> The infinite character of that power was most famously summed up by English lawyer Sir Ivor Jennings, who once said that “if Parliament enacts that smoking in the streets of Paris is an offence, then it is an offence”. This line is taught to every first-year English law student.
Initially this seems like disrespect for another country's sovereignty. But really the crucial thing is:
> We explained to the UK that the Online Safety Act had a snowball’s chance in hell of being enforced in the United States
Ofcom has to go through the motions of telling 4chan they can't smoke in Paris because of the (very on-brand) nanny law.
Ofcom in their reply make their point clear: "The [Online Safety] Act explicitly grants Ofcom the legal authority to regulate online safety for individuals in the United Kingdom [...]"
They are stating that companies operating in the UK and providing services to UK individuals, are required to conform with UK regulations in relation to those services, under UK law.
As an American business, you can choose to ignore that, but that has consequences if any of your board of directors ever sets foot in the UK.
The US does this, and US lawyers understand this. If I open an online poker and sports bookmaking site in the UK (where such sites are completely legal), and take business from all over the United States thereby breaking federal law, I can expect to be met at the plane door the next time I take a shopping trip to NYC. Arguing that my servers and my business are located in the UK is not going to impress the federal judge I'd appear in front of in the morning. Stating the US laws against my activities have a snowball's chance in hell of being enforced in the UK is surely going to risk me being charged with contempt.
The Online Safety Act is ridiculous on many levels, but in the same way that Google does certain things in relation to Tiananmen Square searches in China, and every tech company engages in regulatory alignment for the entire Middle East, the UK has asked that US companies do certain things in the jurisdiction of the UK. I'd argue, less harmful and egregious things in some respects.
Should the UK do this? No, probably not. I think it will just make VPN software vendors richer, and UK citizens - particularly children - barely any safer.
Are Ofcom claiming jurisdiction in the US? No, they're claiming jurisdiction in the UK. Which, I hasten to add they are legally required to do by the Online Safety Act, by the government they are an agency of. If they didn't, the government would literally be breaking its own law.
TIL that 4chan's lawyer is about as grown up, mature and able to engage in critical thinking about the law as the people who post on his client's site.
“None of these actions constitutes valid service under the US-UK Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, United States law or any other proper international legal process.”
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71209929/1/4chan-commun...
This is nerd sniping of a different sort. I’m guessing they are aiming to drum up American sentiment for their actions, and because its 4chan.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyjq40vjl7o
>Lawyers representing controversial online forums 4chan and Kiwi Farms have filed a legal case against the UK Online Safety Act enforcer, Ofcom.
Drumming up public support is a no-go. Rather, I think the intent is to make the stance that if the UK wants to prevent citizens from accessing sites if they are underage, then the UK can do just that, rather than expect random companies around the world to comply.
At a certain point in internet censorship, you exit the arena of sensible, free countries, where everybody can agree to get along and enforce each other's blocks, and enter the realm of a censorious authoritarian country that must constantly patch holes in their filters to protect their citizens from badthink. The UK has entered the second realm, but hasn't realized it yet. They see someone refusing to enforce their block for them as the ultimate scorn. In fact, it is what the vast majority of websites already do to china, iran, or any other similar country. Following regulations implies a willingness to play ball. When you no longer want to play along, you ignore the regulation instead.
Can someone expand on this a bit? I'm passingly familiar with the Chinese Google example (though I thought Google left the market rather than bend the knee?) but I know nearly nothing about the Middle East angle.
According to Google, the China government tried to infiltrate Google's internal computer system. In response, Google stopped the censorship over night, and withdraw from China market shortly afterward.
I still remember night, when _all_ Chinese search engine stopped censoring because Google stopped their filtering service.
The China tech company have evolved much since those days, and they are now much better at censoring compare to what Google had in the early days of the internet.
There was a special case for Middle Eastern countries that removed this language.
Not even close. They bent the knee first; they left afterwards.
Still the gold standard for how US companies should have responded to Chinese censorship demands.
> On 26 January 2006, Google launched its China-based google.cn search page, with results subject to censorship by the Chinese government.
> In January 2010, Google announced that, in response to a Chinese-originated hacking attack on them and other US tech companies, they were no longer willing to censor searches in China and would pull out of the country completely if necessary.
They never had a problem censoring their results. They claimed to pull out "in retaliation" for being hacked; realistically, they noticed that China didn't want them to succeed, and gave up on trying.
First, in 2006, there was still a general belief I think that Western companies could profitably exist in China and be, if not a "force for good", than at least a force for slightly more openness. Google's options were either to not be in China at all, or to be in China and abide by their laws. So when they censored search results in the 2006-2010 time period, at least they told you they were doing it and that it was at the demands of Chinese authorities. I think it's a fair debate to have on either side whether this was a good thing, but I think it's a gross oversimplification to present that this was a simple black-and-white decision and that Google "never had a problem censoring their results."
> Google's options were either to not be in China at all, or to be in China and abide by their laws.
OK. So, they chose "be in China and abide by their laws", and you think it makes sense to characterize that as "they left the market rather than bend the knee"? Those are exactly opposite descriptions. They bent the knee rather than leave the market. That's what happened.
If I were to fly to the USA, purchase something that was illegal in my home country (and explicitly state I was going to take it back home), then took it back home - would the vendor be prosecuted?
Bartenders from other countries don't get locked up the moment they enter the US because they served alcohol to someone (a US citizen?) between 18 and 21. The US does not have jurisdiction over alcohol sales in other countries.
In this scenario, what's more likely to be illegal is bringing the item into the country.
It's difficult to make physical analogies to these types of internet laws. What makes them 'tricky' is how they are not physical.
If the consumer goes to a place it is legal, and consumes it there without bringing any back, most people would say ‘meh’. Depending on the product. Hard drugs and sex work, being two common exceptions that some countries get more worked up about even traveling to ‘enjoy’ it.
But ship it back (especially hard drugs or sex workers!), and almost all people get more concerned.
The issue here is exactly why customs typically is a mandatory ‘gate’ for packages AND passengers entering a country.
Similar, one could say, to a giant country level firewall?
And why it is so lucrative for smugglers, which are defacto performing a type of arbitrage eh?
And no before you ask crypto won't solve this because Uncle Sam demands USD stablecoins to have sanctions mechanisms built in and clearing entities that don't implement KYC etc. will find themselves subjected to prosecution in other ways.
They are not operating in the UK. ISPs in the UK have chosen to make content from the USA available in the uk (or more accurately, do nothing to prevent it being available)
Thus Ofcom goes through the motions of telling 4Chan "hey I think you're not compliant" and if 4Chan says "lol, I'm not serving UK people" _then_ the UK authority will tell the ISPs to block it (and the will be on the hook if they don't).
Countries do things like this when they're run by fools and they can do this because the fools have weapons and prisons. What good has it done the US? Can US patrons of offshore internet Bitcoin casinos no longer find them available? Not a chance.
But then on top of being completely ineffective, it causes exactly what you're saying -- other fools in other countries want to treat the foolishness as precedent for doing it themselves.
Which is why the people in the various countries should put a stop to all of it, before it spreads and they find themselves in a foreign prison because their flight had a layover in a country with a law they didn't know about. And countries themselves should retaliate like hell whenever anyone tries to do it to one of their citizens.
On the other hand, I'm not particularly concerned about some tyrannical regime on the other side of the world that doesn't like the kind of content I have on my site. I'll postpone the research until I actually need to fly over their airspace or something.
Where does the UK currently stand in the spectrum between "country that everyone wants to visit sometime" and "country that nobody gives a fuck about"? It used to be firmly on the former side, but it seems to be drifting away to the latter side every year.
That doesn't do them any good because the set of people who never intend to set foot in the US is still vastly larger than the number of people required to set up an offshore internet casino.
> On the other hand, I'm not particularly concerned about some tyrannical regime on the other side of the world that doesn't like the kind of content I have on my site. I'll postpone the research until I actually need to fly over their airspace or something.
Most people can't even name every country, much less tell you what their laws are. And then you'll be breaking them without even knowing, and if that's regarded as a legitimate reason to incarcerate someone then what are you supposed to do? Suppose you have to choose between a layover in Egypt or in Hungary, do you even know which one's laws you might have broken at any point in your life?
> Where does the UK currently stand in the spectrum between "country that everyone wants to visit sometime" and "country that nobody gives a fuck about"? It used to be firmly on the former side, but it seems to be drifting away to the latter side every year.
The problem is if you get on a flight to Paris you have no control over whether it might get diverted to London.
Don't let slippery slope arguments take you into the dystopian future quicker than the world itself seems to be willing to.
There are two major problems with this.
The first is that you don't actually know which countries you have to avoid. There isn't going to be an app that can walk you through every law in every country.
And the second is that you're not the one flying the plane. You thought you were going to Charles de Gaulle but the weather in Paris is worse than expected or some drunk driver crashed the gate and drove out onto the runway and they're diverting all the planes, so after you're already in the air you find out you're actually going to Heathrow.
> Don't let slippery slope arguments take you into the dystopian future quicker than the world itself seems to be willing to
They already do stuff like this. The fact that they do it is now being used as a justification for doing it more and elsewhere. You can watch people telling you that slippery slope is a fallacy as they're greasing the hill.
Such a system would presumably account for possible diversions and plot your flight accordingly.
And yes, that is a thing that some of us do actually need. For example, while I have lived in the West for the past 18 years, I'm still a Russian citizen, and if I ever set foot there again they will likely have some questions for me regarding all the money for the war effort in Ukraine (see Ksenia Karelina for an example). Thus I would very much appreciate the ability to book a flight that is guaranteed to not be diverted to Russia or to any country that is likely to extradite to Russia, and I would pay money for such a service.
I mean, that's fine if you want to avoid Russia while flying from California to Quebec, but you don't really need an app for that one. Whereas if you're within the plane's fuel supply of where you don't want to be, how are you supposed to know ahead of time what kind of nonsense is going to happen while you're in the air?
The plane could have a navigation failure over the ocean and end up arbitrarily far off course. Some first class VIP could have a medical problem which is going to force the plane to divert anyway and then the nearest city with the right kind of hospital is in the place you don't want to be. And what if you end up St. Petersberg not because you had a layover in Finland but because Helsinki was your intended destination?
Who?
I can't think of a single case other than Ryanair 4978, a plane that was carrying a Belarusian opposition activist over Belarusian airspace. Not saying this was justified in any way, but even Belarus didn't dare to touch any foreign passengers.
If you're aware of any actual case of a first-world airliner from country A being forced to land in country B to have a citizen of country C arrested, please provide links.
This excludes the (arguably contentious) incidents like:
- 1954 in Israel where forced a Syrian passenger plane to land in order to gain hostages which it then hoped to exchange for captured Israeli soldiers. - 2012 in Turkey grounded a Syrian plane in 2012 in order to detain and transfer a suspect to the US. - 2016 in Ukraine grounded a plane with military jets to have a citizen of country C arrested
Leaving the following three exemplars:
Egyptair Flight 2843 - EgyptAir forced to land at a NATO base in Italy in the 80s by US fighter jets due to PLO members onboard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achille_Lauro_hijacking#Interc...
Aeromexico Flight 006 - The US diverted a France-Mexico flight to Canada in order to detain and transfer a suspect to the US https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aeromexico-flight-diverted-pass...
Bolivian president's jet - Bolivian president's jet rerouted amid suspicions Edward Snowden on board with France and Portugal accused of refusing entry to their airspace, with plane forced to Land in Vienna due to pressure of US State Department https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/03/edward-snowden...
