
I think it's entirely different arresting people who overstay their visas or people on student visas that disrupt academic life. The UK regularly arrests citizens for offensive memes. There have even been cases where someone got a harsher sentence based on a tweet about sexual assault than the person who actually committed a sexual assault.
You can feel any way you'd like about free speech in America, but let's not conflate the two as being equal.
I'm far more worried that America will stop me at the border and mistreat me for something I wrote online than I am about the UK. Heck, I'm more worried about visiting the US than China at the moment. The America effort to suppress free speech is very real.
By the way at that scale it is very counterproductive.
If you are gonna end up being arrested for protesting or giving your opinion, it is funnier to do it in the streets than on facebook. And it is probably much easier to be anonymous nowadays in the streets with a mask than on social media.
This is probably why the UK went in flame recently, the government cracked down on the Internet and people just went in the streets instead.
While I disapprove of what the gov is doing here, I think it’s incorrect and unhelpful to put all the blame on them. AIUI, the UK is a democracy and these policies are generally supported by the voters.
The people in charge are largely hated by the electorate. They won by default effectively due to a quirk of how UK elections work (which was less of a problem when the monarch/aristocracy was still involved to counter balance things like this, but now that that's gone the state is effectively out of control.)
Unless by "democracy" you mean "sleepwalking administration everyone hates" the current UK government is unusually undemocratic.
Opinion polling is largely bunk. In addition to the problem with getting a good polling sample today, questions are carefully crafted to achieve the desired results. Opinion polls are for shaping consensus, not reporting it.
Consider how badly off "will you vote R or D in 7 days" polling is in the US, even with the top national experts on the problem. Opinion polls are much, much more troublesome.
The electorate hated the politicians, then they still vote for the same guys. The general public doesn't care about politics, those who cared treats it like tribalism and don't want to learn what are actually happening, they don't want to think they only want to be told whatever feeding their brain chemistry.
> They won by default effectively due to a quirk of how UK elections work (which was less of a problem when the monarch/aristocracy was still involved to counter balance things like this, but now that that's gone the state is effectively out of control.)
I’m reading this as you saying that the system is worse now that the monarchy and aristocracy have less power. Is that correct? If so, how do these unelected groups make it better?
Less than 30% of the electorate voted labour. The problem is that the opposing party consistently ran as opposition but then executed on labour's policies instead so most people just didn't vote because they didn't see anyone running to vote for.
The electorate legitimately did not want these people or their policies, they effectively weren't given a choice. To call that democracy delegtimizes democratic elections.
They can promise whatever they like knowing there's very little chance they will be put to the test.
The last time the Lib Dems got a taste of power in 2010 it was by going into coalition with the Tories at the cost of dumping key election pledges. Next election they were dumped by the public and their leader Nick Clegg was hired by Meta - presumably for his connections as he has no particular talent to sell.
The Lib Dems made a referendum on a fairer voting method a condition of the coalition, and they got their referendum. I see no reason to doubt they'd implement electoral reform if elected.
It was a win under the rules but a memorably shallow one. Labour won a big majority of seats in 2024 on fewer votes (grand total) than when they lost handsomely in 2019.
The paradox of politics : are hated whilst actually doing what the majority wants.
As we saw in the case of the Winter fuel Payments : if a policy is unpopular with voters, it is abandoned. The Online Safety Act is popular, so it will stay.
The winter fuel payments were very unpopular with a very vocal part of the population, while any benefits were very thinly distributed on the rest of the electorate.
The cost of the online safety act is very small and almost invisible distributed across everyone. Any major effects (leaking of personal data) can be blamed on the victims (most people assume that only perverts will have to verify their age). Another effect where security conscious people will be excluded from online discussions is probably in invisible (if not a benefit) to most people.
The ISPs already do this. Most mobile networks are even opt-out, not in, to this feature. The new law is unnecessary overreach. They either don’t know what they are doing technically (alarming) or are just authoritarian (very alarming)
Many browsers/apps now will ignore the system/DHCP-provided DNS server and use their own though (often via TLS so you can't block it easily)... so while this might work for some situations, I can't in good conscious call it a great solution.
I agree. It's not a very robust solution, but it's better than nothing at all .
And it's annoying sometimes. One thing I found is that it somehow forces Google safe-search, which appears to block some non-pornographic search results.
I don’t have to show ID, but I do have to pay the bill, which means a direct debit, which means over 18.
The correct solution (in addition to bill layer control and arguably compulsory support for an “over 18” tag in dns which would be easy enough to implement for the same sites that currently demand over 18s, would be to help parents utilise parental controls (having recently been through it with Minecraft and fortnight it was a nightmarish gordian knot.
The hand wringing about how evil vpns are is the same. My son can’t install mullvad or whatever on his phone without my approval thanks to apple’s parental controls. I assume android has the same.
I think the correct solution would be to make parents responsible for actually using those controls, as they always have been for controlling a child's access to such materials in other media.
For example, if you have a stack of explicit DVDs and it becomes apparent that your child has access to them, then you will likely get a visit from social services and potentially suffer legal consequences up to and including removal of custody. I honestly have no idea why stuff on the internet is treated differently. Internet providers are already required to check that you are over 18 (much as the person selling you those DVDs is) - if you then share the content that this makes available with a child, then you should be held responsible in the same way. It was sufficient with print, VHS, Sky TV, etc. - why not the internet?
Because then parents couldn't just shove a screen in front of their child's face and then proceed to ignore them anymore. Half-kidding, but there are real liability concerns. How much supervision is reasonable? My parents definitely didn't police my every moment on the internet. Actually, quite the opposite
> AIUI, the UK is a democracy and these policies are generally supported by the voters.
When were UK citizens polled on these policies before politicians started enforcing them? And I think after Brexit, the UK government learned never to ask the opinions of their citizens again, because they will vote in direct opposition of the political status quo out of sheer spite of their politicians.
There are huge flaws with our current democratic systems: like sure we can vote, but after the people we vote for get into power, we have no control over what they do until next election cycle. So you can be a democracy on paper while your government is doing things you don't approve of.
Most people I talk to in the west, both here in Europe and in North America, don't seem to approve of what their government is doing on important topics, and at the same time they feel hopeless in being able to change that because either the issues are never on the table, or if they are, the politicians do a 180 once they get voted to power or forget about them because political promises are worthless and non-binding, meaning they lied themselves into power.
So given these issues ask yourself, is that really a true democracy, or just an illusion of choice of direction while you're actually riding a trolly track?
> the politicians do a 180 once they get voted to power or forget about them because political promises are worthless and non-binding, meaning they lied themselves into power.
Why is this allowed? Why aren't there laws in place to hold politicians accountable for the promises they make to get elected?
That’s a form of political change - direct representation democracy and recall legislation are both possibilities. The solution is to make electoral change happen, not to complain that everything is hopeless on the internet.
But how can those changes be made if the representatives don't act to make them? It would take a pretty big act of solidarity amongst various constituencies to send the message that failure to act is not an option.
Since we're talking about the UK, in 2010 negotations after a hung parliament produced an opportunity to move towards something a little more representative: The 2011 referendum on changing to AV voting from first-past-the-post.
Unfortunately, voters rejected that change quite strongly, and that probably set the trend for a while against further steps to proportional or more direct democratic systems.
AV is a type of transferable vote system, and a step closer to proportional representation. In AV you get two votes, so you can vote for your preferred candidate first (who may be niche but represents you better), and your tactical-vote candidate second (who doesn't represent you but are better than the even-worse candidate). As opposed to the current FPTP system, where you often have to tactical-vote for candidates who don't represent your interests much, and your actual preference is not recorded at all.
Even though AV is far from ideal, if voters had said yes then I think just the symbolism of changing the system, would have resulted in a greater inclination to change the system again later.
AV, STV and PR have been debated a number of times in the UK parliament in the last centery, so it does keep coming up, and will likely come up again, eventually.
> Unfortunately, voters rejected that change quite strongly,
Both major parties united in a ridiculously aggressive campaign for the No (there were literally, I mean literally, billboards equating the electoral reform to killing babies).
Fun fact - the same people who managed to inch the Brexit vote over the line were also involved in killing AV ... a certain Dominic Cummings and his gang.
> 'The UK’s Online Safety Act didn’t come from Parliament or the public'
It was debated at length in parliament and it was voted into legislation by parliament. It was developed by a Tory government and has been implemented by a Labour one.
I don't like the OSA but the whole 'robber baron' organisation thing in that video is just .. well Andrew Carnegie died more than a hundred years ago. He funded a lot of charitable organisations including one that has funded work in this area.
Parent was correctly pointing out that responsibility for whatever troubles the UK might be actually encountering should be distributed as democratically as its form of government actually is.
> rooted in the ideology that the majority knows best
Let's be careful here, the point in favor of democracy is not that the majority knows best, but rather if that people are to be subject to laws, then those same people should have an equal share in determining what those laws are. IOW, the point of democracy is to give the people what they deserve, and no more.
When people talk about democracies, they almost always refer to liberal democracies.
With liberal democracies, I believe it's more about self-determination or fair representation than who knows best. The point is to prevent tyranny, including majority tyranny.
There can be no liberal democracy without the protection of human rights and the of law.
It's not 50% of the electorate, in the UK it is the plurality (second best plus 1 vote) of 50% of the electoral seats plus 1 seat. That gives absolute power.
It is hard to call minority rule democratic, really. I've no issue with your point on the OSA and think it is widely supported, but let's be realistic, representation in the UK is virtual on matters like this: widely supported, but mostly by coincidence.
2-party electoral systems (likely to bear >50% majority governments) are also not very democratic, in a way. There's no perfect system, but I prefer minority governments to a 2-party duopoly. YMMV.
The UK has been effectively a two party system anyway within living memory (Labour and Tories). Only rarely (e.g. 2010) does the token third party, the Lib Dems) get to be in coalition, and I think no one else has won anything since 1910.
In a monkey's paw moment for everyone who dislikes only having effectively two parties to choose from, this may soon be changing as Reform is poised to overtake the Tories.
> The UK has been effectively a two party system anyway within living memory
> ...this may soon be changing as Reform is poised to overtake the Tories.
How long has the Farage-shaped tail been wagging the dog? It probably was before 2010. He managed notch many wins without winning a majority government by getting the 2 major parties - especially the Tories - to adopt his parties' positions.
It's a two party system in the sense that only two parties have a chance of winning any given UK general election, but the popular vote is quite widely distributed among parties. In the last election, 33.7% of people voted Labour and 23.7% people voted for the second largest party (the Conservatives):
I think you're making the original poster's point for them. It's very clear a minority government is not the one forcing OSA on people. They don't even have the power.
Arguably, minority rule is more democratic than majority rule, because minority rule isn't "the minority does whatever they want".
It's a huge stretch to call the existence of 4chan in anyone's best interests.
First they came for 4chan and I said nothing, because good riddance!
This is not a slippery slope; this is a spring trying to return to the center. The harder the resistance at the extremes, the more energetic the oscillation will be, so if we want to minimize that, work on undermining the intolerable extremes.
The sheer anarchy of the libertarian mindset that much of this site supports is not a good thing.
> It's a huge stretch to call the existence of 4chan in anyone's best interests.
I wasn't trying to imply that at all... I just meant that voting for age verification laws themselves were against peoples' best interest, not the blocking of any particular website.
In any case... sites like 4chan itself existing (ignoring any actual moderation issues like CP/etc. or other clearly illegal stuff), to me, simply means that free speech still exists, and I will defend their (anyone's) right to exist and to free speech if I have to. It doesn't mean I agree with/support them or their content though.
>It's a huge stretch to call the existence of 4chan in anyone's best interests.
Absolutely, 100% incorrect. You obviously don't approve of 4chan's content or mission, but that's not the point. It benefits everyone when anyone takes a stand because their legal rights are under attack.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
>This is not a slippery slope
Again, incorrect.
Any type of punishment for 4chan due to their legal content is damn close to the definition of "slippery slope". You're familiar with the "anti-slippery slope" argument already ("First they came for 4chan and I said nothing, because good riddance!"), so you're obviously cogent enough to understand what you're saying.
>The sheer anarchy of the libertarian mindset that much of this site supports is not a good thing.
This is not for you to decide. Your mindset is why free speech laws must exist in the first place.
Neither the House of Lords or the Monarch can actually stop Parliament passing a law. They can in some cases slow them down, but if Parliament really wants a law passed it will happen.
As shown by the proroguing of parliament by Boris Johnson on the September 9th, from September 10th to October 14th in 2019 (1), just a couple of months before the COVID19 pandemic landed and the first cases were being reported.
This action to prorogue was however later deemed unlawful by the Supreme Court on the 24th September 2019 (2). See recent changes to senior members, and subsequent rulings on matters of state importance by the Supreme Court for a look at what happens when they try to correct parliamentary actions by the ruling party. They have been singing from the governmental hymn sheet ever since.
The goal of the policy is supported by the voters. The polls used to measure this are shifty at best about the implementation details. Who doesn't want to prevent kids from looking at pornography? But plenty of things are popular if you ask people in a way that makes them ignore how it plays out in real life. Laws against tall buildings are a pretty good example. Land reform was extremely popular in many socialist countries until it actually happened. I'm sure you can think of other examples.
In this case the ministers know what the problems are. The policy is not new or unique to the UK and it has been done better in Louisiana of all places:
> The difference is in the details of complying with Louisiana's law. Verifying visitor ages in Louisiana does not require porn sites to directly collect user IDs. Rather, the state's government helped develop a third-party service called LA Wallet, which stores digital driver's licenses and serves as an online age verification credential that affords some privacy.
> Land reform was extremely popular in many socialist countries until it actually happened
Actually, land reforms were spectacularly popular—and very successful—in many countries like Guatemala or Vietnam (coincidentally, two places that were invaded by the US in an attempt to revert those reforms, one successful and the other not).
Weirdly, the majority of the British public a) support age verification, b) aren't willing to use age verification themselves and c) don't think it'll actually work.
Reading the polling questions, it doesn't actually seem that contradictory.
> To what extent do you support or oppose the introduction of age verification checks to access platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and pornography?
Most people say support, presumably thinking "yeah those things seem bad and kids shouldn't be able to look at them".
> How likely or unlikely would you be to submit any proof of age (e.g. a photo/ video, photographic ID, using banking information, digital ID wallets etc) in order to access... Messaging apps / Social media websites / Online discussion forums / User-generated encyclopedias / Dating apps / Pornography websites
"Ok no I don't like this method, and obviously I'm not going to submit a photo of myself to look at porn." I don't think anybody hearing the first question was thinking "yes I support age verification even if it means blocking Wikipedia".
> And how confident, if at all, are you that the Online Safety Act will prevent children and people under 18 from seeing illegal and harmful material online?
Nothing contradictory about supporting a policy that you don't think will completely work, especially after realizing that you yourself would probably try to get around it.
I think combining or switching the first two questions might produce very different results.
To an extent, but it's also priming, ie lying with statistics.
Obviously if you tell people you're doing something to protect children and that's its only for porn or whatever they'll say yes. You've primed them - you immediately put their minds on the focus of negative things like porn and children getting hurt. Nobody wants children hurt.
You need to ask the question more generically. "Do you support age verification to access certain categories of websites?"
Something tells me the numbers of agreeance will fall.
The phrasing on these polls is really unhelpful because it doesn't include the actor.
"To what extent do you support or oppose the introduction of age verification checks to access platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and pornography"
is like asking me
"To what extent do you support the detainment of people suspected of theft"
and then concluding I support vigilante mobs dragging people out of their homes when I answer in the affirmative. The means IS the question - the sad meltdown we're all about to witness as the UK government realises their lack of jurisdiction is because the actor is wrong, not because the end is wrong.
The phrasing should be "To what extent do you support or oppose the British government enforcing the introduction of age verification checks to access platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and pornography"
Forcing major device manufacturers to implement these content blocks to a certain level of rigour is the obvious, enforceable, effective, minimally invasive way to achieve this entirely reasonable goal. I can believe that pornography consumption by preteens is not a good thing and that this implementation is stupid at the same time.
Doesn’t seem weird at all, Britons are saying a) I agree children watching porn is bad but b) I value my privacy online and c) don’t think sending in photos of an ID is really going to stop kids. Actually seems pretty reasonable, and a reasonable democratic representative should look at that and say “well, how else can get A if method B is unpopular and unlikely to work?”
Instead they seem to have conflated B with A. Maybe they are afraid that any criticism on this method is interpreted as attack on doing anything at all for kids watching porn on the internet or even twisted into some kind of endorsement.
> Instead they seem to have conflated B with A. Maybe they are afraid that any criticism on this method is interpreted as attack on doing anything at all for kids watching porn on the internet or even twisted into some kind of endorsement.
In all fairness, I have seen quite a few people explicitly arguing "I want kids to watch porn" of late.
Western democracies have fair and competitive elections in the same way they have fair and competitive markets for things like internet access or mobile phones. You are effectively only allowed to choose between a very carefully managed set of choice that are provided to you. This set of choices is often so dire and distant from people's actual desires that many just don't bother voting at all.
