Comment by nickdothutton

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.

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...

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.

Just give up a few more rights…for everyone’s safety. Think of the children!

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

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.

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.

"What happened next..."

Racism with extra steps.

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Yes. UK has every right to block whatever they want. US has no obligation to assist them in any way.

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.

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?

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)

Most people are either blissfully unaware or don’t understand the ramifications of a policy until it becomes law

Democracy is a form of government, not an ideology. Just because +50% of an electorate thinks something is OK, doesn't make it so.

> 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 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.

Both major parties in the UK supported this.

> 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.

> AIUI, the UK is a democracy

The House of Lords disagrees and the Monarch disagree. Sometimes they cosplay as a democracy.

“Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos”

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.

really?

From my anecdotal evidence, is that it's fucking stupid and hated

It's an understandable English even for non-native speaker like me. You are probably not very exposed to non-native speakers.

Until coutry implement the great firewall and it becomes a play of cat & mouse.

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...

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.)

My dad can hardly use a mouse, but the systems I put in place for him are pretty complex. He has no idea.

In countries like Iran 80%+ of the population knows how to.

It’s all a matter of incentives.

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.

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.

Encrypted Client Hello and DNS over HTTPS.

This is why I’m really pissed off at how long ECH has taken.

And it’s all because of corporate interests at IETF.

Creating the "Great Firewall of the UK" without actually calling it that: Priceless.

Step 7: Camera AI that can catch the people scribbling “Sci-Hub is 190.115.31.218” on a bathroom wall.

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.

CF will cooperate with UK authorities because they're not in 4chan's business.

AFAIK Cloudflare gives 4chan a dedicated ip to simplify blocking.

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