What matters is if any of their assets are ever denominated in USD, or ever use the international banking system that is also controlled by the US. No other country has that kind of long arm jurisdiction.
The UK on the other hand...
the usa does at lot of leg work to set up legal frameworks, suck as forcing transpacific "partnership", which enforce usa IP law overseas etc.
they can enforce some things, like gambling and financial rules, and now intellectual property overseas because there are specific accords for those. every thing else, even hacking and spying, they must wait for the "criminal" to land on it's jurisdiction.
why is this changing anything on all of that?
also, your example of google/china would let this play out opposite of what you suggest: uk gov would please US law to keep doing business there. i fail to see the relevance on that also.
What does Google do with Tiananmen square searches in China? I can't access google here at all.
> The Tiananmen Square protests, known within China as the June Fourth Incident, were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, lasting from 15 April to 4 June 1989. After weeks of unsuccessful attempts between the demonstrators and the Chinese government to find a peaceful resolution, the Chinese government deployed troops to occupy the square on the night of 3 June in what is referred to as the Tiananmen Square massacre. The events are sometimes called the '89 Democracy Movement, the Tiananmen Square Incident, or the Tiananmen uprising.
> Between 200 and 10,000 civilians were killed. The Red Cross states that around 2,600 died and the official Chinese government figure is 241 dead with 7,000 wounded. Amnesty International's estimates puts the number of deaths at several hundred to close to 1,000. As many as 10,000 people were estimated to have been arrested during the protests.
Google was complying with, what I assume is the law in, China and censoring searches for things China doesn't want talked about. Google has since left China, apparently bowing down wasn't enough.
>We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-chin...
Disclosure: I work at Google.
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on search.
This is obviously pretty old, but as people have noted even this level of censorship didn't save Google in China.
>We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-chin...
did you mean to say "companies operating in the UK and(including) companies providing services to the UK"? because the way you wrote it, it would not apply to 4chan
and what is not being mentioned by most commenters is, if the law is unenforceable on a US corp, what is the chance that an individual associated with 4chan Inc could find themselves individually arrested were they to set foot in a Commonwealth country or somesuch
The board of directors for a private company is generally secret in the US. Only the "manager" aka president/CEO/whoever at the top is generally named publicly, as well as legal agent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
Same can be said for extra-territorial arrests and extraordinary rendition when suitably large Corporate entities like the MPAA are involved. Non-violent Internet copyright infringement charge brought by the United States, even when its not a crime in the country of origin, is enough to bring the hammer down
MI6 would have to commit a few physical in person crimes to get any details out of any reasonably well run operation.
…also suffers from delusions of grandeur, apparently: “Britain will be spinning hard to minimise the noise in the media.”
> as if we haven’t yet shucked-off the American Revolution, let alone colonialism.
I can’t even.
Not that countries don't prosicute laws for crimes outsiden of their border, but the bar for what they will is higher.
Just out of genuine curiosity, what media are you consuming to have this view of the country?
Again, genuinely interested in what media you’re consuming to have this view of the UK.
Right, it's nothing of the sort. It's a proactive quip to highlight the absolute sovereignty of Parliament. Jennings is emphasising that Parliament has the ultimate legal authority to make any law, no matter how absurd, impractical, or unenforceable.
The thing is, Ofcom can still issue fines, and enforce these fines against anyone in the UKs legal scope advertising on 4chan.
And so they should, within the borders of the UK.
It's illegal to own unlicensed firearms in the UK. In the US, it is legal. UK authorities can prevent ownership of firearms in the UK via penalties, prevent firms from selling firearms in the UK, and set up import controls to prevent people from importing guns bought abroad. They cannot prevent foreign companies from selling firearms abroad.
Ofcom can institute penalties for UK consumers who access illegal content, prevent firms from providing such content on UK soil, and put up firewalls to prevent people from digitally importing such content into the UK. They cannot prevent foreign companies from providing such content.
Ofcom is being lazy and is trying to offload the responsibility to foreign firms.
Safety and liberty are often at odds. Let the UK decide the balance for their citizens and let their citizens bear the benefits and costs of implementing the measures.
Said companies often find it less burdensome to comply than the option of being outright blocked from the market. Brazil did that a couple times with a couple different companies. If a company wants to provide services to a given jurisdiction, it needs to comply with local regulations.
4chan offers services at it's web servers which are in the US. People from the UK come over, access the servers in the US, and then import the content they see into the UK. 4chan is offering services locally in the US. People come from all over the place to access those services in the US.
4chan isn’t in the UK. 4chan doesn’t have UK employees or offices. 4chan doesn’t book income on the UK. 4chan didn’t have any thing to do with the UK at all.
If this isn’t convincing, consider this: legally what is the difference from Afghanistan requesting anything not legally in compliance with Taliban’s laws be restricted? Would you support that? Legally that is what is going on here.
Afghanistan can block anything they want within their borders and hold anyone in contempt if they refuse to comply. Whether I support that or not is immaterial - I would have to comply in order to continue making other content or services available to Afghanistan residents. Being entirely blocked would be worse.
We see these exact same mechanisms in the US and that’s precisely why we should not manufacture rationalizations for this kind of policy - the societal decline as a result of this cynical trend is clear.
What the UK does within their own borders is their business. They don't have any right to force foreign entities to censor themselves or tl block UK citizens, as if that's even a technically feasible request.
The UK's free speech situation is bad, yes, but that's not the problem we're talking about here. The matter at hand is the UK trying to censor free speech by foreign citizens outside the UK and is using illegal threats to do so.
If the citizens of the UK wish to express discontent, they are free to vote for a different parliament so they enact different laws. We who live outside the UK have no say on their laws.
A judge will not find this comment amusing, or a justification for breaking the law. You can, of course, engage in civil disobedience, but keep in mind it doesn't shield you from consequences.
You were trying to make a distinction between "government" and "executive" -- that's not how it works here, matey. His Majesty's Government is the party in power (or whichever grouping of MPs can hold the confidence of parliament), it is not all the other MPs - they are the opposition.
We don't have an "Executive". We have His Majesty's Government, they head all the departments, they command the civil service, they control the legislative timetable. The rest of the MPs and Lords are just plebs who get to vote on things. The opposition don't get to propose legislation, except when the Government feels generous and lets them (opposition days).
FPTP creates individual constituencies of roughly 70,000 voters, and the candidate who gets the most votes in one constituency wins a seat. The other candidates in that constituency get nothing, and all votes for them are completely wasted (unlike in other voting schemes). Candidates are usually a member of a political party. The party with the most seats gets first opportunity to form a government.
The 2024 general election was won by Labour with 9,708,716 votes (33.70%) out of 28,924,725 cast. Turnout was 60%, there could've been 48,208,507 possible votes.
The 2019 general election was won by the Conservatives with 13,966,454 votes (43.63%). 2017 was 42.3%. 2015 was 36.8%. 2010 was 59.1%. 2005 was 35.2%. 2001 was 40.7%. You can see the last result was the lowest vote share in decades.
And yet, 33.7% of the vote nets you 100% of the power. Thanks, FPTP!
In alternative systems, you vote and then coalitions jostle to form a majority afterwards.
My point is that all votes were counted. Some people disagree with the winning choice, but it’s still their legitimate government chosen in a free and democratic election.
In FPTP, if your vote doesn't elect the winner in your constituency, it was wasted. Even if you voted for the eventual government party in a seat that the party didn't win. Your vote did not count. In other electoral systems, it does count.
FPTP means that one vote in one area (e.g. a "safe seat") is not equal to one vote somewhere else. Knowing the geographical distribution of preferences makes gerrymandering possible, and elections have been won not by fair voting, but by unfair redistricting.
FPTP massively punishes any "similar" parties with a vote-split, meaning parties have to become mega-alliances and ultimately they are ground down to just 2 parties. That's the only stable configuration. Any third party has to be mercilessly destroyed, otherwise it will start taking votes from the party it is most similar, leaving their opponent an easy victory.
That's what happened in the 2024 election: Reform UK no longer had the electoral pact they had with the Conservatives in 2019 (where Reform UK voluntarily withdrew from any seats the Conservatives were likely to win), and as a result, the vote-split between Reform UK and Conservatives let Labour romp home to victory.
* Labour got 63% of the seats with 33% of the vote.
* Conservatives got 18% of the seats with 23% of the vote
* Reform UK got 0.8% of the seats with 14% of the vote
* Lib Dems got 11% of the seats with 12% of the vote
That is manifestly unjust. Reform got 5 seats for 4,117,610 votes while Lib Dems got 72 seats for 3,519,143 votes. If that's democratic then I'm a banana.
Consider this a glomar response.
In this example 4chan is 'importing' it's content to the UK. I agree though, Ofcom should just go straight to banning these websites that won't comply, rather than this silly and pointless song and dance. Ultimately that's the only real enforcement tool they have. For certain websites that will be enough (Facebook, etc.) for them to follow whatever law for the regions they want to be accessible in.
No, UK ISPs are importing 4chan into the UK. At no point is 4chan involved in the importing of it's content. It could even be argued it's not involved in exporting it either.
It is providing content to IPs located in the UK, therefore, it's knowingly exporting content. If the user bypasses controls using VPNs or proxies, it's a different thing, but I would expect 4chan to make a reasonable effort on their side in order to prevent a sitewide block.
When a resource exists on the internet, it is available to everyone. That's how the internet works. There is no mechanism by which to exclude any given country. You can try to geolocate the IP for every individual visitor, but that's a ridiculous burden for website operators and it also doesn't even work.
Ofcom is trying to censor the entire global internet. If they want to censor the UK internet, they have much, much better tools.
They're trying to enforce extrajudicial law by way of threats and bullying instead of actually taking proactive steps to "protect" UK citizens from dangerous memes.
Ofcom has the right to censor the internet within the UK. They do not have the right to an opinion about what private entities do in other countries.
No, but it's a relatively trivial setting to block IP ranges, especially for a service the size of 4chan.
> You can try to geolocate the IP for every individual visitor, but that's a ridiculous burden for website operators and it also doesn't even work.
It's not a ridiculous burden (the ranges are easy to obtain - I did it before) and it's not expected to be 100% effective against a dedicated user because proxies exist.
It is a massive global undertaking involving untold collective man hours developing, implementing, and updating. They may as well be adding an invisible 1/2 pent tax on every man woman and child like some sort of hidden global sovereign.
This is a war they lost long ago and they keep trying to take power to which they are not entitled. The correct answer is like the Boston tea party dumping their imperial assumptions into the ocean.
If they want to block content they should take the responsibility to do so themselves. Even just blocking advertisers who fund problem sites would probably take care of whatever problem they are trying to solve.
Now, for a relatively high-profile website such as 4chan, who deliberately dodges responsibility for the content it knowingly hosts, I'd say it is not a huge effort. They have the staff for that kind of thing. If they decide they aren't complying, then the UK government might order UK-based ISPs to block access and they will comply - as they did many times before. The people in charge of the company might face charges if they ever set foot in the UK, but that's a risk they need to balance.
And, in the light of legislation that sanctions whoever does business with sanctioned companies, sanctioning advertisers can go a long way to force compliance.
Those people are already angry at so many things it would be hard to measure the change.
Same thing if I make a web request for content on a server overseas.
As was mentioned in another thread, it is simpler to go after the companies abroad than to build out measures that would prevent such import. Those measures would probably take the form of some sort of firewalls. They would be noticeable to the British people, and the British people, being sensitive about their civil liberties, would not like that. It's easier for Ofcam to go after a couple bigger companies, impose no cost on the British public, and tramp national sovereignty into the ground a bit along the way.