George Carlin used the analogy of restaurant to modern democracy. You have the appearance of choice because you are handed a menu where you can choose liberal or conversative or green party, etc. But all of the actual policies and laws are drawn up by the same chefs in the back and you eat what you are served.
You are correct. But I don't see how we can fix this. Revolutions or rioting, is not the right idea either.
A successful and well functioning democracy requires constant monitoring, involvement and pressure from citizens to hold it accountable, otherwise it gets captured by monopolies and malicious actors with money, who will steer politics in their favor instead of the citizens' favor.
The problem with that is that most citizens today are too burdened by the cost of living and sorting their own lives to have time and energy for political activism. The only ones who do are retired boomers and they only care that their pensions and house prices are going up.
Yes, but when you ignore citizens' demands for too long, they will then over-correct in the opposite direction: see Hitler, Brexit, Trump, AFD, LePenn, Meloni, etc. History has proved this to be correct 100% of the time.
>For example the progressive movement in the US
Can you provide more details, I'm not an US citizen.
our two party system means that more often than not you are voting against some party having power.
The left wing has been vote split for some time, now the tight wing is getting vote split.
It’s not a fair characterisation to say that the UK government is popular, the last actually popular government was probably Tony Blair (though many regret him in hindsight), though Boris had his followers I guess.
I'd say it is the other way around. -- Support for the Tories/Conservatives has collapsed to the point where they are 4th or even 5th place! Reform have benefitted most from this shift. [1]-[4]
The left wing is seeing Labour voters shift to the Lib Dems, Greens, Jeremy Corbin's new party, and Reform.
there's a reason anecdotes aren't data. While people are more divided on the effectiveness, there's pretty overwhelming pubblic support for laws like the Online Safety Act.
It's always slightly surprising to see Americans online react to this thinking there is some Illuminati conspiracy happening. Britain and Europe are not the US, we don't have much of an interest of having 4chan dictate public policy.
It's also a good lesson in how effective platforms like Twitter can be in manipulating public perception, given that the same users now seem to be able to openly agitate over there.
> It's always slightly surprising to see Americans online react to this thinking there is some Illuminati conspiracy happening. Britain and Europe are not the US, we don't have much of an interest of having 4chan dictate public policy.
Step 6: The facebook / Instragram / X equivalents then lose their ad revenue. They then may capitulate to keep the ad revenue.
See BlueSky just rolled out Terms ToS that the automated UN Safety (censorship) laws they will accept. This is an automated pipeline for the "censorship demand data notice" can be applied in an automated why. It is plumbing for automating censorship. See "DSA" part of those laws and how BlueSky's ToS is responding.
> See BlueSky just rolled out Terms ToS that the automated UN Safety (censorship) laws they will accept. This is an automated pipeline for the "censorship demand data notice" can be applied in an automated why.
I feel like you are missing some words or have some typos because this isn't comprehensible English.
I've spent years living abroad and have had many long discussions and friendships with non-native english speakers.
This could be a non-native speaker, but the complexity of the attempted sentence structure leads me to think it is a native or fluent speaker who made some mistakes (I make those kinds of mistakes all the time.)
We need a DNS server with a history database, not just a cache, preferably with a distributed history database.
Visit a website and it was blocked by the "official" DNS? Declare the IP invalid in the webUI (or the browser plugin) of the local DNS and it will get you the previous IP from the database.
The root zone file is publicly distributed by IANA [1] so you can download it and ignore the servers themselves. Then your lookup (from the resolver you're running yourself) starts at a particular country's top level.
As for censorship, because it's hierarchical, they'd have to remove an entire country code from the root servers.
Domain Name System was an app on the Internet. It wasn't something that always existed. The purpose of it is to provide intuitive means to look up IP address from more intuitive domain name strings.
If you could come up with an alternative system to derive the IP address of desired remote host, or content, e.g. Magnet Link standard, you can just skip DNS and switch to that instead.
TLS can be a problem as a lot of moving parts of WWW now depends on DNS. But all of those can be solved.
Step 5 is problematic because when people won't put www.4chan.com but will type 4chan into address bar (90% users are doing exactly that) it will trigger search and will easily find some AMPed URL, URL shortener or subdomain to click on.
HMG can compel Google not to offer AMPed 4chan in the UK, and can compel ISPs to block mirrors in DNS and by IP. URL shorteners are just a client-side indirection and won't circumvent a block.
There's really nothing that they can realistically do about VPNs, however.
I doubt it heavily. CF has control over a large chunk of the global internet - they're not going to go thru their clients one by one and make sure they're doing age verification. That's absurd and far too expensive.
The alternative to that is either:
1. UK blocks cloudflare (unlikely, come on now)
2. UK gives cloudflare a pass (fairly common)
3. Somewhere in-between. Maybe UK cares about highly visible people behind cloudflare like 4Chan but not others.
Yeah that's option 3, for now. But they won't go after cloudflare in the general case because it's too risky IMO. And cloudflare will only comply to the absolute minimum they can get away with, because they can't burn money auditing every single customer behind cloudflare.
I think if that were true, there would have at least been an attempt at a court case at the very least. But AFAIK every case they have been involved in, they've won. I am not defending their content, merely a right to exist, especially when you're not breaking any applicable laws.
If you want to talk about content that objectively breaks laws... 8chan hosts monkey torture videos.
Cloudflare isn't capable of that - it can only block downloading CSAM not uploading it. (Which means the moderators wouldn't be able to see it either.)
Millions of British people are already engaged in a cat-and-mouse game against online censorship, for one main reason - football (soccer).
If you're a British football fan and want to watch every live televised match, you'll need to pay £75 a month for subscriptions to both Sky Sports and TNT Sports. That won't actually allow you to watch all of the matches that are played, because for weird historical reasons there's a TV blackout on matches played on Saturday afternoon - even if you've paid for your subscriptions, you'll only be able to watch about half of all league matches on TV.
Alternatively, you can pay some bloke in the pub £50 for a Fire TV Stick pre-programmed with access to a bunch of pirated IPTV streams and a VPN to circumvent blocking, or get a mate to show you how to do it yourself - no subscription, no blackout. As a bonus, you get free access to Netflix and Disney+ and everything else.
Sellers of dodgy Fire Sticks occasionally get caught and imprisoned, a handful of users occasionally get nasty letters from the Federation Against Copyright Theft, but it's too widespread to really stop. Practically every workplace or secondary school class has someone who knows the ins-and-outs of circumventing DNS- and IP-level blocking; the lad who showed you how to watch live football on your phone or get free Netflix will be more than happy to show you how to access adult sites without verifying your age.
I've tried the "IPTV streams" to watch blacked out NHL games, and they are often terribly overloaded or just don't work at all. Not something I'd pay for.
Just search for the name of the sport and “bite” and you’ll find some sketchy successor of the original subreddits for pirated sports streams (“r/nflbite,” “r/nbabite,” etc.) Or find the latest streameast mirror which is usually the best.
Make sure your ad blocker is working. Then it’s just a matter of finding the best stream, extracting the playlist, and opening VLC.
I documented [0] some useful tricks for this technique and the comments also include more useful snippets and bookmarklets.
£75 a month seems very reasonable for sports nerds, compared to the cost and availability in the past
People don’t want to ly for content, that’s as old as the hills.
I don’t do sport, and I wouldn’t fund such a terrible exploitative industry (televised sports is all about getting people hooked on gambling), but I’ve certainly spent that much for entertainment I do like in the past - and far more. A night at the theatre will cost a lot more than subscribing to all the sports channels. A weekly cinema visit too.
>£75 a month seems very reasonable for sports nerds, compared to the cost and availability in the past
good that you ignore the actual point of the comment that you replied to
>That won't actually allow you to watch all of the matches that are played, because for weird historical reasons there's a TV blackout on matches played on Saturday afternoon - even if you've paid for your subscriptions, you'll only be able to watch about half of all league matches on TV.
Given the cost was the first thing mentioned it seems that would be the actual point.
Personally I have no problem with people acquiring shows which are otherwise unavailable, as long as it’s not simply an excuse not to pay, which it so often is.
The iOS instructions are the most onerous (IMO) but still easy enough to follow. It's 15 minutes of fumbling around for the non-technical person, then they're protected.
(Though, as others have pointed out, this is probably moot. The blocking is more effectively done by ISPs.)
>It's 15 minutes of fumbling around for the non-technical person, then they're protected.
You and I have very different ideas of what "non-technical" means. If it involves anything beyond pressing "download" on the app store, it's out of reach of the vast majority of users.
The instructions I linked are to set up DoH/DoT with their (free!) service, so it's a little bit more involved than downloading an app; just not too much more involved to someone who's motivated to regain something they lost.
Fair enough, there's a wide variance there. I'd still hesitate to say it's out of reach for most people as they'll likely have someone they know who would be able to follow those instructions for them. For the purpose of being able to access something they used to be able to access, I think most people will be able to figure this out. The point is that it's one-and-done in most instances. (To that end there's a reasonable worry that OS updates reset these settings but that's kind of a separate problem.)
This. Practically the entire Middle East has blocks on sites like porn. Every household I know pays for a VPN that they share with all their family members.
Ehh, if a youth of digital piracy has taught me anything, it's that people will develop the necessary computer literacy to get the entertainment they want. Even if they've completely failed to develop that same skill in the pursuit of self improvement.
I feel that says something about human psychology. Probably something very unpleasant.
Human adaptivity is perhaps both our biggest strength and biggest weakness. It's the same force behind our greatest innovations and our greatest tragedies, and even fuels the apathetic indifference towards those tragedies, too.
That's one domain down. Only 3,524 domains that just cropped up yesterday to go.
Never mind the fact that doing a Google search will surface pages on various wikis, git repositories, and other sites that conveniently list all of the mirrors.
Most users default to search engines instead of typing in a URL. I searched for "pirate bay" just now and all of the top results are mirrors or lists of mirrors.
Does that even work anymore? I thought plain IP addresses were a thing of the past ever since we started doing virtual hosts 25 years ago. I just get a 503 when I use the address you posted...
Same way most attempts to stop piracy work. The people who are serious about getting around the blocks will find ways, but the less motivated will just give up (again, this is most people).
#2-#4 are the government trying to impose its national laws on an entity in a completely different country, operating entirely in that completely different country, with no business relationship whatsoever with your country. It's a futile and frankly rather insulting effort; no different from if Iran declared it was illegal for UK women living in the UK to leave the house without wearing a burka.
#5 is an authoritarian offense against your own citizens; trying to prevent them from being able to communicate with people in another country even if they want to do so.
Completely besides your point, but Iran mandates a hijab (head scarf, no veil). Burkas (often blue, net in front of face) are mainly found (not sure if mandated or expected) in Afghanistan, whereas the Saudis use niqabs (the black veils). The hijab mandate being the least repulsive.
I know it's an odd nitpick, consider it a compulsion of mine.
Performative yes, but it's about controlling their subjects, not punishing the act or preventings its recurrence. Such as it ever was in UK politics.
Think about the logic of KYC/AML laws - introduced wehn HSBC were fined $1.9 billion for laundering Mexican drug cartels and Saudi terrorist cell money. The impact and burden were almost wholly on the consumer, and did nothing to stop institutional bad actors being malfeasant on a macro scale. This was beautifully illustrated HSBC were caught doing the exact same thing 10 years later. And again. And again.
Fast forward to UK culture and politics today and how they're dealing with a globalised world watching them post-Brexit.
Labour (and to an extent the BBC) were pilloried for having an anti-semitism problem over the last decade, and Northern Ireland is typified by proscribed terrorist groups doing public marches with large public terrorist murals. Rather than mitigate any of the causes, or engage with the problem on a societal level, the UKs answer is to arrest 80 and 89 year olds pleading to stop infanticide in Gaza, and charge native-Irish speaking Rappers and Sundance Award Winning actors under the terrorism act
When looking at the current passion for control and restriction of the internet under the guise of combatting CSAM, its important to understand the context under which these disingenuous ploys arise.
US and European readers might not realise that the BBC, the House of Lords, and specific Political Parties in the UK have a very serious child-grooming and paedophilia scandal they've been trying to keep under wraps for 50 years that had the lid blown off by the revelations following Jimmy Saville's death. This is outside the major child-grooming and abuse scandals in the cultural pillars and cultural groups of the UK - e.g. Church of England, The Boy Scouts, the British Public School system etc...
I can't even go into the more recent and utterly appalling Rotherham debacle - and the dereliction of duty of both the police and the legal system - as it would simply take too long.
In 1981 Sir Peter Hayman - Diplomat and MI6 operative who held highly sensitive posts at the MOD and NATO - was called out for being a paedophile, using parliamentary privilege, as he had not been jailed after it was discovered he had left a package containing child pornography on a bus. The DPP and AG declined to prosecute, but Thatcher advised him that he would be stripped of his honours if was caught in a Public Toilet engaging in homosexual acts again, as he was in 1984.
Now that the statute of limitations is running out, and official secrets acts files are due to be unsealed, its time for a pallaver about VPNs and protecting the children from the 'internet'. Given their age and new-found riches in a disenfranchised post-Brexit Britain, the ruling classes of the UK have never been in a more trepidatious position - some commentators even predicting civil war in the next 5 years - so time for some large-scale distractive measures.
Major social networks aren't even remotely close to being in the same niche.
There are no algorithms, no friction with accounts, no obtrusive interfaces or feature bloat, no likes, no post ratings, content is completely ephemeral. This is a common and fundamental misunderstanding I see people make when trying to understand why 4chan exists. The people who post on 4chan aren't doing it because they can't help but post edgy content, they're doing it because its web 1.0 approach to social media completely erases a whole load of annoyances and anti-patterns that are endemic in the modern web.
Just like Usenet, it will probably never die despite the antisocial controversies. Or at least in the case of 4chan, it will be replaced with another board-type system. As Twitch streamers are the contemporary version of AM radio, 4chan is the contemporary version of BBSes. You should be extremely skeptical of the idea that you could ever compete in the same space with a heavily commercialized product like a modern social network. Twitter is not a replacement, it never will be.
Most people in websites like HN have absolutely no idea what 4chan is, how it works, and what kind of things people post in there. It shows because every time you read a comment here about 4chan you are confused as to what website they may be talking about.
Always has been. A lot of prominent Twitter accounts in my primary language, especially the old ones, has telltales of having been on 2chan. net. There must be something to that format that installs a basic social media amplification skill in your brain that do not develop otherwise.
There are places more toxic than 4chan but skill levels don't compare, and 4chan and 2chan also share nothing culture wise, so it must be in the architecture.
My guess would be that to be on 2chan/4chan "back in the day", you need to be terminally online. And being terminally online is a soft prerequisite to being really good at posting interesting things online. Excellence isn't an act - it's a habit.
There was also 2ch. net that was a lot bigger, but 2ch "alumni" aren't as good. It's not just cohort, it has/had better action-reward loop than other systems.
4chan doesn't manipulate the feed, so far as I know. Nor does it require a phone number to use.
It blocks mainstream vpns, but that's about it. Behind the scenes, who knows, but it's not as obviously full of low effort bait as Twitter, and no account is necessary.
the emergent behavior from ephemeral posting has become a feature by this point. and while it does technically have accounts, they don't at all work like a normal social media account. they aren't published, and using the "this is for sure me" tripcode feature is socially frowned upon.
Listen. The lies, the culture relativist lies, they are so tiresome.
We now all have ghaza at home- and we see through it all now. You do not have the slightest idea of the world, you just have that approximation made out of your own feelings and you yank on all social levers to make it real.
Im sorry the world made you unable to appreciate complexity and handle it especially when its hostile to western values.
But the grown ups have to clean up your mess now.
Why not go and play in your corner, with the other problems, you could play "nazi and revolutionary" all day long. Thank you..
In a way it does not exist any more. Most of the threads are started by 4chan-GPT yes this is a thing and most replies to threads are 4chan-GPT. They uses 4chan passes to allow proxies and not have to deal with a craptcha. Anyone could start their own chan, implement GPT bots and have the same level of popularity. I would wager a dozen HN'ers could implement this in a day. I think the goal on 4chan is controlling the narrative. My question would be, would HN'ers also use bots to control the narratives on their chans or create the same daily and weekly threads?
I doubt GPT is posting NSFW content. I think /b/ is mostly teen boys on the cell phones at school. Prior to 2012 it was diverse porn but then it started to lean heavily into gay porn. I don't know what to make of that. Perhaps Pornhub does not have enough gay porn and they are filling the void?
I don't see that much gay porn on there. The most popular threads seem to be teens that may or may not be 18, trans girls, chubby girls, and girls that you know personally. Then there's the AI porn which is often furry or children.
