> 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?
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
> 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.
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4chan got hacked a while back because they were running a totally outdated software stack.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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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 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".
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.
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.
> 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.)
Ofcom will probably end up requiring UK ISPs to block the site. Which is a fair outcome, given that the site administrators have willingly chosen to not follow UK law while still allowing UK residents to access the site.
"Allowing" UK residents to access the site? The UK is not the police of the Internet. 4chan is not a UK site and does not have to be aware of UK law. If the UK doesn't like it then it's their responsibility to stop their residents from accessing it. 4chan is complying with all the laws that apply to them.
> 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?
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Im sure you will be able to get a passport for digital travel
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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
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I think this was 100% the intention.
> 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.
> 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.
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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?
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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?
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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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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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...
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Reads like narration from Adam Curtis.
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> The UK government has lost control of what happen in the physical world on their own island
What do you mean by this?
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America is like, 2 steps behind with an entire government following
isnt this everyone in power?
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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/etc/hosts, and /etc/resolv.conf.
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.
How does step 5 work? Switching DNS servers is trivial.
For you - not for 99% of the public.
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DNS poisoning and rejection of TLS handshakes based on SNI.
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step 6: Block non-compliant DNS servers
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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).
And the irony is the law itself is encouraging more VPN use, which in turn will allow bypassing of any outright blocks.
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.
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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.
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I mean, downstream from 1 it's all as it should be. 100% of the issue is #1, no?
6 the 4chan fans all know how to bypass the ban and it’s ultimately ineffective
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.
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there's more boards than just /b/
What content in particular?
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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.
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> yes this is a thing and most replies to threads are 4chan-GPT
Do you have proof of this?
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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.
It's happening in the US now too tho.
This dates back the early 2000s at least.
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 :(
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...
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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.
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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.
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_...
>FBI found no issue with it
Because it's art?
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.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
Ugh. I never thought I'd say this.
I'm with 4chan.
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.
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.
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 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.
so I guess the UK will have to build Hadrian’s Firewall to keep everybody out.
Firsr, they need learn to control of what happen on their own island
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.
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.
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.
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=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
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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.
Imagine if some tech like DNS over UHF radio What could the UK do?
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.
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.
>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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
Taxation without representation
lol
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 .
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".
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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
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.
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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.)
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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.
Ofcom will probably end up requiring UK ISPs to block the site. Which is a fair outcome, given that the site administrators have willingly chosen to not follow UK law while still allowing UK residents to access the site.
"Allowing" UK residents to access the site? The UK is not the police of the Internet. 4chan is not a UK site and does not have to be aware of UK law. If the UK doesn't like it then it's their responsibility to stop their residents from accessing it. 4chan is complying with all the laws that apply to them.
Which is why it'll probably end up getting blocked at the ISP level for non-compliance.
> the site administrators have willingly chosen to not follow UK law while still allowing UK residents to access the site.
I happily don't follow a lot of countries' laws. 'Willingly', is another matter which implies malfeasance of some sort.