I don't see anything wrong here: Sure, Ofcom can have the legal authority to regulate online safety worldwide. It's just that this... legal authority... isn't quite enforceable outside the UK jurisdiction. How unfortunate!
And gambling, too. Remember in 2013 when all those celebrities got busted for gambling in Macao?
> After getting caught gambling illegally, Shinhwa’s Andy, Boom and Yang Se Hyung received their punishments.
> On November 28, the Seoul Central District Court sentenced Andy, Boom, and Yang Se Hyung to monetary penalties. Andy and Boom must pay 5,000,000 won, while Yang Se Hyung will pay 3,000,000 won.
> The fines were dependent on how much money each person bet. Andy spent 44,000,000 won, Boom 33,000,000 won, and Yang Se Hyung 26,000,000 won.
> The three are all currently pulled out of all schedules and self-reflecting on their actions.
> Meanwhile, Lee Su Geun, Tak Jae Hoon, and Tony An are waiting for their first trial to take place on December 6. They bet more than several hundred million won.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140215040022/http://mwave.inte...
America will prosecute Americans for doing certain things that are illegal inside America outside its borders. As another example, if you take a boat to international waters and kill someone on it, you're going to get arrested and prosecuted when you get home.
America will not arrest or prosecute someone from the UK visiting Thailand as a sex tourist.
In this case, the operator of 4Chan is free to blow off the UK's law. They may wish to account for that in future travel plans, though.
But given the behavior of the UK government lately, doing something suicidally stupid seems on brand for them.
Every time the media reported something like this, turned out they were leaving out something important. Like the professor who was smuggling biological samples into the US. Turns out that's illegal, that's why she went home. If you aren't doing something like that, you will be fine.
However, if I'm going to break one of their laws that they feel very strongly about, I'm probably not going to travel to the UK. That's just begging for something bad to happen. Why risk it?
So in this case, if you know the US is looking for you, why, oh why, would you travel to the US?
Sure it will. Citizenship is irrelevant. If you travel abroad to have sex with underage people and then come to the US, you can be prosecuted regardless of your nationality.
But in any case, this is different, as the US has only declared these activities as illegal in the US. They haven't enacted laws saying you cannot gamble outside the US.
When it comes to antiterrorism stuff, it's a totally different story. If I go to the Middle East and provide money to an organization on the US terrorist list, then yes - I can definitely be prosecuted for it if I enter US jurisdiction. And it goes even further - I don't need to enter their jurisdiction. The US can just have me extradited if there is a treaty.
Moreover, the US government can have you seized and brought to the US without a treaty (or even in violation of a treaty), which may become a diplomatic and/or international legal issue between the US and the state where you were seized, and may subject the agents doung the seizing to personal legal difficulty in that state, but has no bearing on the validity of the criminal process brought against you once they haul you back to the US. See, e.g., U.S. v. Alvarez-Machain, 504 U.S. 655 (1992).
Notably, if you survive, they’ll send you back home without bothering with a trial?
Sovereignty is a big thing in international politics. Countries as a whole are loath to meddle in other countries domestic affairs, even in extreme cases like genocide/ethnic cleansing. Violating weird online protection laws are not the sort of thing a country is going to risk an international incident over.
Sure you can find some examples of countries that violate those norms, but they are the exception not the rule.
They can say whatever they want, but the UK can't conduct an extra-territorial police action in france. They can bar subject from traveling to france instead. The onus is on the UK.
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71209929/1/4chan-commun...
4chan does not reach out to UK users in any way, only responds to their incoming requests.
It really is analogous to UK users going to a foreign country, buying something that their home country has an issue with, having a third party ship it to their home country, and then their home country getting mad at the store.
They don't bring their services to the UK, ISPs and other network operators do - the UK can go after those and force them to implement the Great Firewall of Britain but that would be less popular so they don't yet.
> The US does the same thing: Kim Dotcom comes to mind.
Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi. The UK can try to go after US citizens abroad if they want to but they will quickly find out why that's a bad idea.
NZ agreed to cooperate with the US request. That made all the difference. If the US agrees to allow UK to proceed, then that's trouble for 4chan.
How exactly do they do that? Do they have peering agreements with UK-based ISPs?
I'll concede that it's not terribly far fetched. If the french entity produced a good that is illegal in the UK put it in the post to be delivered to the UK, then we have something like an analog to producing HTML in one place and displaying elsewhere.
However, the thing about sovereignty is that you don't have it if you can't enforce it.
> UK bans selling cocaine in the UK and tries going after a Colombian cocaine dealer in Columbia.
(I'll less-neutrally note that this is also absurd, and probably criminal.)
Shooting first and asking questions later is how we got into this mess of deporting us citizens.
This has become far too normalized due to decades of bad behavior by the US, and it’s going to come back to bite us as US power declines. Just wait until 30 years from now when you can’t safely visit anywhere in the far East because you made a subversive comment about China. Although I’m sure the same people will hypocritically wail and gnash their teeth about the laws made by those people, when of course our extraterritorial laws are just fine.
If this kind of BS becomes too common then running a small internet business will become impossible. Even if you don’t do business in a country, you will have to consider whether or not they might consider you in violation of some obscure law and then consider whether or not that country has the leverage to impact your business or even your own personal safety. It’s utterly ridiculous. This would spell the end of the global internet, except for megacorps. It’s already a tough business environment as it is.
The status quo is that some countries have these laws, but they are generally ignored unless you’re a citizen, you manage to do something geopolitically significant, or you get involved in transnational crime rings. This seems acceptable to me. If countries don’t like the free internet, then ban it so we can all see what you’re really up to.
This has been happening long before the US started doing it.
If anything, it's normalized in the US because of the bad behavior prior to the US doing it. China's a great example. What does brutally crushing dissent internally and abroad without even a facade of a single care about human rights get you? Well, in their case, damn near superpower status. Been that way since at the very least Nixon's administration.
The net effect was people started to wonder why we bother with the inefficiencies of "rights" and "privacy". The concern for human rights shown since the end of WWII in the West (particularly the US) is an exception, not norm, in history.
Who are these people you're talking about, tankies, faschists?
The Chinese have the government that they deserve. They screw each other over, and what goes around comes around. It's a cautionary tale, not an example to follow.
And they'd be right to do so as a country has sovereignty over what is allowed or not in their country, not matter the country of origin of the seller.
Ok then, thank you, I'll file that demand as appropriate.
Now if the UK sends warships to the country, ok. Good luck with sending warships to invade the US.
Many entities assert extraterritorial jurisdiction [0] for a broad range of activities. The critical question is if the offense would be categorized under an existing extradition treaty's list [1].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterritorial_jurisdiction
It also continues like this:
> This does not mean that the Act extends to all use of in-scope services globally. […] “The duties extend only to the design, operation and use of the service in the UK and, for duties expressed to apply in relation to ‘users’, as it affects the UK users of the service”
Wouldn't this mean that the Act only applies to services explicitly design/targeting UK users/visitors? So if you're building a general service for no particular residents/citizens, the Act doesn't apply to you? Or am I misunderstanding something?
4 days ago:
> "Services who choose to restrict access rather than protect UK users remain on our watchlist "
My read on "remain on our watchlist" was them monitoring for if that block lapses, etc.
I do expect UK's internet insanity to reckon with VPNs sooner rather than later, though.
If the UK government bans VPNs, now they have more people in jail for speech violations than Russia and a more restricted Internet than China. The jokes write themselves at that point. It also becomes a virtue to dunk on the UK government worldwide. All to keep people from reading a site that the majority of people have no interest in. Its sad really...
Clearly not considering that there's nothing in 4chan that would make it explicitly targeted towards the UK. Unless Ofcom is saying something and doing the opposite.
Presumably if the latter, one may express their support of the flag of their choice; or indicate their heritage; or any number of other reasons.
If the former, and considering the existence of a .uk TLD, they probably are considered to be “targeting” that market.
Kiwifarms stopped serving UK IPs, not because of fear of enforcement but rather because they don't anyone British jailed. The UK landing page straight up says 'use Tor'.
That's exactly what anyone wanting to save face would say though.
> they don't anyone British jailed. The UK landing page straight up says 'use Tor'.
There's a contradiction here: if you want to protect British citizens from being jailed for accessing a website then you should tell them not to use your website, not “use an alternative way to connect", because that will still get people to jail if they get caught by other means (I don't think you can, in fact be jailed for accessing a website in the UK in the first place).
It explicitly says that 7% of their users are coming from UK. If UK blocks them, they will loose noticeable part of advertising revenue. If there was no money at stake, they could just ignore Ofcom and sleep well. But they appear to be very agitated about the fact that they may loose their second biggest market.
Honestly, I don’t understand anyone on 4chan side here: they are de facto in UK jurisdiction because they earn money from that user base, so either they comply or they leave. All of this freedom-of-speech and US lawsuit hype is just a distraction circus.
This is important because if it was advertisers, it would be much easier for UK to have actual power over them, since the UK business actually would be under UK jurisdiction.
It doesn’t matter. They loose the audience - they loose advertising revenue. The only difference is that UK cannot seize the money to collect the fine (the fine now is the price of the return ticket), but the fine wasn’t big anyway and complete loss of the market has bigger economic consequences. UK doesn’t have power over US corporation, but they have power over their distribution channel and they have full sovereign right to exercise that power.
The difference is significant.
Lots of laws are stupid. If you think they're stupid, you're allowed to try to fight them.
it's worse than china's firewall
That appears to be the widely held understanding in this particular case.
I'm not so sure. This isn't a strictly black letter law matter. It probably should be, and I'd prefer that it was, but I see political angles to this.
Right now, it is improbable that Trump's DOJ has any interest in doing Ofcom's bidding in the US for UK "online safety" violations, real or imagined. But a world where the US DOJ might does exist. We're the political vectors aligned differently; say, for example, Ofcom was pursuing 4chan for "supporting" ISIS in the UK, I think few people would be surprised learn that Trump's DOJ was eager to "investigate," and perhaps synthesize some indictable offenses, and perhaps even extradite.
Have we not seen, and are we not seeing now, ample examples of similar abuses of power?
So I see much of the rhetoric, and also this lawyer's flippancy, as naïve. Given the optimal set of office holders and sufficient moral panic over some matter, Ofcom et al. could very well have real leverage in the US.
PS Don't yell at me about this, I'm just explaining the situation.
Dramatic things happen with regularity. Wars, viruses, economic calamities... there is no predicting any of it. For all you or I know 4 years from now the (D)s will own everything. Maybe then Ofcom gets a hearing. Maybe Ofcom doesn't exist any longer. This misses the point.
The point is that the hubris exhibited here, in this forum, and also by this lawyer, behaving as though there is some perpetual immunity in effect, is naïve. It is entirely plausible that some foreign regulator with intentions that happen to align well with the prerogatives of prevailing office holders right now or at any point in the future could have have powerful leverage in the US.
Where I think they are going wrong is that they are trying to levy fines rather than just blocking the business.
Oh, and the whole age verification thing is bonkers. I'm a parent of 2 teenagers, I don't think its asking too much for a parent to be responsible for what children see and do on the internet.
The obvious next step is to ban VPNs too or to block connections to their servers.
The big one is to start whitelisting good protocols only. That means everything must be https and you have to at least pass the hostname in plaintext. Random traffic on UDP ports is now illegal as it is assumed to be VPN traffic.
Another one is to pass a law telling ISPs to flag customers with traffic patterns only to a single IP address, set of IP addresses, or a single ASN. This means that you can’t just tunnel everything to your VPS in Amsterdam.