They bragged about it for a while but after the bragging stopped my proof is only anecdotal. When the United States Agency for International Development was defunded the bots went quiet and shortly thereafter the site was hacked using a vulnerability that had been well known since 2012. It was peaceful for a few weeks prior to the hack and for a couple weeks after the hack. Most of the fake racists disappeared from /pol/ and /g/ stopped shilling products. It was just real people and the site was just as active as the hundreds of other chans. Best I can tell 4chan is a test site to fine tune social manipulation GPT's. All the bots, fake racists and shillers are back now suggesting to me the manipulators started getting funded by other means. Before someone says it, there are a few real racists there too. The bots attract and egg them on. Most moved to 8chan. I think that is part of the experiment and tuning. Perhaps some day the veil will be lifted.
I thought about that as well. This would be true if team-hiromoot is not cooperating with the bot owners, otherwise the bots could simply be excluded given all their traffic is authenticated with a 4chan pass. Other chans have manipulated their stats to change how active they appear so it's really hard for me to rely upon that.
Yeah the only way I could really prove anything would be to fully own and operate the site, a task I would never take on. It might be interesting and educational for a day but without government immunity it would get risky fast.
There are non affiliated stat trackers like 4stats.io or any of the archive sites. It's pure nonsense/conspiracy theory to suggest everything is bot content now.
Good, that’s the only way these unpopular laws might get repealed or reworked, given that the UK citizens can’t or won’t do much about it except collectively shrug.
What terrifies me is that the EU is looking at UK’s OSA as a model, and will soon implement it here.
I know this is nothing new, but just stop and appreciate how much modern governments have abandoned all decorum and have fully embraced just downright silly levels of signaling. The UK knows that the law has no jurisdiction over US companies, and they know that US companies won't pay it, but they went ahead with it anyway.
In the UK, ~55% of traffic comes from mobile [1]. The UK could approach Apple and Google and ask them to remove VPNs from their respective app stores when opened in the UK.
I imagine this would curtail a large proportion of mobile VPN usage.
Blocking desktop VPNs would be a bit more adhoc but it is possible to make it much harder for many people to download VPN clients.
Watching sports for cheap using a "dodgy firestick" or similar hardware is incredibly popular in the UK to watch sports for cheap even among those not tech-inclined, despite obviously being illegal. I'd predict the same to happen here, quickly you'll see plug-and-play boxes that will route their home wi-fi traffic through a VPN, and most people will have a mate of a mate who sells them for a few tenners.
Deep packet inspection can detect VPNs. The problem may be more that people have legitimate uses for VPNs, like at their work. Those could be whitelisted though.
I am pretty sure we are slowly but surely heading towards a point where every country will implement its own great firewall and block every website except those in a whitelist approved by the government.
The mechanism for China to compel Starlink to not operate there seems more clear: the leader decides to block all direct and indirect business activities in China, related to Elon Musk.
Is that comparable, for the UK? Maybe other EU members would agree?
As an American, I have trouble comprehending multiple governments colluding to enable mass government censorship, and expecting to stay in power. But, I know nothing of the European mindset.
This is similar to how Wikipedia reacts to Internet Watch Foundation (a UK CSAM Watchdog) when it decided to block the page "Virgin Killer" (a 1976 album by German band Scorpions) and the album cover image page. FBI found no issue with it, but the UK did. The result means ISP using the IWF blocklist are getting their traffic routed to proxy server, and Wikipedia usually blocks open proxies. Eventually, news outlet reproduced the artwork in question, rendering the block moot, and IWF rescinded the block a few days later [1]
I wonder if 4chan will simply decide to ban visitors from UK from visiting based on regulatory compliance. Sometimes when I accidentally clicked on a streaming sites that were not available in my country, their error page will be simply "This content isn't available in your country", but the URL contains GDPR, even though the site is not EU-based at all, and that I'm not visiting it from EU country either.
Americans complaining about extra-territorial application of laws?
As much as I dislike the OSA, if you're not in the UK you can -- and probably should -- just ignore it. Unless you care specifically about interacting with users or businesses in the UK, in which case you probably need to comply.
Unlike the USA, we're generally incapable of successfully demanding everyone everywhere go along with whatever overreach we might think up.
> Unlike the USA, we're generally incapable of successfully demanding everyone everywhere go along with whatever overreach we might think up.
I can understand why someone might think the UK still has as much influence as it did 50-75 years ago when you consider how prevalent that "UKCA" symbol is (the one that was introduced to replace the "CE" mark post-Brexit).
I'm sure the companies who put effort into adopting UKCA were really happy to have put in that effort :P. Even if it's I hope not as onerous as adopting it (or CE) from scratch, as they both have quite similar (if not originally identical?) requirements. It seemed more intended to give the impression of Brexit success than of actually making a difference to anything.
For the same reason Roskomnadzor makes demands of Wikipedia to remove information it doesn't like: to impotently make demands of entities that will obviously not comply so there can be some theatrics before blocking them or marking them as an evil non-compliant entity.
It's truly baffling stuff. If Roskomnadzor made demands of a UK-based website before dramatically fining them massive amounts daily (that will obviously never be collected), people would rightfully treat them as a laughing stock. Yet when Ofcom treats a foreign entity the same way, they somehow expect to be treated seriously.
Honestly 4chan treated this with far more respect than it was due by having their lawyers respond at all.
Starlink complies with this sort of stuff in the general case. The only reason they wouldn't in this specific case is if Musk decides to stir up some shit, which to be fair is totally possible.
I'd be totally un-shocked if the UK criminalized Starlink (over OSA or otherwise), in part because they've already criminalized it before, in some of their territories[0,1].
That barely got covered in the UK news, but if wealthy rural people (who don't have good wired or cellular internet) get told their Starlink is getting banned it will be much more newsworthy.
>"Ofcom can instead ask a court to order other services to disrupt a provider's UK business, such as requiring a service's removal from search results or blocking of UK payments.
>If Ofcom doesn't think this will be enough to prevent significant harm, it can even ask that ISPs be ordered to block UK access.
Well again I guess the UK never heard of VPNs, but they are trying to ban them still, it is like these pols have no clue how the internet works. They never learn these actions are like playing wack-a-mole.
That still leaves space for a lot of unpleasant, but plausible, alternatives:
* Banning under-18s from using VPNs; enforced by ordering Visa+Mastercard to deny UK-originating payments to VPN operators that don't verify their users' identity.
* Introducing a "VPN license"; initially only granted to large corporate users. All encrypted VPN traffic will be required to periodically broadcast their VPN license-number in cleartext so that ISP-based traffic monitoring will let it pass, otherwise the connection will be reset.
I’m curious about what the plan is to differentiate between legitimate business use and personal use of any kind. Age verification obviously won’t work for self-hosted, so does age verification then get pushed to VPS providers? And at that point, so what? I’m already paying with legitimate bank details for legitimate personal use.
do you think the public at large knows what VPS are? How to set up a VPN? the public at large barely understands the concept of files nowadays, if it's not app they're lost
banning selling VPN and VPN apps will solve 90% of the problem and that's enough
>do you think the public at large knows what VPS are? How to set up a VPN?
Do you think the general public NEEDS to know those things right now? Because that's what actually mostly drives what people put in the time to learn. This smug elitist "everyone is dumb except me the tech wizard" sort of comment shows up every such thread and it's deeply irksome. Most people are plenty intelligent and can easily learn things as trivial as setting up a VPN. For most that would just amount to "sign up for one of many turnkey services, install this app, scan this QR code" or even more commonly "ask one of the kids or techie person in circle of friends/neighbors to take care of it". All sorts of people working in a vast array of businesses use VPNs all the frickin' time, it's no big deal.
But there are endless such things in our lives and only so much time, so most people very reasonably triage and only put effort into things they enjoy personally or things they are forced to care about due to being important. Up until now, most people haven't needed to care in their personal lives, because they're satisfied enough with the fairly open internet experience we've had. If that changes, and it matters to them, the tools exist to easily deal with it and people will easily learn it.
It's not elitist to remark that people tech skills are atrophying. The zoomers literally have memes about how bad are at tech stuff.
Setting a VPN is 100% not trivial, I know that because I recently set up a wireguard vpn on a VPS. Not impossible, sure, but out of the reach for a normal person.
Sure, one can ask a techie friend (if one's has a techie friend capable of self-hosting a VPN). So now instead of the gov ban covering 90% of the population, it covers what? 85%? 80%?
All self-hosted tools will not make a difference. Selling turnkey tools will be banned.
You can't win against the government. Not in 2025.
I think there's a good chance that when normies have to upload a picture of their real life ID to watch a funny tiktok or read a tweet they might start looking into VPNs.
Right now most of the privacy violations are covert and everyone is dishonest. Nobody reads TOS or EULA, Google just say "pinky promise we're not mean!", etc.
But there's no way to automate scanning someone's face to view a Garfield comic.
Governments are getting far too cavalier. They're flying too close to the sun here. They've already gotten away with murder and then some, they should quit while they're ahead.
Their greed will be their downfall. People will eventually push back.
>It's not elitist to remark that people tech skills are atrophying.
It is elitist though to not go into why that's the case and instead just assume it's because, what, people are dropping in IQ? A lot of (though not all granted) the cause boils down to the same reason as mechanical skills (engine repair and such) atrophying: lack of need. Things have gotten very polished for the average use case. Most people don't need to know all the inner workings, but that's not necessarily a bad thing right? I can remember easily in the 90s and much of the 00s when many OS crashed if you looked at them funny and had some pretty funky edges, and the state of the art advanced so fast diving into the internals was important. And it was great fun for me and I miss a lot of it. However it made life a lot harder for someone who only wanted an appliance tool, and now that's the changed. But while when comfortable a lot of us have a tendency to coast, as we see in disaster after disaster folks can get extremely inventive and learn in a real hurry if they experience enough motivation.
>Sure, one can ask a techie friend (if one's has a techie friend capable of self-hosting a VPN).
lol what? Why on earth would that be necessary?
>Selling turnkey tools will be banned.
I'm American. The british crown can kiss my red, white and blue ass. Just as with tor, I will contribute for free just to stick it in their authoritarian eye. As well as services from huge parts of the rest of the planet that aren't the UK, there is no reason there won't be fully open source apps where you put in a VPS API key and it does the rest and spits out a profile for you the end. On the contrary that's technically trivial, but there hasn't been that kind of need amongst the developed world.
The UK government will have to go all the way to the level of China for it to work like you're claiming, if they're even capable of that.
The public at large has no idea what IPTV was or how to set it up. Now Barry down the street is watching his footy through it all weekend cause his mate knows someone selling a box for 20 quid, and Barry does know how to plug in a USB cable.
The public doesn't need to know how it works behind the scenes to use it. It just needs to be packaged in a way so that they don't need to know. Which it will.
> do you think the public at large knows what VPS are
Fair point. As you say regarding files, it's easy to vastly overestimate the familiarity with computing concepts when you're writing anything in the orange bar website.
It doesn't matter if naive blocking means can be trivially circumvented. This creates a chilling effect, less technically proficient people will just move to other sites. When circumvention becomes an offence, now government has one more point of leverage over you - they manufacture law under which almost everyone is guilty.
It feels more like a modern version of Luddites where they probably do understand very well how it works and they fear what that means for their own success.
I really dislike what 4chan is, but I'm also a huge proponent of freedom online. I am glad that 4chan is telling the UK to go pound sand, I just hope they have the foresight to realize that they should not travel there or into countries that might extradite them. It's too bad that the country where 1984 originated is currently doing it's best to put the ideas in that book (the bad ones) to use in subjugating their citizens.
At the risk of being old and optimistic; my gut right now is: GOOD, maybe the antisocial youngn's could perhaps make some real fundamental strides in hacking around/replacing/ doing SOMETHING about DNS as it serves.
My old mind is like, COME ON, DNS is just a PHONEBOOK. Just make another one, or do something better.
It's so funny watching the UK try to threaten sites without any jurisdiction. I have American friends who got these letters and openly laughed at them. Sorry buddy, we aren't your colony anymore!
I wish these boomers would stop trying to act like they can control the internet because their citizens are part of it. If they want to do that they should wall their country off like China or NK. Not that I prefer that but this is way worse.
Desperate politicians ,steering desperately against the right wing tide they created by showing everyone the reality of mass immigration to keep their business models and world afloat .
4chan isn't rightwing and it never was, but since 2016 and especially since 2020 the userbase has been moving to the left, because at its core 4chan is always counter culture.
4chan is the edgy counterculture, yes. So when the mainstream was leaning towards christian and right, it was leaning anti-theist libertarian left.
When the mainstream swung to the left, 4chan shifted too and became more right-leaning, and took a stance of performative opposition to political correctness. A similar shift is happening now - away from right wing again as right wing is becoming more mainstream.
The tariff was oppressive in large part because the colonies didn't have representation in Parliament and were allowed limited (and decreasing) local governance. The Stamp, Townshend and Intolerable Acts were a whole lot more than just "we don't wanna pay taxes".
A similar argument can be made against the tariffs though.
US consumers will be paying the bulk of the tariffs through price increases. We do have representatives in Congress, they just weren't the ones imposing tariffs.
edit: as fun as silent down votes are, it would be interesting to hear where you might disagree
Unfortunately the representatives in Congress gave the tariff power to the Presidency.
Now, did they do that with the approval of the voters? Ostensibly, yes, but in reality, it's not that clear-cut.
This would be more like if the Thirteen Colonies had MPs and those MPs still voted in favor of the Stamp Act, or they voted to delegate the power to tariff to someone with a severe personality disorder.
There are lawsuits arguing that Congress didn’t give the executive branch this power. They seem pretty persuasive to me and they’re successful so far, but we’ll see how the appeals process turns out.
It infuriates me just how much members of Congress have abdicated their jobs and given power to the president to make unilateral decisions. I wonder if we need a constitutional amendment (not that we could get such a thing to pass in this day and age), because it is a complete perversion of how our government is supposed to work.
For a long time now I've been banging the drum of "don't put power in the president's hands", because the downside has always been very clear to me: even if you trust the guy in office today, doesn't mean you will want the next guy to have that power. But people just don't care. They are quite happy to have unilateral power exercised by one man, because they don't bother to think through the consequences of such things.
Congressmen have to get reelected, so over the years they've been glad to abdicate power to the executive, the judiciary, and the unelected bureaucracy. Anyone but themselves, so they didn't have to sign their names to the unpopular policies they wanted. They still got what the ruling class wanted, but indirectly, so it rarely threatened their incumbency. Whatever happened, they could tell the votes back home, "Sorry, we tried to pass/stop such-and-such, but we don't have any control over the president/courts/bureaucrats. Can't blame me."
It worked pretty well as long as the ruling class were all pretty much on the same page about most things, with some "social issues" differences between the parties that they used for campaigning but never quite acted on. It works less well if different factions start competing and going against the status quo for real.
I mean yes the American people should probably consider giving our current government the same taste. But they’re not going to do that because we’ve been trained to be complacent.
Trump was elected to be the president, a role itself meant to be the chief executive and public figurehead of the government. Trump was not elected to legislate and no single person should be given the power to do so.
These tariffs may have representation, but constitutionally not from the right representative. Congress has the authority and only delegated it to the president in limited circumstances that don't apply. Trump says the ones on China are imposed for fentanyl being shipped in by mail and other means, and within days of saying that pardoned the largest opiates by mail operator in US history, Ross Ulbricht.
> I don't feel represented on the national or international stage AT ALL. Maybe I'll stop paying mine.
Now gather a huge group of friends who are willing to fight for this cause (and for whose this cause is so important that they can accept ending in jail or even worse).
System's got that on lock by setting it up so the people most predisposed to fight the government are actually cheering on the new taxes. Information/policy/consent flowing the opposite way from how is commonly understood has been my critique of democracy for a long time, but the effect just keeps growing. Social media is a hell of a drug.
I don't see how that is a more useful model than what I said. Maybe for rallying people to oppose the current problems. But it feels like such preaching to the choir mainly serves to exacerbate the "culture war" that helps shut off people's thinking to begin with. So pushing that way might help win the immediate battle, but it also helps lose the overall war.
i don't think it contributes to the culture war to recognize that most people are not truly engaged in a collective sense, and that we are trapped within a self-reproducing system that relies on that:
"...the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign."
That may be where you are coming from, but your original comment didn't contain anything beyond a simple smack down that is too-easily interpreted in a partisan manner.
That's absurd. That doesn't pass the sniff test at all for being remotely true that people would react like that to only a 3 percent tax.
I looked it up, and it was a 3 pence tax per pound. When tea was selling for 2 to 3 pence per pound. So yeah, a 100-150% tax combined with the fact that the East India Company was allowed to sell without paying the tax. That is very unjust and threatens their business a lot more than the tax alone.
The precipitating event behind the Boston Tea Party was actually a reduction in taxation that made it possible for the East India Company to undercut both official colonial tea importers and also American tea smugglers.
It was terrible business. They'd have all been way better off working with the dominant global and economic power than starting a new country. And that's before you average in all the ones who lost everything and/or died.
It was good business, and those men are immortalised in history.
We should probably not forget that France gave nearly everything they had to the US to fund its revolution, what was a global power ended up in such an impoverished situation that it led to the French Revolution and ended the monarchy.
Not a small amount of support, if you are at the receiving end - certainly smells like good business.
"We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch! We had the King. We had a tea port. We had everything we needed, and it all ran like clockwork. You could've shut your mouth, smuggled tea and made as much money as you ever needed. It was perfect. But, no, you just had to blow it up. You and your pride and your ego! You just had to be the man. If you'd done your job, known your place, we'd all be fine right now."
The target of the Boston Tea Party was the British implementation of the Tea Act of May 10, 1773, which allowed the East India Company to sell tea from China in the colonies without paying taxes apart from those imposed by the Townshend Acts.
> This is why the US dropped tea into Boston to have it's own Freedom.
(But primarily done to protect colonial smugglers' and merchants' businesses which were being undercut by the English tea that was still cheaper than theirs, even with the small tax.)
> Two days later, US Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson warned big tech firms they could be violating US law if they weakened privacy and data security requirements by complying with international laws such as the Online Safety Act.
How will this work with chat control?
> "If Ofcom doesn't think this will be enough to prevent significant harm, it can even ask that ISPs be ordered to block UK access."
If you want to enforce stupid laws the burden should be upon you.
I think eventually we will reach a point where laws like the Online Safety Act become so prevalent that it is basically impossible to comply with all of them simultaneously and still have a unified internet across the globe. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 10 years or so every country has its own version of the internet only intended for their own people.
> still have a unified internet across the globe.
which might be the end goal - the internet, with freedom of communication, is a way that the plebs can organize and resist authoritarianism. And as countries are growing increasingly authoritarian (and i include UK here), they may be planning on preventing the old free internet that has enabled so much.
So as technologists here at HN, there needs to be a pre-emptive strike to prevent such an outcome from becoming successful. I would have said TOR, but for most people it's a non-starter. What other options are there?
I've said it for years and I'm sticking to it that you can't solve political "problems" (real or otherwise) with technology.
Not for the masses and not sustainabl,
It's always easier to have a paper say "do this" than finding a tech to circumvent it.
Politics is fundamentally people business and involves lots of people who can't or won't understand the details of what is going on but who may still be interested in the end results.
i also want believe the same, but i am increasingly disillusioned that there's a political process that is capable of reforming it - think about the fact that no one asked for these measures of censorship, but they keep creeping in, as though some vested interest has been pushing it through at every opportunity.
So the lack of ability to solve this politically has made technological solution the only out.
You can definitely create political problems with technology. Why can't technology have a role in solving political problems too?
The problem is when tech people try apply tech to political problems crudely, without understanding or without caring about the human aspect of it. You need sociologists and political scientists to study what impact a technology will actually have, and normal people to see how they feel about it, not just programmers who may incorrectly assume that e.g. designing an open and secure protocol will automatically and directly map to creating an open and secure society.
For example, in this case, the blunt approach is "How do we design a protocol that can't be censored/monitored?" The answer is TOR, which as parent comment noted, is socially a non-starter. But maybe a better approach could be, "How do we design a protocol which removes the incentives/makes it politically untenable for people to censor/monitor it?"
One way you might approach this is to create a system that's organically useless for bad actors. Clearly different platforms have different levels of "safe" and "awful", due to their structure. Could we design a platform with such strong prosocial incentives that authoritarians are not able to fearmonger about it?
Another approach could be to chain common citizen rights to authoritarian interests. For example, the US government cannot backdoor AES, because doing so would also compromise their own communciations. Can we make it so authoritarians are forced onto the same boat as us for our other communication technologies too, and therefore disincentivized from weakening our privacy because doing so would damage theirs too?
ActivityPub, ATProto, and blockchain could also be seen as technologies that are designed to create a social structure that incentivizes specific political outcomes, with varying degrees of success.
It's people business. So you design around questions like "Where is this technology going to put different types of people, and how are they going to feel about that?"
> So as technologists here at HN, there needs to be a pre-emptive strike to prevent such an outcome from becoming successful. I would have said TOR, but for most people it's a non-starter. What other options are there?
The option here is to stop trying to solve everything with tech when a lot of the time it's not viable and actively makes things worse. Start putting that time into the non-tech options. Not as fun though, is it?
Applications based on QUIC and/or P2P might be an option. QUIC is designed to not be as easy to filter as TCP + TLS. But then right now it can be blocked by just blocking UDP. But if majority of the internet would use QUIC then blocking UDP would mean blocking most of the internet so the governments wouldn't be so eager do nationwide firewalls (hopefully).
Encrypted Client Hello is also a puzzle piece towards that - makes it much harder to kill TLS connections that are trying to reach specific websites. Also makes it easier to conceal proxies.
The adoption speed is critical, exactly because of what you're saying. It's easy for a wannabe authoritarian to make a decision to "just block all of ECH and QUIC traffic" if that breaks 0.8% of all traffic - but not if that breaks 80% of all traffic.
QUIC or any other technology still needs domain name and both the domain name ownership and DNS could be blocked by governments. Also IP could be blocked.
There is DNS over QUIC, and in case your current Connection ID or IP is blocked during the connection, QUIC can use multiple IPs and CIDs for single connection, and CIDs are negotiated in encrypted part of packet. It's a mechanism for migrating connection over changing networks. Servers can also take advantage of that.
Server could have multiple QUIC output nodes to migrate connection in case one of them is blocked. The output node network can be shared by many servers and DoQ endpoints so blocking it entirely would scare government.
This solution still needs to connect to some known IP in order to establish connection first. And the same goes for DoQ. To mitigate this we can use Encrypted Client Hello as other commenter mentioned and connect to a pool instead of single IP.
I am not talking man in the middle thing which DNS over QUIC solves, but lawfully telling the domain registrar to forcefully take over the domain. Also multiple IPs doesn't solve anything if all the IPs could be identified.
There is simply cutting all the wires that connect your guys to your enemy's guys. QUIC won't solve that. Protocols which hide routing information might, since then you can't tell where the right wires are.
Reticulum is interesting. It's basically flowing through all network interfaces available on the devices and routing data packets. Making it very easy to connect say lora and bluetooth to the global internet, even using i2p.
Yggdrasil is a decentralized mesh IPv6 network. It automatically forms one big network as more people connect together. It has end-to-end encryption, it's fast (unlike darknets), and it's pretty simple.
In such a "splinternet" scenario, it'd be a matter of setting up PTP links across borders. As long as a few people do so, it becomes one big network again.
Well, it's also what has enabled foreign nations to spread misinformation, what enabled people to disappear into their own bubbles filled with falsehoods, etc. Since these things are now tearing at the fabric of democracy, I wouldn't say it's a clean win for the internet so far.
Im sure you will be able to get a passport for digital travel
Funneled through your local government router, where you first have to install certificates and agree to let them MitM.
We do still have limited entry and exit points to other Countries internets. You could end up with Great Firewalls across the globe if it got bad enough. It doesn’t deter VPNs though
They will put you behind bars for years for using VPNs once they win.
Who is 'they' here?
The authoritarians locking down the internet, not sure why you need to ask
They can try.
> And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
Would have. Should have. Could have. The reality is the authoritarians won for decades.
Yee, but we haven't yet given this fight up. And I plan to never.
The actual great firewall deters VPNs. Western internet blocking tends to be weaker for some reason (cheaper?) but there's no reason they can't be just as effective if the political will was there.
> impossible to comply with all of them simultaneously and still have a unified internet
We'll have 2 kinds of apps and websites.
One will be super nice products that only work in your country and you can't use it to communicate with outside people.
The other kind will work worldwide but because they would be spending so much more on compliance their product would be a bare minimum ad riddled crap.
I think this was 100% the intention.
> international laws such as the Online Safety Act.
It should be noted that the Online Safety Act is in fact not international, but UK-only.
> How will this work with chat control? There is no POC for a chat control E2E-compliant chat app and there will never be. this will just kill EU made software because they will be forced to comply, while US software will use real E2E as marketing.
The UK isn’t part of the EU anymore. As I understand it, this doesn’t apply to the broader group.
As others gave said the UK left the EU 10 years ago.
Chat control (which isn't (yet) a thing) would not in fact lead to the outcome you describe.
Any company would be forced to comply or get the boot from EU market. Apple and Google will happily enforce that and that's probably good enough initially.
US Vendors could also decide to create an EU only version of their services.
It's a US company - tell the UK to pound sand if they think they're going to tell businesses here how to operate because they want to run the UK like a draconian hell-hole.
I wouldn't be so sure it's an ideological stand.
4chan got hacked a while back because they were running a totally outdated software stack. It's been pretty much abandoned by its owner hiromoot.
If they aren't going to update the site for basic maintainance, they definitely aren't going to implement all this chat control/ age verification bullcrap.
I suppose a resistance to change is good when your competitors are burying their own graves.
You can ban 75% of the web if your concern is outdated tech stacks and/or data breaches
I think they're saying that 4chan is not responding bc there is limited people at the helm, not that the UK gov is upset at their security.
75%? Are you being generous because it's weekend?
Agreed--if the concern is data breaches, we can just ban 100% of databases, even those offline.
If it's outdated tech stacks, I'm sometimes in favor of those. Move fast and break things isn't always the best.
That's not an outdated stack - just a stable one.
An outdated stack is a not-up-to-date version of Wordpress I foolishly set up because it was the last one compatible with a certain plugin used by a client on their website that I was recreating from the Wayback Machine.
The domain was put on a black list of dangerous sites (rightfully so, considering that the bot that hacked into it replaced the site with spam).
4chan got hacked because of some outdated dependency used for uploading PDF files, which was some obscure feature only available to some boards. The actual website does get maintained.
If the owner doesn't care about it and it's got such a strong network effect, what's stopping somebody from buying it and implementing the SomethingAwful monetization model, where it's free until you get banned and then $10 for every unbanning?
Nobody besides Hiroshima Moot is dumb enough to buy 4chan.
I think he enjoys the revenue it generates, not actually running the site.
I laughed at hiromoot. Very clever nickname
I know moot, but what’s the hiro part mean?
A Japanese man named Nishimura Hiroyuki bought and now owns 4chan. It's a mashup of their names.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroyuki_Nishimura
>Users on 4chan refer to him commonly as 'hiro' but also by the ethnic slur "gook moot", or the nickname "Jackie 4chan", "Hiroshima Nagasaki," or simply "hiroshimoot".
That's kind of misleading because it lists hiroshimoot alongside blatantly racist nicknames. But hiroshimoot simply appears to be the names of two people mixed together.
If that were the case I'd expect them to block UK IPs (or ignore the threats entirely) rather than fighting it legally.
I wonder what they're going to do when the states mandating age verification for pornographic content start coming for them.
Very similar to these dystopian foreign laws. But because they're US states 4chan will not be able to use the "we only recognize US law" defense.
The latest Steam and visa/Mastercard debacle has the project2025 head behind it. They want to make pork illegal in the US as well.
Pork? Why?
Typo/autocorrect of “porn”, presumably.
its haram :p
> I wouldn't be so sure it's an ideological stand.... they definitely aren't going to implement all this chat control/ age verification bullcrap.
I read this as a plain contradiction.
> they were running a totally outdated software stack.
And this as a convenient pretense.
Step 1, pass law.
Step 2, demand compliance.
Step 3, upon not hearing of compliance, levy fines.
Step 4, upon non payment of fines, declare in breach of (2).
Step 5, block site from UK using DNS, in the same manner as torrent sites etc.
5 was always the goal, 2 to 4 are largely just performative.
This is the only power they have left.
The UK government has lost control of what happen in the physical world on their own island so now the bureaucrats play a fantasy game where they are gonna enforce their rules and dominion in their former colonies or the digital world.
Same thing has been happening for a long time in America. Politicians are typically risk adverse and the real world has complicated problems so they make up a 'virtual' problem to 'fix', or to turn into a new political football.
Politics has become its own end: politicians have job security, and nothing changes except for the worse because constituents keep falling for the same tired shit.
This is demagogy 101: invent or exagerate a problem, and offer yourself as the only true solution. It's a recipe as old as bread, nothing particularly US centric.
It's peaking again in the USA though and it's immigrants. They have replaced the "Commie" (when it last peaked in the 50s) as an imagined threat that lies around every corner that seems to appeal to a certain large minority in the USA that needs something to blame for everything other than their own inaction and choice to not adapt.
That's so true with the current Republican controlled Congress bending a knee every time to the Mango in charge. Other than the occasional furrowed brow or momentary pause.
I don't know if that's really it. In the US, sure, there was a direct line of communication between all the large social media companies and the federal government. It was used to censor what was deemed "conspiracy theories" around covid and election interference. That could be seen as protecting politicians.
But in the UK, what I read about is cases where it offended someone, like the case of a an autistic teenage girl who was arrested after she made a comment to a police officer, reportedly saying the officer looked like her "lesbian nana." Obviously this doesn't threaten government control or politicians, so it doesn't exactly fit the same mold.
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-would-government-ce...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/15nddel/autisti...
> The UK government has lost control of what happen in the physical world on their own island so now the bureaucrats play a fantasy game...
It seems to me like said loss of control is largely the result of other actions by the same bureaucrats.
This is part of a wider trend of trying to solve real world problems with the stroke of a pen. It’s not going well.
Banning 4chan is just part of the UK's efforts to prevent drought. Every jpg shared and string written helps drain the oceans:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/uk-government-ine...
4chan and websites like it have never been the problem.
4chan is a major part of the reason why the guy who's currently destroying the USA has the power to currently destroy the USA. That's not nothing. That's very far from nothing.
Just give up a few more rights…for everyone’s safety. Think of the children!
“just one more law bro. i promise bro just one more law and we’ll be safe bro. it’s just a little more surveillance bro. please just one more. one more law and we’ll stop all the threats bro. bro c’mon just give me access to your data and we’ll protect you i promise bro. think of the children bro. bro bro please we just need one more law bro, one more camera, one more database, and then we’ll all be safe bro”
sed 's/bro/mate/g'
That sounds more Australian, which still works but is a different story. I propose s/mate/chum/g
You needed a /s for the very literal people downvoting you.
I heard things about UK arresting people for social media posts but thought it was just a few cases cherry picked. But I recently looked up the scale of arrests and it's really insane.
Police are arresting over 12,000 people each year for social media posts and other online communications deemed “grossly offensive,” “indecent,” “obscene,” or “menacing.” This averages to around 33 arrests per day.
These arrests are primarily made under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, laws which criminalize causing “annoyance,” “inconvenience,” or “anxiety” to others through digital messages.
Utterly insane.
https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru...
The flip side of this is that convictions under the Communications Act have gone down compared to 2010, so it's a mixed picture:
https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...
It is hard to get good data on this, but it is probably a combination of overzealous policing (which is indeed bad) and an increase in arrests for behavior that arguably is a police matter, such as domestic abuse, harassment, etc. I would not be surprised to discover that there is more online harassment now than there was in 2010.
> I would not be surprised to discover that there is more online harassment now than there was in 2010.
There is simply more people online now than in 2010.
That's a good point! The growth in arrests shown in the article I linked starts in 2017, though. I think internet usage has gone up significantly by some measures since 2017, but whether or not that's sufficient to explain the increase in arrests, I am not sure.
It's more damning when you see who (and the cases) they don't arrest in the mean time.
Sadly this trend is echoed in the US as well since 2023 many have been arrested for their freedom of speech https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rnzp4ye5zo
I don't think that's the same thing:
> The DHS statement says that Ms Kordia had overstayed her student visa, which had been terminated in 2022 "for lack of attendance". It did not say whether she had been attending Columbia or another institution.
I think it's entirely different arresting people who overstay their visas or people on student visas that disrupt academic life. The UK regularly arrests citizens for offensive memes. There have even been cases where someone got a harsher sentence based on a tweet about sexual assault than the person who actually committed a sexual assault.
You can feel any way you'd like about free speech in America, but let's not conflate the two as being equal.
I'm far more worried that America will stop me at the border and mistreat me for something I wrote online than I am about the UK. Heck, I'm more worried about visiting the US than China at the moment. The America effort to suppress free speech is very real.
By the way at that scale it is very counterproductive.
If you are gonna end up being arrested for protesting or giving your opinion, it is funnier to do it in the streets than on facebook. And it is probably much easier to be anonymous nowadays in the streets with a mask than on social media.
This is probably why the UK went in flame recently, the government cracked down on the Internet and people just went in the streets instead.
Wasn't there some documentary a few years ago about UK citizens protesting in masks? Narrated by that guy from The Matrix?
America is like, 2 steps behind with an entire government following
Reads like narration from Adam Curtis.
"What happened next..."
> The UK government has lost control of what happen in the physical world on their own island
What do you mean by this?
Racism with extra steps.
So ... if the USA was ok with kid pornography then everyone else in the world would be forced to be ok with that too?
Sorry but other countries are totally right to block whatever they deem to be USA shit.
Yes. UK has every right to block whatever they want. US has no obligation to assist them in any way.
isnt this everyone in power?
While I disapprove of what the gov is doing here, I think it’s incorrect and unhelpful to put all the blame on them. AIUI, the UK is a democracy and these policies are generally supported by the voters.