You might also pass a law that still allows, say, ssh and random UDP traffic, but with the provision that bandwidth on any non HTTPS ports is capped at 200kbps. You only use ssh for running a shell after all — why would you need more than that! /s
ASNs are a fun feature of the internet in that there are a lot of them but they are finite and scale on the order of organised human activity, mostly businesses. That means it is eminently tractable to categorize them all and regulate traffic from residential ISPs to commercial services ISPs only, and throttle traffic from home users to hosting providers. This already happens — try connecting to Reddit from anything other than a residential IP address.
A far more expedient course lies in legislative control: the imposition of a licensing requirement for VPN usage, coupled with punitive measures – fines and imprisonment – for defiance thereof. A few well-chosen prosecutions, conducted publicly with a fanfare and pomp and without leniency, would suffice to instil both fear and obedience amongst the populace.
As ever, the familiar refrain of «think of the children» would provide an acceptable veneer of moral justification to soothe the public conscience.
You do realize that things other than VPNs use UDP right?
The whole post is so nonsensical I would have assumed it's all sarcasm, but the single tag in the middle has me confused.
What's stopping VPN providers from being forced to censor the internet?
In a way they are like addicts: you love them and want the best for them but you absolutely have to be on your guard for egregious breaches of trust cropping up without warning. Children / teenagers / young adults can be driven by curiosity, peers, and lack of judgment into all kinds of dreadful behavior, and it can come from the least likely ones just as much as the obviously naughty ones.
The best we can do is to warn them in advance, accept that mistakes will be made anyway, and support them in learning from their mistakes. Keep at it for even a short while and you too can experience the shock of how your most charming, academically brilliant, upstanding star pupil is found throwing up a bottle of vodka she just drank!
I don't have them chained up, but I'm also not concerned they are become radicalized, or damaging themselves watching snuff films and goatse.
The parents I’ve seen who give up and make no efforts because they think it’s impossible to perfect control everything don’t have great outcomes. This applies to everything from internet to drinking alcohol and more.
All it takes is the kid wanting to go behind your back, the rest becomes easy for them. The only chance you have is establishing a good relationship with your kid and instilling good values. You can't actually control them online unless you lock down their life like a supermax prison.
By the time they're teenagers, it's pretty easy for them to access anything on the internet regardless of the controls implemented.
4chan is a cesspool, and society is worse off letting it fester, but you arn't solving this problem by "personal responsibility" of parents.
Buy Wines Online currently does not ship alcohol to AL, MI, MS, UT, HI, AK
Says it requires an "adult signature" but anyone who's signed for fedex/ups knows they don't check your ID. I can say, when I was in high school, they did not check...
It's physically addictive with harsh withdrawal symptoms that makes it difficult to quit; and it has significant healthcare costs for the wider community when smokers eventually get sick and die prematurely.
Nobody is going to get addicted and die prematurely from reading 4chan. Cleaning what you consider a cesspool is not the job of the government. These laws are about kids stumbling into the cesspool before they are ready.
Parents can choose to just not give their kids phones till they are 12 or 13 (highschool). Before that, internet access is on locked down devices in the family room with somebody else around.
Personally I think once your kids are about 13-14 you have probably had your chance to pass on your morals, they need to be mentally prepared to encounter bad stuff on the internet and deal with it.
I mean, point 1 in favour of this theory is the fact that tobacco is legal, while most drugs aren't.
The government in general has been becoming increasingly authoritarian and centralized far before social media, see the abuses of the CIA and MK ULTRA, Operation Mockingbird, COINTELPRO, the War on Terror. You use the term neonazi, yet I hope you're honest enough to recognize the left also has dark authoritarian impulses. It was only a few years ago that we had ruinous lockdowns, widespread censorship, illegal mandates for experimental medical interventions, mostly peaceful riots, a 30% spike in homicides, anarcho-tyranny with the prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny, etc.
I agree thwres no chemical component but addictiond are broadee than just external chemical iintroduction.
Plus, there is plenty of dopamine (or other brain juice) to be had from more healthy activities.
These slowly degrade societies, like it or not. At least someone tries to do something to weed out the utter, batshit crazy adults, actually childminded idiots, who think the world is their playground.
Any way I see it this is a slow virus, a weapon of sorts. Just politicians usually have their heads lodged in their own back orifice, hence slow reacting.
So, thought crimes?
It's not like we are not warning you, you have netflix, amazon, google, whatever you want - somehow pirating an American movie is an offense in Europe - but abiding by the same logic is not acceptable - same goes for Assange and Snowden - why the did we abide with American shenanigans if that's just one sided ?
And are you getting ready for the turn-over ? Because all it takes is some mad politicians - alternatives - and I'm not sure the status quo is going to last while AI is booming - more than that - people are increasingly hostile to US and it seems it's going to continue this way if the toddler attitude is kept over.
4chan's whole gimmick is that you can say whatever you want, because you don't have to identify yourself when you say it. It's a way for Internet denizens scream their intrusive thoughts into the pseudovoid.
If expressing intrusive thoughts makes society worse, and should be controlled. That, arguably makes expressing thoughts a crime. You shouldn't be allowed to think or say thing.
I guess you could insist that thinking is different from expressing, and that thinking is fine as long as you repress the inate human trait and desire of expression... But I feel that's a stupid line in the sand to draw given my intent was to point out 4chan doesn't make society worse, tolerating ideas you don't like generally improves society. It's how you behave that matters.
In other words, If 4chan didn't exist, people would behave better.
If you weren't exposed to those thoughts and ideas, you would behave better.
If you didn't have a thought....
What’s happening online just drags things down. People chasing clicks, money, and attention by any means. When platforms like 4chan or influencers resort to gimmicks or self objectification to get views, it encourages people to act less like thoughtful humans and more like they’re reverting to base instincts - like animals. It normalizes shallow, attention-hungry behaviour and chips away at basic self-respect and awareness. One idiot can lead a hundred astray.
Why is it ok for a young woman to put a paper bag on her head in a live chat session, in order to gain more subscribers? Or swallow insults after insults? Is this ok? I don't think so.
You want to tolerate ideas like GGG movies and Dick Wadd gay videos where black guys sodomize whitebois acting as nazis and then piss in steel bowls and force them to drink it from said bowl? How do these "ideas" improve society hm? You need these things to be tolerated?
This whole idea that anyone can do anything and people will decide what's best for them is absolute hogwash.
I don't want any of these “services” thank you very much. Inflict them on your own people, not us.
American technology companies operate by finding technological solutions to evading the law, then counting on being too big to fail once regulators catch up. These companies do not provide innovative products, they abuse monopoly power to dominate industries. The Chinese are smart enough to make their own versions of all this stuff so that they aren't under the US yoke and I want the same here (sans the dictatorship of course). I want to replace every horrid US machine with something FOSS or publicly owned, and every regulatory step towards that is a win in my book.
Maybe instead of turning your nose up at other countries that dare to regulate your tech overlords, you should try to get your politicians to do the same thing.
You're showing yourself to believe that America can regulate conduct that never touches American soil.
If you enter America, there may also be consequences, but you don't need to enter America.
You picked a bad example - there are many US crimes that you could get away with if done elsewhere within the local laws, it generally isn't seen as worth bothering with when done elsewhere if the other country doesn't care.
That isn't much different. Say an adult American drinks alcohol in America; then they travel to a country where alcohol is illegal. Should they be prosecuted in that country for having drank in America?
There's a world of difference here. Ofcom is claiming to be able to shut down an American website for content generated in America, stored in America, and shown only to Americans. There are no UK citizens in this chain at all. This sets up Ofcom as having global censorship authority even over content seen elsewhere.
> Should they be prosecuted in that country for having drank in America?
In my opinion, no, but some countries are hardasses about this. If you want to do things that are illegal in certain places, you should not plan on traveling to those places. Usually, they will just refuse you entry but you kind of do put yourself at their mercy if you touch their soil. This is how the world works.
You are making the same argument that Trump is making with the tariffs. Personally, while I can see some good arguments for protectionism, I'd rather have the choice to decide whether or not I want to buy Chinese products, rather than the government making the choice for me.
So you two are on completely separate frames of thought. One party sees it as a matter of choice, the other sees it as removing choice because one party has a monopoly on avoiding the regulations.
The issue here is IMO more so that the taxi driver should be able to operate a taxi business without a license without having to go through Uber. Ultimately what is happening in a lot of places is the guys with medallions will basically use agents of the state to violently enforce their racket (which Uber breaks up, but then monopolizes), or alternatively in some places in Latin America the entrenched taxi drivers will simply shoot to kill their competitors that don't have cartel sanctioned 'medallions.'
Do some research on why these services are so attractive before you give your opinion on it being a good thing. What these companies are doing should be illegal under US law as well, but they have paid your president to make that issue go away.
Keep your american movies and social networks please. Btw why is TikTok banned in US?
There is 0 reason for us to let american suck away important infrastructure tools, benefits that goes with it, or even benefit from tax exemption trough the best company framework there can possibly exist.
I still haven't got an answer here - why is TikTok US owned ?
1) whatsapp (facebook)
2) telegram (incorporated in dubai)
3) messenger (also facebook lmao)
Capitalism works when there is a competition between companies. Corporations are everything but that.
China may be able to bully Apple into letting it snoop on its citizens’ icloud backups, but when the UK wants the same illiberal snooping powers, with 10% the population it’s 90% easier to walk away.
The EU is big and rich enough to force Big Tech into submission under threat of loosing the market.
Hell look at HN and literally anywhere. Everybody has their own "ideal" world.
I for instance don't want anybody talking shit about anime or video games ever.
When was the last time anyone visited an unmoderated usenet group?
They won't have personal biases, don't need to sleep (ending the infamous "mods are asleep, post xxx" waves), their prompts would be visible to everyone, and there could be ways for the users themselves to update the space's rules/prompts.
But either way, I want people like dang to be the ones moderating and managing a community - call it "personal bias" if you'd like, but they have a vision for the space, and as long as I as a user think that that vision is of a community I want to be in, then it's fine. If I no longer think it is... I leave.
First, everyone did what they wanted. As conflict became more common, power hierarchies started to emerge. we're now at a stage where every place needs to be governed, yet its members have no influence over who does it.
I have online communities will transition into something resembling democracy where moderators are elected from members by members.
---
While HN is fairly lenient, moderators in pretty much all online spaces are effectively dictators, they are not elected and they cannot be removed by ordinary users, no matter how many disagree.
And of course, such positions attract people who want power for its own sake and who have agendas they want to push.
This. How do 1-10 or 20 or even 100 people get the "right" to decide what millions of people talk about and see?
What's keeping them from burying/boosting opinions about shit they have strong personal feelings about?
Steve Huffman/Spez of Reddit literally edited users' comments, and they autoban anyone saying "Fuck Spez"
Society does not progress by people being nice and hugging eachother.
HN is NOT fairly lenient. HN has a very strict set of rules (applied with infinite discretion) and absolute bunches of tiny rules and quirks that are completely hidden and no real transparency of any kind.
HN has basically an official party line for heavens sake! This is a site for disseminating information about VC things and driving engagement about things that VCs want people to talk about and think, driving traffic to Paul Graham things, and advertising YC businesses and people and ideology.
And not politics unless it's positive towards the ideology of VCs
There aren't official punishment policies or official ways to appeal anything. There's no higher power to call out to. There's a semisecret clique of users.
HN, like most places that are actually good to participate in, is a strict, tyrannical dictatorship that usually uses it's powers to shape behavior towards "discussion", but what that means is entirely up to dang and now tomhow.
The internet requires such behavior because it's just too easy to participate in a non-genuine way and entirely escape any retaliation. You cannot shun a human in an internet setting like you can in real life. The social tools humans and other animals use to shape community behavior are impossible online.
This idea that if we just let people speak absolutely free on the internet things will work better is hilariously uninformed. Humans do not pick or latch on to narratives that are correct, they pick narratives that feel the best and in the modern world, that is almost never the "correct" one. Brains hate nuance, but reality is nuanced.
It's funny, the same exact people on here who insist they can't ride the bus or walk around cities because they freak out if a homeless person accosts them seem to be blind to the concept of how other people's free expression can have a chilling effect.
HN has incredibly strict moderation, and to be clear, that's a good thing. It keeps discussion in line and useful, for the most part.
> It's funny, the same exact people on here who insist they can't ride the bus or walk around cities because they freak out if a homeless person accosts them seem to be blind to the concept of how other people's free expression can have a chilling effect.
I've seen that the term "gatekeeping" is recently starting to be reclaimed as people realize this, to emphasize that while anyone is welcome to participate, the community is not required to bend its rules or standards to accommodate new people. i.e. anyone is welcome to use the bus, but openly shooting heroin while you're on it won't be tolerated.
Oh, the Party-Approved Correct Narrative.
Nazi/fascist narratives were sure as hell correct in 1930s-1940s Germany, mind you, and have been becoming correct again worldwide since 2020.
This[0] blog post puts it nicely - you _can_ move but you lose all your connections and sometimes even you data.
It just takes the first 3-4 viewers to downvote you to prevent the next 10000 people from seeing what you said. There's no downside to downvoting just because you don't like what someone says, even if it's true.
And usually no amount of corrections can outshout a lie/mistake with 100+ votes.
It will be hard to design a formula that can only be gamed by making quality contributions.
A quality discussion requires parties who disagree, exchange of ideas and facts and ideally some kind of eventual agreement.
The hardest part is to make it enjoyable to use.
Let people regularly vote on which prompts should be added/removed, and have the AI justify all of its decisions, show which information it used etc.
4chan was great in 2015 precisely because anyone could comment, but it's a young man's website in that scrolling through a 300 comment thread to find the worthwhile parts of the discussion will require upwards of fifteen minutes, whereas on Reddit or Hacker News most of that sorting is already done. This does have censorial effects, so it isn't ideal for controversial topics like politics, but it's better for almost everything else.
It’s a single board with a full-time moderator and almost everyone on it has a background in information technology. These kinds of networks leave very obvious signatures, and the site simply isn’t a big enough place for them to hide.
> This kind of behavior almost certainly goes on here.
Do you have any examples?
I’m not asking for timestamps or evidence, I’m asking for general instances where you believe vote manipulation may have occurred.
>But this kind of stuff happens everywhere on the internet where you can post for free
This isn’t true.
You can get there in days if you just spot a few bandwagons to hop on.
> I post things I know won't be well-received here all the time and it's quite rare for a comment to go below -2 karma, but comparatively common for these sorts of comment to get flagged despite not breaking any rules.
Yep, there's no downside to frivolously downvoting/flagging: It just takes a 2-3 people to hide your comment from the majority of the users as soon as it's posted, easy for a PR firm with paid people watching a topic like hawks.
Sometimes when I get insta-downvoted in a heated topic, if I delete my comment and repost later, the first few votes are positive. So it's clearly dependent on luck/time, which it shouldn't be.
I and others suggested this years ago: Maybe votes shouldn't have any effect for the first 12 or 24 hours.
s/civil servants/lawmakers/g
Civil servants didn't create, write, or pass the law. They simply got handed a flaming, bad smelling paper bag and got told to implement it.
The bag is handed by the legally elected government body in charge of making laws. I assume the UK citizens who elected their representatives agree with the policy.
This concept in the U.S. is also evolving since 2024 decision reducing the strength of this legal protection.
Practically all countries have some version of this, few hundred lawmakers and their staff cannot reasonably set every single policy and micromanage its execution for every for government function.
Civil servants always have a lot of say in direction of governance even if not directly enshrined in law or recognized by the court.
The classic 80s satire Yes, Minister is good illustration of the parliamentary version of how it happens in say England even if not enshrined in law so to speak.
They might benefit the rich, but they also benefit the lower classes very much as those are the ones they need to vote for them.
And they take all that from the middle class that had to pay for mostly everything for mostly everyone.
It's not a simple problem to solve, and it's not like having one problem is better than the other, because both devolve outside the boundaries of democracy.
Hopefully you see simple solutions come with their own complex problems.
In other words, "Speech + Offense" is prosecutable, for illegal "Offense".
You don't get a hall pass to use speech to commit a crime, and not be culpable for the crime.
Fraud, libel, harassment, giving false testimony in court, colluding with competitors to artificially increase prices, broadcasting a copyright work, signing your name (just your name!) to an illegal contract, etc. all may involve speech, but the offense is defined by the non-speech functional impact.
Convincing someone to kill someone for you is not legal, because murder is not legal.
People generally have to prove that the speech was intentionally or recklessly geared to cause harm to others.
Although many cases may be clear, there isn't a mathematical separation between the two, so we have courts and precedence, and further reviews, as the practical means of drawing the line.
And that is true for the vast majority of laws and rights.
Nobody is forced to abide by HIPPA, without their consent. Nobody is forced to sign a HIPAA agreement.
In fact, nobody is forced to work in the medical professions, or look at private medical data, in the US. And no law prohibits asking a patient or caregivers if they are ok with some harmless informal sharing, and explaining the urge to them...
This is similar to the voluntary civil jeopardy of signing an NDA before being informed of trade secrets. Penalties may vary.
HIPAA prohibits share private medical information that isn't yours. Regardless of signing anything or how you got it.
And no medical establishment can (legally) share records with you, without a legal purpose, and documentation you know your obligations or are legally allowed to have the information.
Nobody cares what your opinion is, without an explanation.
This is HN. Two-way curiosity and friendly discussion are encouraged. Enlighten me, instead of posing, please.
There is no curiosity in your approach, you know in your heart of hearts you're simply backtracking and then shifting the posts everytime your claims are wrong.
And clarifying can be either or both tuning reasoning or tuning communication.
You realize you can nit pic at almost any comment with some validity?
And you didn’t include any of your own substantive thoughts, which I apparently moved closer to, until your second comment after I asked you for them?
So what to do? Just communicate in a positive and clear way yourself if you have something to add.
I come here to learn. I would rather learn from you than wonder why you make negative comments, in a discussion where you and your thoughts are welcome.
"Free speech" doesn't mean it can't be challenged.
/not a lawyer
That being said, the UK government can pound sand and should be embarrassed by its behavior. UK isn't a serious country anymore. If you want to know why Americans don't really care what others think, this is a really good example as to why. Total clown show...
It's not absolute in the US because the US constitution only protects from the governmental limiting it, which means there is a lot of potential to effectively and fully legally limit free speech. And even the government gave itself a lot of limitations where through excuses and loopholes it can limit free speech (e.g. from teachers in public schools).
Then there is the question of what even is "speech", in the us spending money can be an act of speech but wouldn't that make bribing an act of free speech even though it clearly shouldn't be legal?
Should systematically harassing/mobbing people with the intent to drive them into suicide be protected by free speech? It's speech, but you would need to be a very cold hearted person to think that this shouldn't be a crime.
Is leaking trade secrets free speech when you do it vocally? It would be strange if that where no crime but technically you do so by speech.
What if you systematically rail up people with deep fakes and all kind of misinformation? Is that free speech? Before WW2 many intellectual would probably have argued that people aren't that easy to mass rail up and as such it should be free speech. But after Hitler gained power in exactly that way the position is more one of "if people systematic rail up the population and spreed misinformation en mass with the intend to overthrow the government" then letting them do that is pretty dump thing to do.
So no "speech" not only is free speech not absolute, it's a pretty bad idea create absolute free speech protection. And both in small and large cases this has been proven again and again through history.
This doesn't mean that censorship is right either.
Like with everything in live "extremes" are close to never a good thing to peruse.
Anyway you know what is even more embarrassing then being a hall way monitor, it's to never question your believes and insisting they are right even when its repeatedly shown to you that there seems to be some problem with them. But seriously, why edit you response to add an insult against anyone who doesn't share your opinion??
That is not a limitation on free speech; it's a recognition of the right to free association.
but no, it's not about that, it's more about how e.g. Hitler took over Germany. Systematically rilling up people, spreading systematic misinformation about how the Jews supposedly backstabbed German and how the world economic crash between WW1-2 was another devious plan of them etc.
like the difference is its very dump for a country to let people destabilize it with such means, it's still ethically wrong to do so about other countries, but less of an potential existential thread to democracy
I agree it was enabled by the corrupt class, but initiated elsewhere.
The UK can make a law and apply it however they see fit. 4Chan is providing a service to UK people (a website you can access) and is not implementing the law. Ultimately the UK cannot enforce this law until money destined to/from 4Chan passes through the UK or people associated with the site visit UK territories.
In practicality this law for the most part will just mean either websites block the UK or UK ISPs are forced to block websites.
But this law was designed for the websites and platforms that will not be willing to do that as they make money off of UK citizens, such as Amazon/Facebook/Youtube/etc.
If a website blocks UK users then the law doesn't apply as it is only concerned with protecting UK citizens. If a foreign company was shipping drugs or guns to UK children, or your choice of obvious contraband, then why wouldn't it have the power to hold that entity accountable? This is how it has always worked and I am not seeing why this is a problem just because it's in the digital space.
It is not the responsibility of foreign companies to enforce or even acknowledged the UK's laws. If the UK has a problem, they have tools to solve it on their own soil. If they want to enforce their laws they need to pay for it.
The UK is trying to bully and scare foreign website operators regardless of scale or type of business into paying to enforce UK laws outside of the UK.
If they want a website blocked, the only way to make that work is to block it and pay for it themselves.
Whether one agrees with the policy aims of the OSA or not, there are some complex jurisdictional and enforceability issues at play here. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as you make out.
Still, not quite.
Servers in the UK ≠ targeting the UK – courts on both sides of the pond will ask whether the operator directed activity at the forum. Merely serving content from UK edge nodes because a CDN optimises latency is usually incidental and does not, by itself, show a «manifest intent» to engage with UK users. There is an established precedent in the US[0].
If a UK-established CDN processes personal data at UK nodes, the CDN itself may be subject to UK GDPR. That does not automatically drag a non-UK website operator into UK GDPR unless it offers services to or monitors people in the UK. Accessibility or passive CDN caching alone is insufficient. And modern UK statutes mirror this; for example, the Online Safety Act bites where a service has a significant number of UK users or targets the UK – not simply because a CDN happens to serve from UK equipment. From the horse's mouth: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
Then there is a nuance – explictly configured Cloudflare (1) vs automatic «nearest-edge» (2) selection:
1. Explicit UK-favouring config (for example, rules that prioritise UK-only promotions, UK-specific routing or features tailored for UK users) is a relevant signal of targeting, especially when combined with other indications such as UK currency, UK-specific T&C's, UK marketing or support. In EU/UK consumer cases the test is whether the site is directed to the state – a holistic, fact-sensitive enquiry where no single factor is decisive.
2. Automatic «nearest-edge» selection provided by a CDN by default is a weak signal. It shows global optimisation, not purposeful availment of the UK market. US targeting cases say much the same: you need directed electronic activity with intent to interact in the forum; mere accessibility and generic infrastructure choices are not enough.
[0] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/293...
I am no fan of the OSA but this spat is also not showing 4chan or its fan-base to be particularly mature or legally savvy (quelle surprise).