The people in charge are largely hated by the electorate. They won by default effectively due to a quirk of how UK elections work (which was less of a problem when the monarch/aristocracy was still involved to counter balance things like this, but now that that's gone the state is effectively out of control.)
Unless by "democracy" you mean "sleepwalking administration everyone hates" the current UK government is unusually undemocratic.
No post war U.K. government aside from the 2010-15 coalition had a majority of voters voting for the parties in power. 1951 came close I think.
However opinion polls consistently put support for the “anti porn” bill up high amongst multiple demographics.
The cause for this is a lack of computer literacy, in both government and the population, but that doesn’t really matter.
Opinion polling is largely bunk. In addition to the problem with getting a good polling sample today, questions are carefully crafted to achieve the desired results. Opinion polls are for shaping consensus, not reporting it.
Consider how badly off "will you vote R or D in 7 days" polling is in the US, even with the top national experts on the problem. Opinion polls are much, much more troublesome.
The electorate hated the politicians, then they still vote for the same guys. The general public doesn't care about politics, those who cared treats it like tribalism and don't want to learn what are actually happening, they don't want to think they only want to be told whatever feeding their brain chemistry.
> They won by default effectively due to a quirk of how UK elections work (which was less of a problem when the monarch/aristocracy was still involved to counter balance things like this, but now that that's gone the state is effectively out of control.)
I’m reading this as you saying that the system is worse now that the monarchy and aristocracy have less power. Is that correct? If so, how do these unelected groups make it better?
You have misread (in a very common way for, I believe, a very common reason.)
I said it's less democratic. That's not necessarily less bad unless you believe democracy is the ultimate measure of fitness for a state.
Tell me about this "quirk" and winning by "default" (and how this never applied to other recent elections).
Less than 30% of the electorate voted labour. The problem is that the opposing party consistently ran as opposition but then executed on labour's policies instead so most people just didn't vote because they didn't see anyone running to vote for.
The electorate legitimately did not want these people or their policies, they effectively weren't given a choice. To call that democracy delegtimizes democratic elections.
>The electorate legitimately did not want these people or their policies
> so most people just didn't vote because they didn't see anyone running to vote for.
Probably shoulda voted then
Everyone also had the choice to vote Green or Liberal Democrat. I believe both promise electoral reform.
They can promise whatever they like knowing there's very little chance they will be put to the test.
The last time the Lib Dems got a taste of power in 2010 it was by going into coalition with the Tories at the cost of dumping key election pledges. Next election they were dumped by the public and their leader Nick Clegg was hired by Meta - presumably for his connections as he has no particular talent to sell.
The Lib Dems made a referendum on a fairer voting method a condition of the coalition, and they got their referendum. I see no reason to doubt they'd implement electoral reform if elected.
That's how our representative democracy works though. Even if just one person votes in each constituency.
I say that those who didn't vote knew it was a foregone conclusion and would have voted in the same proportion as those who did vote.
You say they weren't given a choice, but there are now more parties represented in parliament now than before.
What percent of the electorate voting for the biggest party would be acceptable to you?
It was a win under the rules but a memorably shallow one. Labour won a big majority of seats in 2024 on fewer votes (grand total) than when they lost handsomely in 2019.
The paradox of politics : are hated whilst actually doing what the majority wants.
As we saw in the case of the Winter fuel Payments : if a policy is unpopular with voters, it is abandoned. The Online Safety Act is popular, so it will stay.
Being unpopular is not the opposite of popular.
The winter fuel payments were very unpopular with a very vocal part of the population, while any benefits were very thinly distributed on the rest of the electorate.
The cost of the online safety act is very small and almost invisible distributed across everyone. Any major effects (leaking of personal data) can be blamed on the victims (most people assume that only perverts will have to verify their age). Another effect where security conscious people will be excluded from online discussions is probably in invisible (if not a benefit) to most people.
I understand the people might wanna block porn on their kids mobile internet and home WiFi.
So why don't they mandate their ISP to implement this as an optional feature ?
Why do they instead try to boil the ocean by going after every website on the planet and outside of their jurisdiction?
The ISPs already do this. Most mobile networks are even opt-out, not in, to this feature. The new law is unnecessary overreach. They either don’t know what they are doing technically (alarming) or are just authoritarian (very alarming)
I don't think ISP DNS solution is very effective when all major web browsers implement DoH by default.
My solution was to set my router to use the DNS server at 1.1.1.3 which blocks adult sites.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-1-1-1-1-for-families...
I assume this doesn't block porn on reddit or non-porn websites?
No, it just blocks DNS requests from a list of porn hostnames.
Many browsers/apps now will ignore the system/DHCP-provided DNS server and use their own though (often via TLS so you can't block it easily)... so while this might work for some situations, I can't in good conscious call it a great solution.
Wow I did not know that.
I agree. It's not a very robust solution, but it's better than nothing at all .
And it's annoying sometimes. One thing I found is that it somehow forces Google safe-search, which appears to block some non-pornographic search results.
I understand that. I just wasn't sure if Reddit and co used specific subdomains for porn images/videos.
Can they not set their device DNS to 1.1.1.1
They're not that technically inclined ... Yet.
Their isps already offer this, actually. You have to show id to them to get it turned pff.
I don’t have to show ID, but I do have to pay the bill, which means a direct debit, which means over 18.
The correct solution (in addition to bill layer control and arguably compulsory support for an “over 18” tag in dns which would be easy enough to implement for the same sites that currently demand over 18s, would be to help parents utilise parental controls (having recently been through it with Minecraft and fortnight it was a nightmarish gordian knot.
The hand wringing about how evil vpns are is the same. My son can’t install mullvad or whatever on his phone without my approval thanks to apple’s parental controls. I assume android has the same.
The goal has never been to empower parents though
> direct debit, which means over 18
Incorrect. Source: I had a checking account before I was 18.
I think the correct solution would be to make parents responsible for actually using those controls, as they always have been for controlling a child's access to such materials in other media.
For example, if you have a stack of explicit DVDs and it becomes apparent that your child has access to them, then you will likely get a visit from social services and potentially suffer legal consequences up to and including removal of custody. I honestly have no idea why stuff on the internet is treated differently. Internet providers are already required to check that you are over 18 (much as the person selling you those DVDs is) - if you then share the content that this makes available with a child, then you should be held responsible in the same way. It was sufficient with print, VHS, Sky TV, etc. - why not the internet?
Because then parents couldn't just shove a screen in front of their child's face and then proceed to ignore them anymore. Half-kidding, but there are real liability concerns. How much supervision is reasonable? My parents definitely didn't police my every moment on the internet. Actually, quite the opposite
> AIUI, the UK is a democracy and these policies are generally supported by the voters.
When were UK citizens polled on these policies before politicians started enforcing them? And I think after Brexit, the UK government learned never to ask the opinions of their citizens again, because they will vote in direct opposition of the political status quo out of sheer spite of their politicians.
There are huge flaws with our current democratic systems: like sure we can vote, but after the people we vote for get into power, we have no control over what they do until next election cycle. So you can be a democracy on paper while your government is doing things you don't approve of.
Most people I talk to in the west, both here in Europe and in North America, don't seem to approve of what their government is doing on important topics, and at the same time they feel hopeless in being able to change that because either the issues are never on the table, or if they are, the politicians do a 180 once they get voted to power or forget about them because political promises are worthless and non-binding, meaning they lied themselves into power.
So given these issues ask yourself, is that really a true democracy, or just an illusion of choice of direction while you're actually riding a trolly track?
> the politicians do a 180 once they get voted to power or forget about them because political promises are worthless and non-binding, meaning they lied themselves into power.
Why is this allowed? Why aren't there laws in place to hold politicians accountable for the promises they make to get elected?
Why haven't wolves made laws for themselves that prevent them from eating sheep?
That’s a form of political change - direct representation democracy and recall legislation are both possibilities. The solution is to make electoral change happen, not to complain that everything is hopeless on the internet.
But how can those changes be made if the representatives don't act to make them? It would take a pretty big act of solidarity amongst various constituencies to send the message that failure to act is not an option.
Since we're talking about the UK, in 2010 negotations after a hung parliament produced an opportunity to move towards something a little more representative: The 2011 referendum on changing to AV voting from first-past-the-post.
Unfortunately, voters rejected that change quite strongly, and that probably set the trend for a while against further steps to proportional or more direct democratic systems.
AV is a type of transferable vote system, and a step closer to proportional representation. In AV you get two votes, so you can vote for your preferred candidate first (who may be niche but represents you better), and your tactical-vote candidate second (who doesn't represent you but are better than the even-worse candidate). As opposed to the current FPTP system, where you often have to tactical-vote for candidates who don't represent your interests much, and your actual preference is not recorded at all.
Even though AV is far from ideal, if voters had said yes then I think just the symbolism of changing the system, would have resulted in a greater inclination to change the system again later.
AV, STV and PR have been debated a number of times in the UK parliament in the last centery, so it does keep coming up, and will likely come up again, eventually.
> Unfortunately, voters rejected that change quite strongly,
Both major parties united in a ridiculously aggressive campaign for the No (there were literally, I mean literally, billboards equating the electoral reform to killing babies).
Fun fact - the same people who managed to inch the Brexit vote over the line were also involved in killing AV ... a certain Dominic Cummings and his gang.
I've posted this before, but it's relevant here:
'The UK’s Online Safety Act didn’t come from Parliament or the public'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ2AokZujC0 (watch from about 4:20)
> 'The UK’s Online Safety Act didn’t come from Parliament or the public'
It was debated at length in parliament and it was voted into legislation by parliament. It was developed by a Tory government and has been implemented by a Labour one.
I don't like the OSA but the whole 'robber baron' organisation thing in that video is just .. well Andrew Carnegie died more than a hundred years ago. He funded a lot of charitable organisations including one that has funded work in this area.
Democracy is a form of government, not an ideology. Just because +50% of an electorate thinks something is OK, doesn't make it so.
I agree. But it does matter if you want to do more then rant on the internet. If there is public support you need to educate people and change minds.
Parent was correctly pointing out that responsibility for whatever troubles the UK might be actually encountering should be distributed as democratically as its form of government actually is.
The form of government that applies democracy is rooted in the ideology that the majority knows best, which is the ideological version of democracy.
> rooted in the ideology that the majority knows best
Let's be careful here, the point in favor of democracy is not that the majority knows best, but rather if that people are to be subject to laws, then those same people should have an equal share in determining what those laws are. IOW, the point of democracy is to give the people what they deserve, and no more.
When people talk about democracies, they almost always refer to liberal democracies.
With liberal democracies, I believe it's more about self-determination or fair representation than who knows best. The point is to prevent tyranny, including majority tyranny.
There can be no liberal democracy without the protection of human rights and the of law.
It's not 50% of the electorate, in the UK it is the plurality (second best plus 1 vote) of 50% of the electoral seats plus 1 seat. That gives absolute power.
Anything can be turned into an ideology, even democracy.
The UK hasn't elected a government on 50% or more of the vote since the 1950s:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/717004/general-elections...
It is hard to call minority rule democratic, really. I've no issue with your point on the OSA and think it is widely supported, but let's be realistic, representation in the UK is virtual on matters like this: widely supported, but mostly by coincidence.
2-party electoral systems (likely to bear >50% majority governments) are also not very democratic, in a way. There's no perfect system, but I prefer minority governments to a 2-party duopoly. YMMV.
The UK has been effectively a two party system anyway within living memory (Labour and Tories). Only rarely (e.g. 2010) does the token third party, the Lib Dems) get to be in coalition, and I think no one else has won anything since 1910.
In a monkey's paw moment for everyone who dislikes only having effectively two parties to choose from, this may soon be changing as Reform is poised to overtake the Tories.
> The UK has been effectively a two party system anyway within living memory
> ...this may soon be changing as Reform is poised to overtake the Tories.
How long has the Farage-shaped tail been wagging the dog? It probably was before 2010. He managed notch many wins without winning a majority government by getting the 2 major parties - especially the Tories - to adopt his parties' positions.
Technically 2017-19 was a minority government where a party in Northern Ireland sold its votes for about £100k/mp/vote to prop up May.
It's a two party system in the sense that only two parties have a chance of winning any given UK general election, but the popular vote is quite widely distributed among parties. In the last election, 33.7% of people voted Labour and 23.7% people voted for the second largest party (the Conservatives):
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1478478/uk-election-resu...
I think you're making the original poster's point for them. It's very clear a minority government is not the one forcing OSA on people. They don't even have the power.
Arguably, minority rule is more democratic than majority rule, because minority rule isn't "the minority does whatever they want".
Most people are either blissfully unaware or don’t understand the ramifications of a policy until it becomes law
> generally supported by the voters
you could say the same about the US... that doesn't make it right and it doesn't mean people aren't violently voting against their own best interests.
It's a huge stretch to call the existence of 4chan in anyone's best interests.
First they came for 4chan and I said nothing, because good riddance!
This is not a slippery slope; this is a spring trying to return to the center. The harder the resistance at the extremes, the more energetic the oscillation will be, so if we want to minimize that, work on undermining the intolerable extremes.
The sheer anarchy of the libertarian mindset that much of this site supports is not a good thing.
> It's a huge stretch to call the existence of 4chan in anyone's best interests.
I wasn't trying to imply that at all... I just meant that voting for age verification laws themselves were against peoples' best interest, not the blocking of any particular website.
In any case... sites like 4chan itself existing (ignoring any actual moderation issues like CP/etc. or other clearly illegal stuff), to me, simply means that free speech still exists, and I will defend their (anyone's) right to exist and to free speech if I have to. It doesn't mean I agree with/support them or their content though.
>It's a huge stretch to call the existence of 4chan in anyone's best interests.
Absolutely, 100% incorrect. You obviously don't approve of 4chan's content or mission, but that's not the point. It benefits everyone when anyone takes a stand because their legal rights are under attack.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
>This is not a slippery slope
Again, incorrect.
Any type of punishment for 4chan due to their legal content is damn close to the definition of "slippery slope". You're familiar with the "anti-slippery slope" argument already ("First they came for 4chan and I said nothing, because good riddance!"), so you're obviously cogent enough to understand what you're saying.
>The sheer anarchy of the libertarian mindset that much of this site supports is not a good thing.
This is not for you to decide. Your mindset is why free speech laws must exist in the first place.
The whole point of this is that what counts as "legal" is permitted to change. In particular, "legal under some circumstances" is a thing.
> AIUI, the UK is a democracy
The House of Lords disagrees and the Monarch disagree. Sometimes they cosplay as a democracy.
Neither the House of Lords or the Monarch can actually stop Parliament passing a law. They can in some cases slow them down, but if Parliament really wants a law passed it will happen.
As shown by the proroguing of parliament by Boris Johnson on the September 9th, from September 10th to October 14th in 2019 (1), just a couple of months before the COVID19 pandemic landed and the first cases were being reported.
This action to prorogue was however later deemed unlawful by the Supreme Court on the 24th September 2019 (2). See recent changes to senior members, and subsequent rulings on matters of state importance by the Supreme Court for a look at what happens when they try to correct parliamentary actions by the ruling party. They have been singing from the governmental hymn sheet ever since.
Whither democracy? Whither justice?
1. https://labourheartlands.com/parliament-has-been-prorogued-a...
2. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/decision-of-the-supreme...
Democracy cannot stop Parliament from passing a law either. UK is Parliament first, democracy second.
The House of Lords is part of Parliament.
Both major parties in the UK supported this.
The goal of the policy is supported by the voters. The polls used to measure this are shifty at best about the implementation details. Who doesn't want to prevent kids from looking at pornography? But plenty of things are popular if you ask people in a way that makes them ignore how it plays out in real life. Laws against tall buildings are a pretty good example. Land reform was extremely popular in many socialist countries until it actually happened. I'm sure you can think of other examples.
In this case the ministers know what the problems are. The policy is not new or unique to the UK and it has been done better in Louisiana of all places:
https://reason.com/2024/03/18/pornhub-pulls-out-of-seventh-s...
> The difference is in the details of complying with Louisiana's law. Verifying visitor ages in Louisiana does not require porn sites to directly collect user IDs. Rather, the state's government helped develop a third-party service called LA Wallet, which stores digital driver's licenses and serves as an online age verification credential that affords some privacy.
> Land reform was extremely popular in many socialist countries until it actually happened
Actually, land reforms were spectacularly popular—and very successful—in many countries like Guatemala or Vietnam (coincidentally, two places that were invaded by the US in an attempt to revert those reforms, one successful and the other not).
That's not really the point. You can always think of another example. I was talking about the Online Safety Act.
“Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos”
really?
From my anecdotal evidence, is that it's fucking stupid and hated
Weirdly, the majority of the British public a) support age verification, b) aren't willing to use age verification themselves and c) don't think it'll actually work.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-...
Reading the polling questions, it doesn't actually seem that contradictory.
> To what extent do you support or oppose the introduction of age verification checks to access platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and pornography?
Most people say support, presumably thinking "yeah those things seem bad and kids shouldn't be able to look at them".
> How likely or unlikely would you be to submit any proof of age (e.g. a photo/ video, photographic ID, using banking information, digital ID wallets etc) in order to access... Messaging apps / Social media websites / Online discussion forums / User-generated encyclopedias / Dating apps / Pornography websites
"Ok no I don't like this method, and obviously I'm not going to submit a photo of myself to look at porn." I don't think anybody hearing the first question was thinking "yes I support age verification even if it means blocking Wikipedia".
> And how confident, if at all, are you that the Online Safety Act will prevent children and people under 18 from seeing illegal and harmful material online?
Nothing contradictory about supporting a policy that you don't think will completely work, especially after realizing that you yourself would probably try to get around it.
I think combining or switching the first two questions might produce very different results.
It's all very "how to lie with statistics".
The world is complicated, and normal to have conflicting ideas.
To an extent, but it's also priming, ie lying with statistics.
Obviously if you tell people you're doing something to protect children and that's its only for porn or whatever they'll say yes. You've primed them - you immediately put their minds on the focus of negative things like porn and children getting hurt. Nobody wants children hurt.
You need to ask the question more generically. "Do you support age verification to access certain categories of websites?"
Something tells me the numbers of agreeance will fall.
The phrasing on these polls is really unhelpful because it doesn't include the actor.
"To what extent do you support or oppose the introduction of age verification checks to access platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and pornography"
is like asking me
"To what extent do you support the detainment of people suspected of theft"
and then concluding I support vigilante mobs dragging people out of their homes when I answer in the affirmative. The means IS the question - the sad meltdown we're all about to witness as the UK government realises their lack of jurisdiction is because the actor is wrong, not because the end is wrong.
The phrasing should be "To what extent do you support or oppose the British government enforcing the introduction of age verification checks to access platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and pornography"
Forcing major device manufacturers to implement these content blocks to a certain level of rigour is the obvious, enforceable, effective, minimally invasive way to achieve this entirely reasonable goal. I can believe that pornography consumption by preteens is not a good thing and that this implementation is stupid at the same time.
Doesn’t seem weird at all, Britons are saying a) I agree children watching porn is bad but b) I value my privacy online and c) don’t think sending in photos of an ID is really going to stop kids. Actually seems pretty reasonable, and a reasonable democratic representative should look at that and say “well, how else can get A if method B is unpopular and unlikely to work?”
Instead they seem to have conflated B with A. Maybe they are afraid that any criticism on this method is interpreted as attack on doing anything at all for kids watching porn on the internet or even twisted into some kind of endorsement.
> Instead they seem to have conflated B with A. Maybe they are afraid that any criticism on this method is interpreted as attack on doing anything at all for kids watching porn on the internet or even twisted into some kind of endorsement.
In all fairness, I have seen quite a few people explicitly arguing "I want kids to watch porn" of late.
That’s not really being fair if you’re assuming that fringe argument by default though right?
They have fair and competitive elections, no?
Western democracies have fair and competitive elections in the same way they have fair and competitive markets for things like internet access or mobile phones. You are effectively only allowed to choose between a very carefully managed set of choice that are provided to you. This set of choices is often so dire and distant from people's actual desires that many just don't bother voting at all.
George Carlin used the analogy of restaurant to modern democracy. You have the appearance of choice because you are handed a menu where you can choose liberal or conversative or green party, etc. But all of the actual policies and laws are drawn up by the same chefs in the back and you eat what you are served.
This is my point. You need to identify the source of the problem if you want to take action. Blaming bureaucrats is not helpful.
> Blaming bureaucrats is not helpful.
Bureaucrats are the ones making the rules of the game we have to play. So why shouldn't we blame them?
Chain of events is the lobbyists write the policies that are handed to the politicians who vote them in, then to the bureaucrats to execute them.
But the lobbyists work for the rich and the power. They are ultimately the chefs and ones who decide what the rules will be.
You are correct. But I don't see how we can fix this. Revolutions or rioting, is not the right idea either.
A successful and well functioning democracy requires constant monitoring, involvement and pressure from citizens to hold it accountable, otherwise it gets captured by monopolies and malicious actors with money, who will steer politics in their favor instead of the citizens' favor.
The problem with that is that most citizens today are too burdened by the cost of living and sorting their own lives to have time and energy for political activism. The only ones who do are retired boomers and they only care that their pensions and house prices are going up.
Democracies can and do correct. It takes time and effort, but it happens. For example the progressive movement in the US.
>Democracies can and do correct.
Yes, but when you ignore citizens' demands for too long, they will then over-correct in the opposite direction: see Hitler, Brexit, Trump, AFD, LePenn, Meloni, etc. History has proved this to be correct 100% of the time.
>For example the progressive movement in the US
Can you provide more details, I'm not an US citizen.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era
our two party system means that more often than not you are voting against some party having power.
The left wing has been vote split for some time, now the tight wing is getting vote split.
It’s not a fair characterisation to say that the UK government is popular, the last actually popular government was probably Tony Blair (though many regret him in hindsight), though Boris had his followers I guess.
I'd say it is the other way around. -- Support for the Tories/Conservatives has collapsed to the point where they are 4th or even 5th place! Reform have benefitted most from this shift. [1]-[4]
The left wing is seeing Labour voters shift to the Lib Dems, Greens, Jeremy Corbin's new party, and Reform.
[1] https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/services_lsdm.html (April)
[2] https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/blogs/ec_vipoll_20250625... (June)
[3] https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html (July)
[4] https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/blogs/ec_rrose_20250731.... (August)
Popular politicians tend to do the most damage.
First past the post, and not proportionally representative - so could be improved a lot.
The People’s Republic of China has elections, no?
First past the post, so no, not really.
there's a reason anecdotes aren't data. While people are more divided on the effectiveness, there's pretty overwhelming pubblic support for laws like the Online Safety Act.
https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...
It's always slightly surprising to see Americans online react to this thinking there is some Illuminati conspiracy happening. Britain and Europe are not the US, we don't have much of an interest of having 4chan dictate public policy.
It's also a good lesson in how effective platforms like Twitter can be in manipulating public perception, given that the same users now seem to be able to openly agitate over there.
> It's always slightly surprising to see Americans online react to this thinking there is some Illuminati conspiracy happening. Britain and Europe are not the US, we don't have much of an interest of having 4chan dictate public policy.
Too late by about nine years at the very least.
Behold, the power of the anecdote.
Step 6: The facebook / Instragram / X equivalents then lose their ad revenue. They then may capitulate to keep the ad revenue.
See BlueSky just rolled out Terms ToS that the automated UN Safety (censorship) laws they will accept. This is an automated pipeline for the "censorship demand data notice" can be applied in an automated why. It is plumbing for automating censorship. See "DSA" part of those laws and how BlueSky's ToS is responding.
> See BlueSky just rolled out Terms ToS that the automated UN Safety (censorship) laws they will accept. This is an automated pipeline for the "censorship demand data notice" can be applied in an automated why.
I feel like you are missing some words or have some typos because this isn't comprehensible English.
It's an understandable English even for non-native speaker like me. You are probably not very exposed to non-native speakers.
English speaker for approximately 43 of my 44+ years on this planet. I have almost no idea what this sentence is trying to convey.
Damn what’s up with that gap? You’re falling behind.
I've spent years living abroad and have had many long discussions and friendships with non-native english speakers.
This could be a non-native speaker, but the complexity of the attempted sentence structure leads me to think it is a native or fluent speaker who made some mistakes (I make those kinds of mistakes all the time.)
"You are probably not very exposed to non-native speakers."
If native speakers have to talk to people of other languages to understand it, then it's not even English at that point. What it is, who knows.
I am non-native speaker and I confirm that the post was gibberish.
We need a DNS server with a history database, not just a cache, preferably with a distributed history database.
Visit a website and it was blocked by the "official" DNS? Declare the IP invalid in the webUI (or the browser plugin) of the local DNS and it will get you the previous IP from the database.
Brave browser launched a blockchain based domains registry IIRC.
Or teach people how to point to a different DNS server in an area with laws more amenable to their preferences.
Until coutry implement the great firewall and it becomes a play of cat & mouse.
... or until the blocking starts at the root name servers. There are only a few of them.
The root zone file is publicly distributed by IANA [1] so you can download it and ignore the servers themselves. Then your lookup (from the resolver you're running yourself) starts at a particular country's top level.
As for censorship, because it's hierarchical, they'd have to remove an entire country code from the root servers.
[1] https://www.iana.org/domains/root/files
/etc/hosts, and /etc/resolv.conf.
And get the original IP from where?
Domain Name System was an app on the Internet. It wasn't something that always existed. The purpose of it is to provide intuitive means to look up IP address from more intuitive domain name strings.
If you could come up with an alternative system to derive the IP address of desired remote host, or content, e.g. Magnet Link standard, you can just skip DNS and switch to that instead.
TLS can be a problem as a lot of moving parts of WWW now depends on DNS. But all of those can be solved.
Step 6: Someome buys (or steals) a new domain to mirror the site. Or piggybacks a subdomain.
Step 7: Rinse and repeat, fueling the domain-bureaucracy complex. Oceania has always been at war with the pirate bay!
Step 5 is problematic because when people won't put www.4chan.com but will type 4chan into address bar (90% users are doing exactly that) it will trigger search and will easily find some AMPed URL, URL shortener or subdomain to click on.
HMG can compel Google not to offer AMPed 4chan in the UK, and can compel ISPs to block mirrors in DNS and by IP. URL shorteners are just a client-side indirection and won't circumvent a block.
There's really nothing that they can realistically do about VPNs, however.
UK site blocking isn't done with DNS. I think they mess with routes at the ISP level. There's not much you can do except use a VPN.
4chan uses Cloudflare. Blocking routes to Cloudflare may have an interesting impact unless CF are cooperating with the UK.
4chan could stop using CF but their moderators will have to step up their game as CF is being used to detect and block CSAM.
CF will cooperate with UK authorities because they're not in 4chan's business.
I doubt it heavily. CF has control over a large chunk of the global internet - they're not going to go thru their clients one by one and make sure they're doing age verification. That's absurd and far too expensive.
The alternative to that is either:
1. UK blocks cloudflare (unlikely, come on now)
2. UK gives cloudflare a pass (fairly common)
3. Somewhere in-between. Maybe UK cares about highly visible people behind cloudflare like 4Chan but not others.
Won’t it just be the UK telling Cloudflare to block 4chan specifically for the UK (or we’ll fine you too)?
Yeah that's option 3, for now. But they won't go after cloudflare in the general case because it's too risky IMO. And cloudflare will only comply to the absolute minimum they can get away with, because they can't burn money auditing every single customer behind cloudflare.
> they're not going to go thru their clients one by one and make sure they're doing age verification
no, they just drop customers when people complain that they host legal content they happen to disagree with (KF).
You're complaining that Cloudflare doesn't want to host a site that literally killed people?
I think if you want cloudflare to host your site, don't kill people with your site. That seems fair IMO.
I think if that were true, there would have at least been an attempt at a court case at the very least. But AFAIK every case they have been involved in, they've won. I am not defending their content, merely a right to exist, especially when you're not breaking any applicable laws.
If you want to talk about content that objectively breaks laws... 8chan hosts monkey torture videos.
AFAIK Cloudflare gives 4chan a dedicated ip to simplify blocking.
I think you may be right. [1] It's the same IP I've had in my hosts file for a long time.
[1] - https://whoisfreaks.com/tools/dns/history/lookup/4chan.org?t...
Cloudflare isn't capable of that - it can only block downloading CSAM not uploading it. (Which means the moderators wouldn't be able to see it either.)
spain block CF every weekend to try to avoid football piracy. crazy, but its happening and nobody cares.
ironic how CF will host 4chan and 8chan but not kiwifarms
How does step 5 work? Switching DNS servers is trivial.
For you - not for 99% of the public.
Millions of British people are already engaged in a cat-and-mouse game against online censorship, for one main reason - football (soccer).
If you're a British football fan and want to watch every live televised match, you'll need to pay £75 a month for subscriptions to both Sky Sports and TNT Sports. That won't actually allow you to watch all of the matches that are played, because for weird historical reasons there's a TV blackout on matches played on Saturday afternoon - even if you've paid for your subscriptions, you'll only be able to watch about half of all league matches on TV.
Alternatively, you can pay some bloke in the pub £50 for a Fire TV Stick pre-programmed with access to a bunch of pirated IPTV streams and a VPN to circumvent blocking, or get a mate to show you how to do it yourself - no subscription, no blackout. As a bonus, you get free access to Netflix and Disney+ and everything else.
Sellers of dodgy Fire Sticks occasionally get caught and imprisoned, a handful of users occasionally get nasty letters from the Federation Against Copyright Theft, but it's too widespread to really stop. Practically every workplace or secondary school class has someone who knows the ins-and-outs of circumventing DNS- and IP-level blocking; the lad who showed you how to watch live football on your phone or get free Netflix will be more than happy to show you how to access adult sites without verifying your age.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/illicit-streaming...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_on_television...
I've tried the "IPTV streams" to watch blacked out NHL games, and they are often terribly overloaded or just don't work at all. Not something I'd pay for.
Just search for the name of the sport and “bite” and you’ll find some sketchy successor of the original subreddits for pirated sports streams (“r/nflbite,” “r/nbabite,” etc.) Or find the latest streameast mirror which is usually the best.
Make sure your ad blocker is working. Then it’s just a matter of finding the best stream, extracting the playlist, and opening VLC.
I documented [0] some useful tricks for this technique and the comments also include more useful snippets and bookmarklets.
[0] https://gist.github.com/milesrichardson/4661c311199b98023701...
£75 a month seems very reasonable for sports nerds, compared to the cost and availability in the past
People don’t want to ly for content, that’s as old as the hills.
I don’t do sport, and I wouldn’t fund such a terrible exploitative industry (televised sports is all about getting people hooked on gambling), but I’ve certainly spent that much for entertainment I do like in the past - and far more. A night at the theatre will cost a lot more than subscribing to all the sports channels. A weekly cinema visit too.
>£75 a month seems very reasonable for sports nerds, compared to the cost and availability in the past
good that you ignore the actual point of the comment that you replied to
>That won't actually allow you to watch all of the matches that are played, because for weird historical reasons there's a TV blackout on matches played on Saturday afternoon - even if you've paid for your subscriptions, you'll only be able to watch about half of all league matches on TV.
Given the cost was the first thing mentioned it seems that would be the actual point.
Personally I have no problem with people acquiring shows which are otherwise unavailable, as long as it’s not simply an excuse not to pay, which it so often is.
Copyright and censorship involve similar technological issues, but the ethics and legal aspects are totally different.
https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls
The iOS instructions are the most onerous (IMO) but still easy enough to follow. It's 15 minutes of fumbling around for the non-technical person, then they're protected.
(Though, as others have pointed out, this is probably moot. The blocking is more effectively done by ISPs.)
>It's 15 minutes of fumbling around for the non-technical person, then they're protected.
You and I have very different ideas of what "non-technical" means. If it involves anything beyond pressing "download" on the app store, it's out of reach of the vast majority of users.
Mulvad is totally non technical, you just download it and press “connect” and boom you’re on a vpn?
Is that really so complex the average person can’t do it? It’s less complex than sending an email.
The instructions I linked are to set up DoH/DoT with their (free!) service, so it's a little bit more involved than downloading an app; just not too much more involved to someone who's motivated to regain something they lost.
Fair enough, there's a wide variance there. I'd still hesitate to say it's out of reach for most people as they'll likely have someone they know who would be able to follow those instructions for them. For the purpose of being able to access something they used to be able to access, I think most people will be able to figure this out. The point is that it's one-and-done in most instances. (To that end there's a reasonable worry that OS updates reset these settings but that's kind of a separate problem.)
In countries like Iran 80%+ of the population knows how to.
It’s all a matter of incentives.
This. Practically the entire Middle East has blocks on sites like porn. Every household I know pays for a VPN that they share with all their family members.
My dad can hardly use a mouse, but the systems I put in place for him are pretty complex. He has no idea.
Ehh, if a youth of digital piracy has taught me anything, it's that people will develop the necessary computer literacy to get the entertainment they want. Even if they've completely failed to develop that same skill in the pursuit of self improvement.
I feel that says something about human psychology. Probably something very unpleasant.
Human adaptivity is perhaps both our biggest strength and biggest weakness. It's the same force behind our greatest innovations and our greatest tragedies, and even fuels the apathetic indifference towards those tragedies, too.
DNS poisoning and rejection of TLS handshakes based on SNI.
That's one domain down. Only 3,524 domains that just cropped up yesterday to go.
Never mind the fact that doing a Google search will surface pages on various wikis, git repositories, and other sites that conveniently list all of the mirrors.
Big enough barrier to stop most users
Most users default to search engines instead of typing in a URL. I searched for "pirate bay" just now and all of the top results are mirrors or lists of mirrors.
This is why I’m really pissed off at how long ECH has taken.
And it’s all because of corporate interests at IETF.