I.e., if a machine (the Cloudflare control plane) elects to route traffic through an edge node within the UK as an optimisation measure, such an act does not, in itself, constitute the possession of equipment within that jurisdiction — nor would it be readily ascertainable before a court of law.
Historically speaking, the Ofcom/UK approach is orthodox rather than novel. Ofcom’s sequence – information notices, process fines for non-response, then applications to court for service-restriction and access-restriction orders that bind UK intermediaries – is a modern, statute-bound version of a very old playbook. If a service has no UK presence and refuses to engage, the realistic endgame is to pressure UK-based points of access rather than to extract cash from an foreign entity.
What is new is the medium and the safeguards, not the underlying logic: regulate the domestic interface with out-of-jurisdiction speakers.
I was merely citing use of Cloudflare as evidentiary, not determinative.
I am not so sure about the relevance of billing entity. I suspect that how Cloudflare chooses to bill is as much driven by tax (especially transfer pricing) as anything else. I also think there are as-yet-unanswered questions about the role of CDNs and similar “global” infrastructure providers, and the impact of using their services as subcontractors (cf intermediaries), in interpreting jurisdiction. These services are obviously different to the “traditional” autonomous systems (routed networks). I am not sure that the law has caught up with this yet. But that is a tangent.
Thanks for the thoughtful debate.
To expand upon your observations regarding the role and the function of global infrastructure providers — what I find most disquieting is the manner in which the Internet has degenerated from a realm of open discourse, at times resembling the untamed frontier, into a labyrinthine construct of proliferating legislation and extrajudicial interference by a multitude of states.
The result is a regulatory morass so burdensome that, in certain instances, it proves more expedient to disregard an entire jurisdiction than to endeavour compliance with its statutory dictates. Even when such legislative efforts are conceived without malice, their consequences are seldom benign — the attendant escalation in implementation costs can be considerable. By way of illustration, conformity with the EU’s GDPR must now be accounted for at the very architectural level of a solution, with financial implications that are far from negligible.
I assume companies wouldn't need to comply with tax law either unless countries in which they operate pay them to pay their dues.
Literally because the entity is not under the jurisdiction of the UK. The UK can force domestic companies to block the website but they cant force the website itself to do anything. The claims of fines against 4chan are therefore nonsensical. Probably just part of the legal proceedings prior to blocking the site I guess but still strange to see.
If I had a website operated outside of the US, where you can download US citizens private medical records and phone conversations, I would be liable to breaking US law.
If you do not want to be held accountable to a regions laws, then you do not offer a service to or deal with data that relates to that regions citizens.
I don't think this is a hard concept to grasp.
Jurisdiction does not imply enforceability. There are laws from your country that you can break while not even being in that country and be held accountable.
That's what's happening here - a webserver is operating entirely out of the UK, with no nexus. UK citizens send requests to it - just like all other countries citizens do, so either the website would be covered by all laws or just the places where it has nexus.
This is especially true in the US, where speech is strongly protected - making Ofcom's assertion that its regulation overrides the first amendment especially egregious. The UK government's behavior here is a bit shameful.
You are allowed to sell lemonade to British tourists. But if you're shipping lemonade to the UK, you are subject to UK lemonade regulations. That doesn't mean that the UK has jurisdiction over your business and can shut it down or anything like that, but if you travel to the UK or UK banks handle your transactions, they have the right to seize funds and shipments, close your accounts or detain you if you set foot in the UK. Your choice are: follow UK regulations; stop shipping lemonade to the UK; or continue as you were, never go to the UK, and know that the UK can always ban shipments from your stand.
The US does the same thing all the time, and even worse[1]. Lots of piracy sites located in jurisdictions where US copyright laws don't apply are seized by US federal agencies and replaced with a notice about piracy. Those sites haven't broken any laws in the countries they're hosted in, they have no legal presence in the US, and yet the domains are banned/seized and administrators detained if they ever step foot on US soil. The UK is not threatening to seize anyone's site.
Why not? It's their responsibility to comply with UK laws if they want to keep serving British customers and making money off of them. Just because the service is provided online doesn't mean it can go on unregulated. You're acting like this is something new that websites haven't had to do for decades.
> Why not?
Because laws vary from location to location, and it's an unreasonable for a [UK] agency to make demands from an exclusively [US] group under the assumption that they are aware of every possible law in existence. Someone in the [US] can't expect to have reasonable influence over the laws in the [UK] that they're now required to follow? That's a blatantly unfair system. That's why not.
But actually why? You confidently assert that because it has happened before, that's the way it should always be!
You're still trying to apply rules for jurisdiction, that don't map well to the Internet. If I was sending someone to the UK to buy and sell, I think your arguments would make sense. But that's not the analogy that applies here. The better analogy is, people from the UK are traveling across jurisdictional lines, and buying from my shop, based exclusively in my country. My country feels privacy and anonymity are important fundamental rights, and my business exists to that end. Here, instead of trying to control UK citizens, and making it illegal for them to travel to the US to do something they want to prevent, they instead are trying to force the US group to attempt to doxx every user and exclude some of them.
That feels insane to me, what's your take on that examplev
Also, I feel it's important to note, part of the reason they're using this specific tactic, is because they're aware how impossible and intractable their demands actually are. To call internet geolocation complex or error prone would be an understatement. So based exclusively that they're demanding someone other than them should tackle a near impossible task, should be enough of a reason to reject the demand. Legal or not, unreasonable demands deserve rejection.
That's why Ofcom started the correspondence, to inform 4chan of laws it may not have been aware of.
> Someone in the [US] can't expect to have reasonable influence over the laws in the [UK] that they're now required to follow
UK companies comply with US laws all the time if they want to continue serving US audiences. I wish this wasn't the case, but this isn't new. Similarly, lots of US news websites aren't available in the EU/UK because they don't comply with GDPR. None of this is new, there's lots of precedent for it.
> You're still trying to apply rules for jurisdiction, that don't map well to the Internet
Sure they do. When I go to boards.4chan.org, the server recognises my request, including where it's coming from, and returns some content. Similarly, when I buy lemonade from a company, they see my shipping address and ships the lemonade. Seems to me like it maps pretty well.
> To call internet geolocation complex or error prone would be an understatement
All other service providers have imposed IP-based limits and that has satisfied Ofcom, so no need to make it more complex than necessary.
> Legal or not, unreasonable demands deserve rejection.
Of course, 4chan is free to reject the demands, just like The Pirate Bay (based in Sweden) have rejected demands from the US government, that was always an option. Ofcom is making the demands to then be able to enforce the OSA, for example by blocking 4chan, without 4chan saying they were not aware of the demands.
How do you suspect a given IP address maps to a geographical location?
Does ofcom supply a list of IP addresses based in the UK? What if it's a US resident using a VPN or other anonymizing tool such as Tor?
It's a mistake to ignore the problems and realities of some solution, or half solution, caused a legal demand from without a reasonable claim of jurisdiction.
Honestly, It's a wild take to assert that an ip based geoblock that's guaranteed to be buggy is fine or acceptable just because ofcom hasn't figured out how buggy it actually is yet. Just as it is equally insane to suggest that a foreign government should be able to compel, (or willing to demand) some action by anyone.
I was with you up until here. Shipping to a physical address, where if you don't specify the country name, it won't arrive. Is very different than shipping to an Internet address, which has no "reasonable" connection to a physical location.
> Your choice are: follow UK regulations [give up the core gimmick of your entire site]; stop shipping lemonade to the UK [the shipping analogy really breaks here, how? and what about vpns? what if the other endpoint is in the UK but the address isn't?]; or continue as you were, never go to the UK, and know that the UK can always ban shipments from your stand.
I don't disagree that [country] can make laws that make society worse... But I don't think it's reasonable to defend them as if these actions aren't egregious. There's the armchair arguments that I enjoy as a thought experiment, but it's still important to point out how antisocial this behavior is.
> The US does the same thing all the time, and even worse [...]
There's an argument to be made they're using a domain registratar in the US, which is subject to those laws (obviously). But what about [other disappointing behavior] because it's worse. Is exactly the example you're arguing against. Precedence of bad stuff is still bad, ideally everyone would point out it's bad, and suggest alternatives to the bad thing, no?
I'm not defending the Online Safety Act, I think it's a horrible and stupid law. On the other hand, I will defend GDPR, which uses a similar legal framework of enforcement. My argument is that the UK is within its rights to implement and enforce laws as they see fit, not that the laws are good.
The argument you are making, is that the laws, and the behavior they're enabling is reasonable.
That may not what you meant to convey, but to abuse an analogy, it is fruit from the poisoned tree. You can't defend some action, without by proxy defending the source. Either the law is reasonable, and ofcom is acting reasonably, or the law is unreasonable, and ofcom is acting unreasonably trying to enforce it. Correct or not, or technically legal in the UK or not.
You can defend the actions of ofcom, as not illegal, but that's not what you're doing, and not the context of this thread.
I am doing no such thing.
Yet? :)
part of the high bar is claiming juristriction requires sending your army. (Sanctions are often used too which might or might not work). That is why the threat is if the directors travel to the uk - that gives them sone power - but still expect US government to do 'things' if the arrest any US citizen on this.
It does... to correct your example, the UK citizen is paying a dollar for the lemonade while in the UK.
Are you saying that if I had a website hosted in Russia that pretended to be your bank and stole all your money from phishing that is perfectly legal?
Website hosted in US publishing truth about Ukraine war - even calling it a war is already a felony in Russia - is it legal or illegal?
I'm personally against stealing money, and i'm for calling a war a war, yet how do we formally codify that into law - there are 200 countries and at any given moment, especially while online, you're probably violating some law of some country. Before internet globalization, the geography based jurisdiction was such an objective approach. Now it is more like "catch me if you can" which is obviously not a solid foundation to build on. Like that plane that had emergency landing in Minsk, and the Belorussian dissident flying on that plane was arrested by the Belorussian police. And many here on HN were critical of MBS when Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul - what if our plane has to make an emergency landing in Riyadh ...
That's illegal in Russia. Russia has fined Google more money than exists in the world. It doesn't mean anything, but you bet the CEO of Google isn't going to visit Russia. Russia can choose to block any websites that hurt their feelings. Much like the UK and 4Chan.
> what if our plane has to make an emergency landing in Riyadh ...
Then you hope to God that the people with the bone saws don't read hackernews.
Try hosting one of those sites and then fly to Russia and let us know. I think you’ll find it’s quite illegal and will be enforced to the fullest extent of the law the second you enter their jurisdiction.
It turns out it doesn’t actually matter whether you or I think the law in question is BS. We don’t run Russia or determine what laws they enact.
Whether the website is illegal or not would depend on Russian law in your example. I'd also suspect that other laws might apply, like wire fraud. Some of those would likely be enforceable in other countries.
I'll be pretty shocked if someone ever gets extradited out of the US for not showing a cookie banner.
4Chan isn't popping up unbidden on people's phones. Wither a UK citizen chooses to visit a website is no business of the website operator.
To say that 4Chan is somehow responsible for the actions of unknowably many private citizens is absurd. If the UK wants to enforce internet censorship within their borders, that's their own business. Putting pressure on wholly independent foreign businesses for the crime of existing is not reasonable. This is just as bad as US credit card companies censoring adult material from the entire global online economy.
They're trying to censor large parts of the global internet for everyone, not just their citizens. If they cared about UK citizens so much, they'd do something like proactively blocking noncompliant websites to force them to immediately either comply or fuck off. They should be trying to protect their citizens instead of trying to bully foreign companies they have no jurisdiction over. It's their responsibility to enforce their laws, not the US courts.
If I transmit insults of dear leader Kim Jung Un on amateur radio, then those radio waves will reach DPRK. I likely would be breaking DPRK law.