Encrypted Client Hello and DNS over HTTPS.
Drop all ECH TLS connections, as China does.
Creating the "Great Firewall of the UK" without actually calling it that: Priceless.
step 6: Block non-compliant DNS servers
Step 7: Camera AI that can catch the people scribbling “Sci-Hub is 190.115.31.218” on a bathroom wall.
Does that even work anymore? I thought plain IP addresses were a thing of the past ever since we started doing virtual hosts 25 years ago. I just get a 503 when I use the address you posted...
If you just point your browser to https://<ip_address> then it won't work. You also need to have the correct hostname in the http request headers.
The easiest way to accomplish this is to add the address into your .hosts file (as sibling post says) and just use the name.
As well as SNI, most reverse proxies need to know which TLS cert to serve. Lower than layer 7.
Put it in your hosts file ;)
What domain name we need to put into hosts file?
Whatever is included on the bathroom wall
"scihub.invalid 192.168.19.17"
Literally DNS-over-sneakernet
There's literally no perfect law in the world. So I'm not exactly sure what your point is.
And yet most people won't bother doing it.
Same way most attempts to stop piracy work. The people who are serious about getting around the blocks will find ways, but the less motivated will just give up (again, this is most people).
IMO this whole situation is ridiculous.
#2-#4 are the government trying to impose its national laws on an entity in a completely different country, operating entirely in that completely different country, with no business relationship whatsoever with your country. It's a futile and frankly rather insulting effort; no different from if Iran declared it was illegal for UK women living in the UK to leave the house without wearing a burka.
#5 is an authoritarian offense against your own citizens; trying to prevent them from being able to communicate with people in another country even if they want to do so.
Completely besides your point, but Iran mandates a hijab (head scarf, no veil). Burkas (often blue, net in front of face) are mainly found (not sure if mandated or expected) in Afghanistan, whereas the Saudis use niqabs (the black veils). The hijab mandate being the least repulsive.
I know it's an odd nitpick, consider it a compulsion of mine.
To be fair, there's no logical problem with an example of Iran demanding UK women to wear burkas even if burkas aren't their cultural norm.
And the irony is the law itself is encouraging more VPN use, which in turn will allow bypassing of any outright blocks.
6 the 4chan fans all know how to bypass the ban and it’s ultimately ineffective
I mean, downstream from 1 it's all as it should be. 100% of the issue is #1, no?
Performative or outright extortion.
Performative yes, but it's about controlling their subjects, not punishing the act or preventings its recurrence. Such as it ever was in UK politics.
Think about the logic of KYC/AML laws - introduced wehn HSBC were fined $1.9 billion for laundering Mexican drug cartels and Saudi terrorist cell money. The impact and burden were almost wholly on the consumer, and did nothing to stop institutional bad actors being malfeasant on a macro scale. This was beautifully illustrated HSBC were caught doing the exact same thing 10 years later. And again. And again.
Fast forward to UK culture and politics today and how they're dealing with a globalised world watching them post-Brexit.
Labour (and to an extent the BBC) were pilloried for having an anti-semitism problem over the last decade, and Northern Ireland is typified by proscribed terrorist groups doing public marches with large public terrorist murals. Rather than mitigate any of the causes, or engage with the problem on a societal level, the UKs answer is to arrest 80 and 89 year olds pleading to stop infanticide in Gaza, and charge native-Irish speaking Rappers and Sundance Award Winning actors under the terrorism act
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/24/uk-police-de... https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/20/uk/irish-rapper-terrorism...
When looking at the current passion for control and restriction of the internet under the guise of combatting CSAM, its important to understand the context under which these disingenuous ploys arise.
US and European readers might not realise that the BBC, the House of Lords, and specific Political Parties in the UK have a very serious child-grooming and paedophilia scandal they've been trying to keep under wraps for 50 years that had the lid blown off by the revelations following Jimmy Saville's death. This is outside the major child-grooming and abuse scandals in the cultural pillars and cultural groups of the UK - e.g. Church of England, The Boy Scouts, the British Public School system etc...
I can't even go into the more recent and utterly appalling Rotherham debacle - and the dereliction of duty of both the police and the legal system - as it would simply take too long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
In 1981 Sir Peter Hayman - Diplomat and MI6 operative who held highly sensitive posts at the MOD and NATO - was called out for being a paedophile, using parliamentary privilege, as he had not been jailed after it was discovered he had left a package containing child pornography on a bus. The DPP and AG declined to prosecute, but Thatcher advised him that he would be stripped of his honours if was caught in a Public Toilet engaging in homosexual acts again, as he was in 1984.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_paedophile_dossier... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tory-mp-warned-o...
Now that the statute of limitations is running out, and official secrets acts files are due to be unsealed, its time for a pallaver about VPNs and protecting the children from the 'internet'. Given their age and new-found riches in a disenfranchised post-Brexit Britain, the ruling classes of the UK have never been in a more trepidatious position - some commentators even predicting civil war in the next 5 years - so time for some large-scale distractive measures.
Is the UK headed for civil war? | UK Politics | The New ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4urbhc_cOQk
I assumed 4chan didn't exist anymore and it was renamed/replaced by another board... Great advertisement.
The UK acts like a madman on fire trying to attack everybody.
It stopped being relevant because its content became acceptable on major social networks, beginning in late 2022.
Major social networks aren't even remotely close to being in the same niche. There are no algorithms, no friction with accounts, no obtrusive interfaces or feature bloat, no likes, no post ratings, content is completely ephemeral. This is a common and fundamental misunderstanding I see people make when trying to understand why 4chan exists. The people who post on 4chan aren't doing it because they can't help but post edgy content, they're doing it because its web 1.0 approach to social media completely erases a whole load of annoyances and anti-patterns that are endemic in the modern web.
Just like Usenet, it will probably never die despite the antisocial controversies. Or at least in the case of 4chan, it will be replaced with another board-type system. As Twitch streamers are the contemporary version of AM radio, 4chan is the contemporary version of BBSes. You should be extremely skeptical of the idea that you could ever compete in the same space with a heavily commercialized product like a modern social network. Twitter is not a replacement, it never will be.
Most people in websites like HN have absolutely no idea what 4chan is, how it works, and what kind of things people post in there. It shows because every time you read a comment here about 4chan you are confused as to what website they may be talking about.
Twitter is really not far from 4chan in 2025.
Always has been. A lot of prominent Twitter accounts in my primary language, especially the old ones, has telltales of having been on 2chan. net. There must be something to that format that installs a basic social media amplification skill in your brain that do not develop otherwise.
There are places more toxic than 4chan but skill levels don't compare, and 4chan and 2chan also share nothing culture wise, so it must be in the architecture.
My guess would be that to be on 2chan/4chan "back in the day", you need to be terminally online. And being terminally online is a soft prerequisite to being really good at posting interesting things online. Excellence isn't an act - it's a habit.
There was also 2ch. net that was a lot bigger, but 2ch "alumni" aren't as good. It's not just cohort, it has/had better action-reward loop than other systems.
Its the fleetingness as a filter. If you are not catchy and repeated by others- its gone. instantly. No coming back.
That's understating it. They're practically the same at this point, 4chan just has fewer bots.
4chan doesn't manipulate the feed, so far as I know. Nor does it require a phone number to use.
It blocks mainstream vpns, but that's about it. Behind the scenes, who knows, but it's not as obviously full of low effort bait as Twitter, and no account is necessary.
Actually 4chan does have accounts, otherwise you get extremely nasty captchas.
Anyways, image boards are ephemeral because the devs were incompetent and cheap, it wasn't some genius design, or design at all.
the emergent behavior from ephemeral posting has become a feature by this point. and while it does technically have accounts, they don't at all work like a normal social media account. they aren't published, and using the "this is for sure me" tripcode feature is socially frowned upon.
there's more boards than just /b/
What content in particular?
The stuff that Free Speech Absolutists like to say on twitter, judging by the date they included.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...
Amd by free speech absolitists we usually mean nazi supporters. Who care great deal about spreading their ideas
They just happen to care equally lot about punishing and shutting up whoever is not on their side.
Listen. The lies, the culture relativist lies, they are so tiresome.
We now all have ghaza at home- and we see through it all now. You do not have the slightest idea of the world, you just have that approximation made out of your own feelings and you yank on all social levers to make it real.
Im sorry the world made you unable to appreciate complexity and handle it especially when its hostile to western values. But the grown ups have to clean up your mess now.
Why not go and play in your corner, with the other problems, you could play "nazi and revolutionary" all day long. Thank you..
racism
4chan is to Twitter what Reddit is to Hacker News.
In a way it does not exist any more. Most of the threads are started by 4chan-GPT yes this is a thing and most replies to threads are 4chan-GPT. They uses 4chan passes to allow proxies and not have to deal with a craptcha. Anyone could start their own chan, implement GPT bots and have the same level of popularity. I would wager a dozen HN'ers could implement this in a day. I think the goal on 4chan is controlling the narrative. My question would be, would HN'ers also use bots to control the narratives on their chans or create the same daily and weekly threads?
I frequent the NSFW boards and that doesn't seem to be the case?
And if it is the case... I guess it's so undetectable that it doesn't matter anyway.
I doubt GPT is posting NSFW content. I think /b/ is mostly teen boys on the cell phones at school. Prior to 2012 it was diverse porn but then it started to lean heavily into gay porn. I don't know what to make of that. Perhaps Pornhub does not have enough gay porn and they are filling the void?
I don't see that much gay porn on there. The most popular threads seem to be teens that may or may not be 18, trans girls, chubby girls, and girls that you know personally. Then there's the AI porn which is often furry or children.
> yes this is a thing and most replies to threads are 4chan-GPT
Do you have proof of this?
They bragged about it for a while but after the bragging stopped my proof is only anecdotal. When the United States Agency for International Development was defunded the bots went quiet and shortly thereafter the site was hacked using a vulnerability that had been well known since 2012. It was peaceful for a few weeks prior to the hack and for a couple weeks after the hack. Most of the fake racists disappeared from /pol/ and /g/ stopped shilling products. It was just real people and the site was just as active as the hundreds of other chans. Best I can tell 4chan is a test site to fine tune social manipulation GPT's. All the bots, fake racists and shillers are back now suggesting to me the manipulators started getting funded by other means. Before someone says it, there are a few real racists there too. The bots attract and egg them on. Most moved to 8chan. I think that is part of the experiment and tuning. Perhaps some day the veil will be lifted.
If that's true you should be able to see that in the public traffic statistics.
I thought about that as well. This would be true if team-hiromoot is not cooperating with the bot owners, otherwise the bots could simply be excluded given all their traffic is authenticated with a 4chan pass. Other chans have manipulated their stats to change how active they appear so it's really hard for me to rely upon that.
At this point your hypothesis is unfalsifiable. I was on /g/ before and after the hack and didn't detect any big changes. It was as shitty as ever.
Yeah the only way I could really prove anything would be to fully own and operate the site, a task I would never take on. It might be interesting and educational for a day but without government immunity it would get risky fast.
/g/ is really only good during aoc
There are non affiliated stat trackers like 4stats.io or any of the archive sites. It's pure nonsense/conspiracy theory to suggest everything is bot content now.
> Best I can tell 4chan is a test site to fine tune social manipulation GPT's.
Almost certainly. Relevant donor tie from the Tiburon Trestle Trail Project https://imgur.com/a/3JAW9ku (2017)
This was one guy that did it for a few days (weeks?). Not some "common occurence". Funny video btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPrtcLdcdM
Humiliation of the UK continues. Falling into irrelevance / meme territory.
Good, that’s the only way these unpopular laws might get repealed or reworked, given that the UK citizens can’t or won’t do much about it except collectively shrug.
What terrifies me is that the EU is looking at UK’s OSA as a model, and will soon implement it here.
The UK started arresting people that posted differing opinions a few years ago. There were no articles or outcry and this is what it has led to.
There was a lot of outcry, just like there was with the anti-semitic labelling of human rights protestors at US universities.
This dates back the early 2000s at least.
It's happening in the US now too tho.
I know this is nothing new, but just stop and appreciate how much modern governments have abandoned all decorum and have fully embraced just downright silly levels of signaling. The UK knows that the law has no jurisdiction over US companies, and they know that US companies won't pay it, but they went ahead with it anyway.
I thought that by the time I was old that the people making the rules would have some understanding of the internet.
I'm old now, they don't :(
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
The next step I assume is banning VPN use for anyone under 18 in the UK, followed by only allowing academics or certain roles to use them.
Banning VPNs seems effectively impossible. Any ip address can act as a vpn. There are also zero identity providers like mullvad.
In the UK, ~55% of traffic comes from mobile [1]. The UK could approach Apple and Google and ask them to remove VPNs from their respective app stores when opened in the UK.
I imagine this would curtail a large proportion of mobile VPN usage.
Blocking desktop VPNs would be a bit more adhoc but it is possible to make it much harder for many people to download VPN clients.
[1] https://www.digitalsilk.com/digital-trends/mobile-vs-desktop...
Watching sports for cheap using a "dodgy firestick" or similar hardware is incredibly popular in the UK to watch sports for cheap even among those not tech-inclined, despite obviously being illegal. I'd predict the same to happen here, quickly you'll see plug-and-play boxes that will route their home wi-fi traffic through a VPN, and most people will have a mate of a mate who sells them for a few tenners.
Deep packet inspection can detect VPNs. The problem may be more that people have legitimate uses for VPNs, like at their work. Those could be whitelisted though.
I am pretty sure we are slowly but surely heading towards a point where every country will implement its own great firewall and block every website except those in a whitelist approved by the government.
They're not going to suddenly become competent enough to implement something like that.
Could they compel Starlink to not offer service there?
I don't know, is it easy for chinese residents to subscribe and pay invoices for a Starlink connection?
The mechanism for China to compel Starlink to not operate there seems more clear: the leader decides to block all direct and indirect business activities in China, related to Elon Musk.
Is that comparable, for the UK? Maybe other EU members would agree?
As an American, I have trouble comprehending multiple governments colluding to enable mass government censorship, and expecting to stay in power. But, I know nothing of the European mindset.
This is similar to how Wikipedia reacts to Internet Watch Foundation (a UK CSAM Watchdog) when it decided to block the page "Virgin Killer" (a 1976 album by German band Scorpions) and the album cover image page. FBI found no issue with it, but the UK did. The result means ISP using the IWF blocklist are getting their traffic routed to proxy server, and Wikipedia usually blocks open proxies. Eventually, news outlet reproduced the artwork in question, rendering the block moot, and IWF rescinded the block a few days later [1]
I wonder if 4chan will simply decide to ban visitors from UK from visiting based on regulatory compliance. Sometimes when I accidentally clicked on a streaming sites that were not available in my country, their error page will be simply "This content isn't available in your country", but the URL contains GDPR, even though the site is not EU-based at all, and that I'm not visiting it from EU country either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation_and_...
Yeah similar except 4chan has no power and Wikipedia has a huge amount of power.
>FBI found no issue with it
Because it's art?
so I guess the UK will have to build Hadrian’s Firewall to keep everybody out.
Americans complaining about extra-territorial application of laws?
As much as I dislike the OSA, if you're not in the UK you can -- and probably should -- just ignore it. Unless you care specifically about interacting with users or businesses in the UK, in which case you probably need to comply.
Unlike the USA, we're generally incapable of successfully demanding everyone everywhere go along with whatever overreach we might think up.
> Unlike the USA, we're generally incapable of successfully demanding everyone everywhere go along with whatever overreach we might think up.
I can understand why someone might think the UK still has as much influence as it did 50-75 years ago when you consider how prevalent that "UKCA" symbol is (the one that was introduced to replace the "CE" mark post-Brexit).
It's fairly prevalent, but actually the UK government gave up on replacing CE a couple of years ago: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-government-announces-e...
I'm sure the companies who put effort into adopting UKCA were really happy to have put in that effort :P. Even if it's I hope not as onerous as adopting it (or CE) from scratch, as they both have quite similar (if not originally identical?) requirements. It seemed more intended to give the impression of Brexit success than of actually making a difference to anything.
I am Canadian and I worry that usually what happens in UK ends up coming to Canada too.
Ugh. I never thought I'd say this.
I'm with 4chan.
Would employees and owners of 4chan get arrested if they ever fly into the UK now?
1. Create a fake LinkedIn profile for your enemy that says they work for 4chan
2. Wait for them to travel to the UK
3. ???
4. Profit
I thought 4chan already blocked UK IPs. Why is Ofcom still pursuing this?
For the same reason Roskomnadzor makes demands of Wikipedia to remove information it doesn't like: to impotently make demands of entities that will obviously not comply so there can be some theatrics before blocking them or marking them as an evil non-compliant entity.
It's truly baffling stuff. If Roskomnadzor made demands of a UK-based website before dramatically fining them massive amounts daily (that will obviously never be collected), people would rightfully treat them as a laughing stock. Yet when Ofcom treats a foreign entity the same way, they somehow expect to be treated seriously.
Honestly 4chan treated this with far more respect than it was due by having their lawyers respond at all.
While the UK's demands will surely be laughed at, I'm fairly sure George Orwell's estate has a solid copyright claim here against the UK.
Ofcom's only card now is to have UK ISPs block 4chan. When that happens will Starlink comply? maybe. what if they block X? could get messy fast.
Starlink complies with this sort of stuff in the general case. The only reason they wouldn't in this specific case is if Musk decides to stir up some shit, which to be fair is totally possible.
I'd be totally un-shocked if the UK criminalized Starlink (over OSA or otherwise), in part because they've already criminalized it before, in some of their territories[0,1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979869 ("Starlink in the Falkland Islands – A national emergency situation? (openfalklands.com)"—225 comments)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37645945 ("Saint Helena Island Communications (sainthelenaisland.info)"—145 comments)
That barely got covered in the UK news, but if wealthy rural people (who don't have good wired or cellular internet) get told their Starlink is getting banned it will be much more newsworthy.
Not the only card according to the article
>"Ofcom can instead ask a court to order other services to disrupt a provider's UK business, such as requiring a service's removal from search results or blocking of UK payments.
>or blocking of uk payments
Lol
Do we think anyone in the UK is paying to advertise to the UK demographic noted on https://www.4chan.org/advertise ?
Imagine if some tech like DNS over UHF radio What could the UK do?
They'll just maintain course on their mission to make everything illegal no matter the technical details.
Starting with whatever allows criticism of their parody of a farce of so called leadership.
UHF? With LOS range? How useful is that?
> Imagine if some tech like DNS over UHF radio What could the UK do?
Criminalize this usage of UHF radio.
>If Ofcom doesn't think this will be enough to prevent significant harm, it can even ask that ISPs be ordered to block UK access.
Well again I guess the UK never heard of VPNs, but they are trying to ban them still, it is like these pols have no clue how the internet works. They never learn these actions are like playing wack-a-mole.
VPNs are next: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn438z3ejxyo
So they're lagging about 3-4 years behind the Russian practices, but steadily catching up. Quite impressive!
Par for the course for European countries.
Note that the children's commissioner is only an advisor to government.
The government itself has said it doesn't believe VPNs should be outlawed - that's even stated in the article.
> it doesn't believe VPNs should be outlawed
That still leaves space for a lot of unpleasant, but plausible, alternatives:
* Banning under-18s from using VPNs; enforced by ordering Visa+Mastercard to deny UK-originating payments to VPN operators that don't verify their users' identity.
* Introducing a "VPN license"; initially only granted to large corporate users. All encrypted VPN traffic will be required to periodically broadcast their VPN license-number in cleartext so that ISP-based traffic monitoring will let it pass, otherwise the connection will be reset.
Hah, yes 'children' stealing a 'credit card' to get a VPN to watch porn. Well stop that!
I’m curious about what the plan is to differentiate between legitimate business use and personal use of any kind. Age verification obviously won’t work for self-hosted, so does age verification then get pushed to VPS providers? And at that point, so what? I’m already paying with legitimate bank details for legitimate personal use.
do you think the public at large knows what VPS are? How to set up a VPN? the public at large barely understands the concept of files nowadays, if it's not app they're lost
banning selling VPN and VPN apps will solve 90% of the problem and that's enough
>do you think the public at large knows what VPS are? How to set up a VPN?
Do you think the general public NEEDS to know those things right now? Because that's what actually mostly drives what people put in the time to learn. This smug elitist "everyone is dumb except me the tech wizard" sort of comment shows up every such thread and it's deeply irksome. Most people are plenty intelligent and can easily learn things as trivial as setting up a VPN. For most that would just amount to "sign up for one of many turnkey services, install this app, scan this QR code" or even more commonly "ask one of the kids or techie person in circle of friends/neighbors to take care of it". All sorts of people working in a vast array of businesses use VPNs all the frickin' time, it's no big deal.
But there are endless such things in our lives and only so much time, so most people very reasonably triage and only put effort into things they enjoy personally or things they are forced to care about due to being important. Up until now, most people haven't needed to care in their personal lives, because they're satisfied enough with the fairly open internet experience we've had. If that changes, and it matters to them, the tools exist to easily deal with it and people will easily learn it.
It's not elitist to remark that people tech skills are atrophying. The zoomers literally have memes about how bad are at tech stuff.
Setting a VPN is 100% not trivial, I know that because I recently set up a wireguard vpn on a VPS. Not impossible, sure, but out of the reach for a normal person.
Sure, one can ask a techie friend (if one's has a techie friend capable of self-hosting a VPN). So now instead of the gov ban covering 90% of the population, it covers what? 85%? 80%?
All self-hosted tools will not make a difference. Selling turnkey tools will be banned.
You can't win against the government. Not in 2025.
I think there's a good chance that when normies have to upload a picture of their real life ID to watch a funny tiktok or read a tweet they might start looking into VPNs.
Right now most of the privacy violations are covert and everyone is dishonest. Nobody reads TOS or EULA, Google just say "pinky promise we're not mean!", etc.
But there's no way to automate scanning someone's face to view a Garfield comic.
Governments are getting far too cavalier. They're flying too close to the sun here. They've already gotten away with murder and then some, they should quit while they're ahead.
Their greed will be their downfall. People will eventually push back.
>It's not elitist to remark that people tech skills are atrophying.
It is elitist though to not go into why that's the case and instead just assume it's because, what, people are dropping in IQ? A lot of (though not all granted) the cause boils down to the same reason as mechanical skills (engine repair and such) atrophying: lack of need. Things have gotten very polished for the average use case. Most people don't need to know all the inner workings, but that's not necessarily a bad thing right? I can remember easily in the 90s and much of the 00s when many OS crashed if you looked at them funny and had some pretty funky edges, and the state of the art advanced so fast diving into the internals was important. And it was great fun for me and I miss a lot of it. However it made life a lot harder for someone who only wanted an appliance tool, and now that's the changed. But while when comfortable a lot of us have a tendency to coast, as we see in disaster after disaster folks can get extremely inventive and learn in a real hurry if they experience enough motivation.
>Sure, one can ask a techie friend (if one's has a techie friend capable of self-hosting a VPN).
lol what? Why on earth would that be necessary?
>Selling turnkey tools will be banned.
I'm American. The british crown can kiss my red, white and blue ass. Just as with tor, I will contribute for free just to stick it in their authoritarian eye. As well as services from huge parts of the rest of the planet that aren't the UK, there is no reason there won't be fully open source apps where you put in a VPS API key and it does the rest and spits out a profile for you the end. On the contrary that's technically trivial, but there hasn't been that kind of need amongst the developed world.
The UK government will have to go all the way to the level of China for it to work like you're claiming, if they're even capable of that.
>It is elitist though to not go into why that's the case and instead just assume it's because, what, people are dropping in IQ?
Nowhere in my comment did I mention or assumed IQ, that's all you.
One techie can resell his vpn to other people.
please re-read my comment
>Selling turnkey tools will be banned
you can't escape the state financial control, it's impossible
sure, you can do it on a very very small scale, but nothing that would have any impact
The public at large has no idea what IPTV was or how to set it up. Now Barry down the street is watching his footy through it all weekend cause his mate knows someone selling a box for 20 quid, and Barry does know how to plug in a USB cable.
The public doesn't need to know how it works behind the scenes to use it. It just needs to be packaged in a way so that they don't need to know. Which it will.
> do you think the public at large knows what VPS are
Fair point. As you say regarding files, it's easy to vastly overestimate the familiarity with computing concepts when you're writing anything in the orange bar website.
> will solve 90% of the problem
Remind me again, what the problem they're trying to solve is?
people using VPNs to circumvent banned or restricted content
A VPN license of course! Just need a corporation number, a list of registered employees, and mandatory logging to get one! /s
It doesn't matter if naive blocking means can be trivially circumvented. This creates a chilling effect, less technically proficient people will just move to other sites. When circumvention becomes an offence, now government has one more point of leverage over you - they manufacture law under which almost everyone is guilty.
> I guess the UK never heard of VPNs
Wanna bet that when they finally hear of them, they'll try to ban them (and mentions of VPNs, too)?
What about Onion networks?
They need bridges.
I think the question we should be asking is "What about SSHing into a VPS?" and "What about seedboxes".
You can disguise a VPS as any server outside of your country, it could serve up an HTTPS page and no one snooping the connection would be any wiser.
Related: https://snowflake.torproject.org/
Help run a Snowflake proxy! You can do it from your browser.
It feels more like a modern version of Luddites where they probably do understand very well how it works and they fear what that means for their own success.
I really dislike what 4chan is, but I'm also a huge proponent of freedom online. I am glad that 4chan is telling the UK to go pound sand, I just hope they have the foresight to realize that they should not travel there or into countries that might extradite them. It's too bad that the country where 1984 originated is currently doing it's best to put the ideas in that book (the bad ones) to use in subjugating their citizens.
Firsr, they need learn to control of what happen on their own island
What does this mean?
At the risk of being old and optimistic; my gut right now is: GOOD, maybe the antisocial youngn's could perhaps make some real fundamental strides in hacking around/replacing/ doing SOMETHING about DNS as it serves.
My old mind is like, COME ON, DNS is just a PHONEBOOK. Just make another one, or do something better.
It's so funny watching the UK try to threaten sites without any jurisdiction. I have American friends who got these letters and openly laughed at them. Sorry buddy, we aren't your colony anymore!
Taxation without representation
lol
I wish these boomers would stop trying to act like they can control the internet because their citizens are part of it. If they want to do that they should wall their country off like China or NK. Not that I prefer that but this is way worse.
Desperate politicians ,steering desperately against the right wing tide they created by showing everyone the reality of mass immigration to keep their business models and world afloat .
4chan isn't rightwing and it never was, but since 2016 and especially since 2020 the userbase has been moving to the left, because at its core 4chan is always counter culture.
But 4chan is most of all pro free speach, which is a different axis, which has opponents left, right and center .
Which speech is it pro free? It's not all speech. People get banned from 4chan.
4chan is the edgy counterculture, yes. So when the mainstream was leaning towards christian and right, it was leaning anti-theist libertarian left.
When the mainstream swung to the left, 4chan shifted too and became more right-leaning, and took a stance of performative opposition to political correctness. A similar shift is happening now - away from right wing again as right wing is becoming more mainstream.
Ofcom can fine 4chan all it wants, but without UK assets those penalties are unenforceable, they have no power here.
This is why the US dropped tea into Boston to have it's own Freedom.
> This is why the US dropped tea into Boston to have it's own Freedom.
the 3% tariff on Chinese tea was seen as oppressive
don't look at what has been imposed this year (without congressional approval)
The tariff was oppressive in large part because the colonies didn't have representation in Parliament and were allowed limited (and decreasing) local governance. The Stamp, Townshend and Intolerable Acts were a whole lot more than just "we don't wanna pay taxes".
A similar argument can be made against the tariffs though.
US consumers will be paying the bulk of the tariffs through price increases. We do have representatives in Congress, they just weren't the ones imposing tariffs.
edit: as fun as silent down votes are, it would be interesting to hear where you might disagree
Unfortunately the representatives in Congress gave the tariff power to the Presidency.
Now, did they do that with the approval of the voters? Ostensibly, yes, but in reality, it's not that clear-cut.
This would be more like if the Thirteen Colonies had MPs and those MPs still voted in favor of the Stamp Act, or they voted to delegate the power to tariff to someone with a severe personality disorder.
There are lawsuits arguing that Congress didn’t give the executive branch this power. They seem pretty persuasive to me and they’re successful so far, but we’ll see how the appeals process turns out.
sigh
There are a lot of lawsuits about the executive branch doing things it supposedly doesn't have the power to do.
Generally the mood seems to be that only a SCOTUS ruling will potentially be taken seriously.
It infuriates me just how much members of Congress have abdicated their jobs and given power to the president to make unilateral decisions. I wonder if we need a constitutional amendment (not that we could get such a thing to pass in this day and age), because it is a complete perversion of how our government is supposed to work.
For a long time now I've been banging the drum of "don't put power in the president's hands", because the downside has always been very clear to me: even if you trust the guy in office today, doesn't mean you will want the next guy to have that power. But people just don't care. They are quite happy to have unilateral power exercised by one man, because they don't bother to think through the consequences of such things.
Congressmen have to get reelected, so over the years they've been glad to abdicate power to the executive, the judiciary, and the unelected bureaucracy. Anyone but themselves, so they didn't have to sign their names to the unpopular policies they wanted. They still got what the ruling class wanted, but indirectly, so it rarely threatened their incumbency. Whatever happened, they could tell the votes back home, "Sorry, we tried to pass/stop such-and-such, but we don't have any control over the president/courts/bureaucrats. Can't blame me."
It worked pretty well as long as the ruling class were all pretty much on the same page about most things, with some "social issues" differences between the parties that they used for campaigning but never quite acted on. It works less well if different factions start competing and going against the status quo for real.
I mean yes the American people should probably consider giving our current government the same taste. But they’re not going to do that because we’ve been trained to be complacent.
I fully agree tariffs should be the purview of Congress, but that's not a "similar argument". Trump was elected just as Congress was.
Trump was elected to be the president, a role itself meant to be the chief executive and public figurehead of the government. Trump was not elected to legislate and no single person should be given the power to do so.
edit: typo
These tariffs may have representation, but constitutionally not from the right representative. Congress has the authority and only delegated it to the president in limited circumstances that don't apply. Trump says the ones on China are imposed for fentanyl being shipped in by mail and other means, and within days of saying that pardoned the largest opiates by mail operator in US history, Ross Ulbricht.
Technically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_representation
I don't feel represented on the national or international stage AT ALL. Maybe I'll stop paying mine.
> I don't feel represented on the national or international stage AT ALL. Maybe I'll stop paying mine.
Now gather a huge group of friends who are willing to fight for this cause (and for whose this cause is so important that they can accept ending in jail or even worse).
Be careful what you ask for. History has proven that such a group will exist at some point.
System's got that on lock by setting it up so the people most predisposed to fight the government are actually cheering on the new taxes. Information/policy/consent flowing the opposite way from how is commonly understood has been my critique of democracy for a long time, but the effect just keeps growing. Social media is a hell of a drug.
> System's got that on lock by setting it up so the people most predisposed to fight the government are actually cheering on the new taxes
more likely, proving that this group of people never actually believed in anything.
I don't see how that is a more useful model than what I said. Maybe for rallying people to oppose the current problems. But it feels like such preaching to the choir mainly serves to exacerbate the "culture war" that helps shut off people's thinking to begin with. So pushing that way might help win the immediate battle, but it also helps lose the overall war.
i don't think it contributes to the culture war to recognize that most people are not truly engaged in a collective sense, and that we are trapped within a self-reproducing system that relies on that:
"...the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectacle_(critical_theory)
That may be where you are coming from, but your original comment didn't contain anything beyond a simple smack down that is too-easily interpreted in a partisan manner.
What you "feel" is irrelevant though? You have the option of voting.
That's absurd. That doesn't pass the sniff test at all for being remotely true that people would react like that to only a 3 percent tax.
I looked it up, and it was a 3 pence tax per pound. When tea was selling for 2 to 3 pence per pound. So yeah, a 100-150% tax combined with the fact that the East India Company was allowed to sell without paying the tax. That is very unjust and threatens their business a lot more than the tax alone.
The precipitating event behind the Boston Tea Party was actually a reduction in taxation that made it possible for the East India Company to undercut both official colonial tea importers and also American tea smugglers.
And many of those tea importers/smugglers happened to be prominent figures in the future US government.
A coup was just good business.
It was terrible business. They'd have all been way better off working with the dominant global and economic power than starting a new country. And that's before you average in all the ones who lost everything and/or died.
It was good business, and those men are immortalised in history.
We should probably not forget that France gave nearly everything they had to the US to fund its revolution, what was a global power ended up in such an impoverished situation that it led to the French Revolution and ended the monarchy.
Not a small amount of support, if you are at the receiving end - certainly smells like good business.
"We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch! We had the King. We had a tea port. We had everything we needed, and it all ran like clockwork. You could've shut your mouth, smuggled tea and made as much money as you ever needed. It was perfect. But, no, you just had to blow it up. You and your pride and your ego! You just had to be the man. If you'd done your job, known your place, we'd all be fine right now."
I dunno.
Look at Musk who tried to work with the US President vs Trump who is the US president. Which one of them is gaining more?
The target of the Boston Tea Party was the British implementation of the Tea Act of May 10, 1773, which allowed the East India Company to sell tea from China in the colonies without paying taxes apart from those imposed by the Townshend Acts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party
Thank you for your pointless strawman argument.
> This is why the US dropped tea into Boston to have it's own Freedom.
(But primarily done to protect colonial smugglers' and merchants' businesses which were being undercut by the English tea that was still cheaper than theirs, even with the small tax.)
The matter was settled in 1783
If the UK really cared about child abuse, they'd go after the churches first. And let's not forget Jimmy Savile.
But we all know thinking of the children is a pretext.