Why wouldn't they have the power? Same reason my decree that guns are now banned in the US is not even refuted, but ignored.
4chan has no obligation or even reason to even respond to the UK except as entertainment (this reply was entertaining), and to send a message to the US that (in its opinion) the US government cooperating with the UK on this would be illegal by US law, the only law that matters to the US legal system. Other countries laws only matter insofar as they are allowed by US law. Foreign laws will not get US constitution bypass unless the US constitution itself allows it.
It's as if DPRK demanded to have a US citizen extradited in order to be executed for blasphemy. All that US citizen cares about is to give a heads up to the US that "if these people come knocking, tell them to go fuck themselves".
What is the UK government going to do, send bobbies over to attack 4chan owners with nerve gas on US soil?
What's the alternative? I'm sure there are countries where it's illegal for women to show their faces on TV. Why wouldn't that country have the power to hold any website where women's faces are shown accountable?
On a more depressing note, as is super clear in the US lately, crime is perfectly legal, if your friend (or POTUS you bribed) orders you to not be prosecuted. Or pardons you for being a drug kingpin and mobster ordering murders of innocent people (Ross Ulbricht).
Power ultimately comes from the exercise of violence. The UK cannot exercise state violence on US soil. That's a US monopoly under very harsh penalty. On US soil only US law (or in the case of Trump, lawlessness) can de facto be exercised.
Also, from their reply:
> The infinite character of that power was most famously summed up by English lawyer Sir Ivor Jennings, who once said that “if Parliament enacts that smoking in the streets of Paris is an offence, then it is an offence”. This line is taught to every first-year English law student.
Why should parisians care? Why would France cooperate with enforcing such laws?
If POTUS orders that taking $50k in cash as a bribe is not to be prosecuted, then you won't be prosecuted.
> I likely would be breaking DPRK law. Why wouldn't they have the power?
They do as a sovereign nation. But what most people seem to be missing is that you're not going to DPRK and the US Government doesn't care so you can go about your life breaking DPRK law as much as you want.
That's called offering the service to UK users. I don't host my blog in 165 times in each country in order to let people to access my content/services.
> That's called offering the service to UK users.
It is not – not under US law, not under common law (in the UK/Commonwealth).
Under US law and in common law systems generally, a website being merely accessible from country XYZ does not, by itself, constitute «offering a service» into XYZ. Courts look for purposeful targeting of, or meaningful interaction with, users in that place. Mere accessibility is not enough. See [0] for a precedent.
1. The US approach in a nutshell.
a) Personal-jurisdiction basics: a court needs «minimum contacts» that the website operator created with the forum. The US Supreme Court has previously stressed that the plaintiff’s location or where effects are felt is not enough if the defendant did not create forum contacts.
b) The «Zippo sliding scale» test distinguishes passive sites from interactive, commercial ones. Passive presence online generally does not create jurisdiction. See [1] for a landmark opinion.
c) The Fourth Circuit’s ALS Scan test says a state may exercise jurisdiction when the defendant directs electronic activity into the state, with a manifest intent to do business or interact there, and that activity gives rise to the claim. Simply putting content on the web is not enough. Again, see [0] for an established precedent.
2. The common law/European «targeting» idea
a) UK and EU courts apply a similar targeting notion in various contexts. The CJEU in Pammer/Alpenhof held that a site must be directed to the consumer’s member state; mere accessibility is insufficient. UK cases on online IP use also examine whether activity is targeted at UK users. See [2] for an established precedent on the other side of the pond.
b) Data-protection law is also explicit: the GDPR applies to non-EU operators when they offer goods or services to people in the EU or monitor them. Recital 23 and the EDPB’s guidelines list indicators such as using a local language or currency, shipping to the territory, local contact details, and targeted ads. Accessibility alone does not trigger the rule.
To recap, if a US-hosted site simply serves content that UK users can reach, that alone does not mean the operator is «offering a service» to the UK or its citizens under US law or general common-law principles. Liability or regulatory reach typically turns on targeting and purposeful availment, not mere availability. Circle back to [0] for details again.
[0] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/293...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zippo_Manufacturing_Co._v._Zip....
[2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
I'm not. My comment and other replies to you are telling you that YOU are.
We're saying that your question doesn't make any sense.
Not really. It's more like DPRK messaging a private US citizen directly, repeatedly and incessantly, that they will be executed for blasphemy. Ofcom is not using proper diplomatic channels here.
Why should parisians care? Why would France cooperate with enforcing such laws?
Everyone here seems convinced that Parisians should care about this, because the majority opinion seems to be that it's perfectly acceptable for the UK government to arrest Parisians for having ever smoked a cigarette in Paris, should they set foot on UK soil. I do not agree that this is a defensible application of law.
Instead of getting court orders and ordering ISPs to block the sites, the UK is pushing off the responsibility for age verification onto the companies/site owners whether they are actually under UK jurisdiction or not.
Because if instead the UK just managed it internally, and started ordering ISPs to block, they'd be criticized foor being like China, and the citizens would start placing their blame on the government instead of the private companies that are pulling out of the market.
The ID side of things though? Having your citizenry send their personal information to foreign companies all across the globe? It's a disaster waiting to happen.
In one of the more enlightened things Elon has done in the last few years, he fought back, and he won.
Interestingly, here in AU, there was a storm of media outrage at the time, saying all kinds of nasty things about Musk, making all kinds of assertions about how he was super arrogant and wrong to insist on upholding american's freedom of speech, with no attempt to justify why. It was almost like we were just expected to assume that AU law applies everywhere on earth.
Here's a fun sample of a totally unbiased article from the time: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-20/elon-musk-reacts-to-e...
Strangely, when the court order wasn't upheld because AU laws don't actually apply outside our country, and the gubmint that was so outraged and "ready to take him on" lost badly on every point, there was no huge storm of media coverage about that.
> "Services who choose to restrict access rather than protect UK users remain on our watchlist"
How does withdrawing service from UK users not "protect UK users"? How does age verifying UK IPs provide more protection than withdrawing the service entirely?
It is about power and control, and nothing else.
Standing next the the US when it does things (or rather to the left and two steps behind the US) is not being like the US.
https://youtu.be/lJatJ-Hi2_s?t=66
more recent: https://youtu.be/Hyn_VHtSU48?t=35
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-visa-polic...
>aberration
McCarthyism would like a word
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Chaplin#Limelight_and_...
That would seem to be least intrusive option.
Using the internet in the UK/EU is such a horrible experience, every cookie pop-up is a reminder how badly thought out these rules are.
Technical cookies don't require any consent so every time you see a cookie banner the website owner wants to gather more data about you than necessary. Furthermore, these rules don't require cookie banners, it's what the industry has chosen as the way to get consent to track their users.
Check the banner next time, you'll see how many “partners” they do sell your data to.
Until then I will shed no tears about your slightly lowered effectiveness at manipulating people into acting against their own best interests.
This policy was pushed by David Cameron, who was the prime minister at the time:
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-internet-and-porn...
When purchasing an internet-enabled device the UK could regulate that large retailers must ask if the device is to be used by an under 18 year old. If they say yes, then they could ship with filters enabled. They could also regulate that all internet-enabled devices which could be sold to children should support child filters.
If we did this then whether or not a child views NSFW material it will be on the parent, instead of the current situation where whether a child can view NSFW material online depends on the age verification techniques of Chinese companies like TikTok or American companies like 4chan.
All mobile network connections already come with content filters enabled in the UK, adult or not, and has to be explicitly disabled.
When you buy wifi, they already make sure you're an adult. They ask for proof of residence, you sign a contract. Children cannot buy wifi. Go ahead and try - no ISP is going to write a contract with a child.
Wifi, like tobacco and alcohol, is already age restricted.
The problem is the adults buying it then turn around and just... Hand it to children. That's not the fault of the law or society.
Like, okay the store clerk might make sure when I buy a pack of menthols I'm of age. But if I just go home and hand my kid the pack of menthols, all bets are off. That's not the store clerks problem, he can't and won't get in trouble for that.
Parents and establishments are being stupid here. Same applies for public wifi. Don't want kids to use it? Okay, give it a password, only tell the password to adults. Easy peasy.
The law can't stop parents from being stupid.
But it is society's problem, and within society's capacity to attempt to manage.
https://www.childline.org.uk/info-advice/you-your-body/drugs... says it's illegal to give a child cigarettes, and the cops can confiscate them if you're 16 or below.
> The law can't stop parents from being stupid.
Sure, but reality also often means smart, caring parents still can't stop kids from... being kids. I've lived in places where half a dozen public wifi hotspots were available; even if I didn't, chances are I'd have to let my kids on wifi for homework, on computers I don't have admin rights to because they come from the school.
They can't go sign up for a new internet plan, but that's hardly required.
Sure, to an extent, but not really: we give parents a lot of freedom here.
> Sure, but reality also often means smart, caring parents still can't stop kids from... being kids. I've lived in places where half a dozen public wifi hotspots were available; even if I didn't, chances are I'd have to let my kids on wifi for homework, on computers I don't have admin rights to because they come from the school.
Okay, then lock down those networks. We don't need to lockdown the Internet as a whole.
In reality, most of those networks already are locked down.
Try searching up porn on, say, hotel wifi, it won't work.
We already have the solution.
I… very much doubt that.
I can't even search for porn on cellular networks and I'm in the US.
Hotels, Starbucks, my job, the library - they all block porn. The idea that kids just have free access to a wild internet is legitimately made up. Schools block that stuff too - universities, even.
As I've said, this solution is not solving this problem because this problem legitimately does not exist. It's solving a different problem. What that problem is, is for you to find out.
I have high-school aged kids; they all trade techniques for getting precisely that "free access to a wild internet". It's a game of whack a mole, and school IT administrators are on the losing side.
The reality is that it is YOUR responsibility to control what your kids see. If you fail, I do not care. They are not my kids. Not only do I not care, nobody cares.
You can absolutely lock your kids down and make sure they get no internet access. I know because I grew up without internet. Everything is very much in reach. Do that, or don't, again I don't care.
My mobile carrier blocks porn. I know because I'm an adult and sometimes I want to watch porn, and I have to use a VPN.
What you should do is call up whoever you are giving money to for internet and ask them about blocking. If they tell you they don't offer that product, then you, as a consumer, should cancel your subscription and go to another carrier.
Both require being an adult.
And, "free wifi", like you're talking about, already blocks porn. So problem solved, right?
What's actually the issue here? Because nobody seems to be able to articulate it. What problem are we solving?
Cookie regulations are perfectly Ok, businesses which want to add 429 vendors and data processors to simple internet shop or corporate blog is not.
If you use cookies only for legitimate basic local functionality (like login and shopping cart on online shop site) you SHOULD NOT have any popups, there is exemption for such use cases in the regulations. Only if you want to sell data or pass it for processing to third party you need popup. Simply don't.
White listing worked for a while (months) when they were young, but it was super-high touch and stuff just broke all the time. You try to whitelist a site, but you have to then figure out all their CDNs.
Restricting specific sites works, sort of, until they find some place that hosts that content. Blocking youtube doesn't work(*), every search engine has a watch videos feature. (Why are you spending 3 hours a day on DDG?) There's really no way to segment youtube into "videos they need to watch for school" and "viral x hour minecraft playthrough". Somehow, we've managed to combine the biggest time waste ever with a somewhat useful for education hosting service.
That's leaving out the jailbreaks that come from finding an app's unfiltered webview and getting an open web escape there.
There's basically no reliable method for filtering even on locked down platforms.
* there's probably a way to kill it at the firewall based on dns, but that's iffy for phones and it's network wide.
The regex are: (^|\.)youtubei\.googleapis\.com$ (^|\.)ytstatic\.l\.google\.com$ (^|\.)ytimg\.l\.google\.com$ (^|\.)youtube-ui\.l\.google\.com$ (^|\.)youtube\.com$ (^|\.)ytimg\.com$ (^|\.)googlevideo\.com$
You can create groups and assign devices to them, and assign the block rules only to certain groups.
The only annoyance with this is that it blocks logging into Google since they redirect to YouTube to set a login cookie as part of the Google login process. If you're already logged into Google though, everything works as normal, and you can always disable pihole for five minutes if for some reason you got logged out and need to log back in.
Neither is the tech for locking down all online identity to government-controlled access... But I have strong opinions about which one everybody should/shouldn't start creating!
All the routers also come with filtering settings as well and ISPs ship with the filtering on by default, since that is the law and has been for several decades.
my dream is when ISPs are allowed to sell this, but not allowed to call it internet access.
That's what the advertising-dependent implementers who deliberately made it shittier than necessary (stuff like "you have to decline each of our 847 ad partners individually") want you to think, at least. It's mostly malicious compliance.
But people (like my girlfriend) still click "Allow all" because they don't seem to realize that the legislation requires the website to still function if you decline unnecessary cookies!
The banner is literally an attempt to FOMO you into accepting cookies you never need to accept!
IMO the EU is somewhat in dereliction of Duty for not punishing cookie banner sites
It's much simpler than blocking, and much more effective. Most parents don't know what to block proactively, blocklists are imperfect, and the biggest threats are hiding in the most innocent looking apps (Discord, Roblox, Reddit, even just messaging with friends from school).
Also remember that the pop-up is an industry choice, the rules only mandate that a user should opt in, not how. No laws mandate the cookie banners, no regulations say they should be obnoxious.
There's no need, that's already the case.
All phones (the network account attached to the SIM actually, not the phone itself) comes with a content filter enabled by default in the UK, adult or not.
Neither resident nor frequent visitor to the UK, so I'm behind the times when I ask: I beg your fucking pardon?
Is there further reading on this inane nanny-state horror, ideally via a Wikipedia article on the law or gentleman's agreement amongst the carriers?
Furthermore, is this more common than I assume, and I simply don't notice because I don't stray too far from the mainstream?
Yep, my thoughts exactly when I first encountered it.
> Is there further reading on this inane nanny-state horror
I tried to look something up but it seems the articles and news about the (new) Online Safety Act has taken over all of the search results (and it's not something I want to search too hard at work). I even asked an LLM but it couldn't provide sources and simply said it was "voluntary" and "industry standard". The rest of its output was drowned in the new Online Safety Act.
I suppose thanks to the OSA the old system is now history.
What's to stop that same kid to buy a porno dvd? Or to download a torrent of a porno? Or a porn magazine?
Like you can configure your browser to do whatever you want with cookies - blocking them all, blocking only third party ones, etc. - there is no need for government regulation here.
But the legislators are completely tech illiterate and even the general public supports more interference and regulation.
The question a user should ask is why is this website collecting my data. Marketing and adtech companies are trying to shift this question to why is the EU making websites worse.
> there is no need for government regulation here
You don't need to care about this if you respect users' privacy in the same way you don't need to care about waste water regulation when you don't pump waste into rivers.
I'd welcome a ramp-up of the legislation: outlaw the kind of tracking that needs the banners currently outright. I'm sure a lot of websites would just geo-block EU as a result (like how some did because of GDPR), but I bet the EU-compliant visitor tracking solutions would suddenly skyrocket, and overall, nothing of value would be lost, neither for the users, nor for the website administrators.
It’s not possible to rely on browser controls as-is, because they do not differentiate between necessary and optional cookies.
Browser vendors could agree standards and implement them, exposing these to users and advertisers in a friendly way.
But they haven’t shown any interest in doing this.
I wonder why?
One of the hundreds of reasons do_not_track failed. You cannot do something that trusts the website operators, because they are egregiously untrustworthy.
The cookie banner everyone keeps bitching about is a direct example of this. No website is required to have a cookie banner. They choose to, because they know most users click "Yes to all", and then complain about the regulators, instead of the assholes asking you to consent to sharing your data with nearly a thousand third parties
And "browser vendors" will never do anything, because 90% of the market is a literal advertising behemoth, the rest of the market is owned by a company that makes money only when you do things not through the web browser.
My point is about UX: it could be much slicker if the browser industry standardised the consent mechanism.
You make a good point about lack of incentives.
[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
A client checking for a header is more than sufficient to block small children from seeing porn and that is 100% more than we have today. No extra memory or CPU required important on tablets or phones handed to children. No privacy invasion by daemons or other third parties.
Kid: "Mommie they said go to pornhub.com for games but it ask for password"
Mom: "Dumb trolls are picking on you, I will deal with them."
Edit: also something like this needs deep OS integration.
What do you mean? Parents can easily set this up before they give them to their children.
This generalises very well for all Government. Shame we're a couple of generations into education being about producing pliant workers over independent, thinking human beings.
The government shouldn't be dropping things. It should have the power to pick those things up in the first place.
It's like a fishing stop. Even if you get off with a warning the whole interaction just shouldn't have happened.
You cant have things like computers and smart phones if you dont have millions of pliant workers mass producing them for you. If you want the technological world that we live in to be possible then you should accept that it requires this concept. If everybody is a creative independant free thinking individual, then nobody is a worker drone in a factory churning out phones, laptops, or the materials and components that go into them.
It seems to have serious demographic issues and actual ethnic English are understandably angry at having been largely vilified as Nazis and far-right for wanting to protect their heritage and identity.
To reach into draconian surveillance and censorship to quell its own natives of the land who has lived there for thousands of years at the behest of those that have arrived from far away lands with a drastically incompatible culture with the British is a recipe for civil war.
That is the true reason for the surveillance state and these new transgressions. If you’ve had that thought it stands to reason they have also.
Edit: In a nutshell - almost every other transfer of goods and services across national borders is subject to quality standards. Why do we give a pass to a system that allows deep, individualised access to people's personal lives and mental processes?
Sovereign firewalls are mostly used by countries that have them for censorship and surveillance, and I think letting governments use a pretext of digital services being able to avoid tolls and taxes to establish such a powerful tool would be a huge mistake.
I don't want the government to decide which thoughts I can access and which ones I can't, but I also understand that allowing a foreign power (let's say Russia, although "the US" works just as fine) to freely run undercover propaganda and/or destabilization campaigns without any recourse doesn't look good either. And while I agree with "when in doubt aim for the option with more freedom", I can understand those who share your position.
Step 1 is reduce your attack surface :) As a second point, democracies are propaganda campaigns - it's a feature, not a bug.
I believe that national cultural and societal norms play a key part in self-regulation. I think it's too much to ask for those balancing forces to work as effectively without first turning down the firehose.
By closing up we defend us from some threats, but open gates wide for others. Foreign actors compete against much stronger domestic media machines and as you mentioned have to operate in foreign cultural environments. Gaining true influence also always involves financial flows, not just propaganda campaigns, so it is sure possible to mitigate these threats without closing information flow.
Consider the opposite threat of democracies being undermined from within. If some internal "threat actor" gets control of the executive branch and of the media and also can prevent information flow from the outside, very little can be done against it.
I think it is critical to keep in mind this second possibility even when the first threat seems more urgent.
Propaganda is not necessarily to gain influence or money. Eg: Country x just wants to mess with people's heads and turn them on each other to weaken a rival country. Or: Country y runs a crafted propaganda campaign against a rival. As a result, some sector of its own economy starts doing better at the expense of its rival.
>If some internal "threat actor" gets control of the executive branch and of the media and also can prevent information flow from the outside, very little can be done against it.
I understand the scenario (it's far from new), but that's what the design of any particular democracy is supposed to minimise. Term limits, separation of government powers, etc.
Is that a made up problem? IMO: yes. That's a PARENT'S responsibility, not mine.
There are legitimate arguments in favor of a national firewall. Nobody is making them.
That's just as bad of an argument as so-called intellectual walls of text. Nothing needs to be done, the outcomes are not bad. My argument is as strong as yours.
Censoring view points is equivalent to signal boosting other view points. Why do you trust the UK government to select the correct view points given all the strong evidence to the contrary?
This is about the worst attitude you can have in politics.
That would be an interesting discussion in itself, but even so - accessing material in isolation over the internet removes all of the benefits of cultural and community self-regulation.
>freely run undercover propaganda and/or destabilization campaigns
I'm of the opinion that WWW3 has already happened - it was a war for hearts and minds waged over the internet, and we've already lost.
Who is we, and who won? What did they win?
This is a very fancy way of saying “censorship”.
> I'm of the opinion that WWW3 has already happened - it was a war for hearts and minds waged over the internet, and we've already lost.
If the open, unfettered exchange of culture and ideas is such a threat to our system then we deserve to lose. If my only option is to be stuck in a system that enforces ideological conformity on its subjects, then I’d rather it be the Chinese system. At least it’s not so dysfunctional!
If we are receiving all of the downsides of a liberal democracy without the benefits, what’s the point anymore?
The question is: is there a defense against this?
Your answer currently is there is no defense because creating an illusion of unanimous ideological conformity counts as an exchange of ideas and that exchange must not be hindered.
The debate is over whether the right to conduct Sybil attacks is more precious than the right to freedom of thought. The question is vastly harder than many people in this thread seem to believe.
My personal take is that the right to freedom of thought is more fundamental and that the value of freedom of speech is via its support for freedom of thought.
1. Tell 4chan or its registrar l to take down .co.uk urls (maybe?)
2. Tell UK ISPs to ban UK visitors from viewing 4chan
Too bad the UK public can't effectively tell Ofcom off.
> consistent with the UK legal doctrine known as parliamentary supremacy, which holds that the UK Parliament has theoretically unlimited power
This is also true in Canada for the most part, while in theory with the adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as part of the Constitution Act, 1982. This Act prescribes that “the Constitution of Canada is the supreme law of Canada” (s.52), Thus constitutional supremacy replaced Parliamentary supremacy in Canada, in reality, the parliament can invoke s. 33 of the Charter, the notwithstanding clause, allows Parliament and the provincial legislatures to override certain provisions of the Charter, Canadian legislatures are still partially supreme. Which means the law can stand even if it violates those rights. This clause, which can only be used for a five-year term that is renewable, applies to specific sections of the Charter, including fundamental freedoms, legal rights, and equality rights, but not democratic, mobility, or Aboriginal rights.
Ultimately all of these sorts of regulations rely on people feeling the need to comply. 4chan feels no needs, least of all to comply.
It's the immovable object of online forums. It has not encountered a true unstoppable force. I doubt it ever will.
If they want it "gone" they'll have to both block it at the infrastructure level leading into the country and keep people from using internet infrastructure that isn't subject to these blocks from within the UK. That's... not really possible.
Contrary to HN and other USA tech forums might think, this will likely be recieved favorable by the the UK public.
There's no agreement between the UK and France that would require or even permit French authorities to enforce fines by a some random UK entity willy-nilly.
Publically available databases suggest 4chan executives include John Cena, Evan Essence and Norton Antivenom.
And with a bit of effort, the UK could call on friendly countries for extradition (such as Canada). They'll have to convince the judge that the crime is bad enough for extradition, but I'm sure they can come up with something.
It all depends on how much the UK really cares. In practice, this is probably just a big act by Ofcom so they can say "we've tried everything, we'll have to go for a full ISP-level block as a last resort".
As I understand it, _the UK_ is the one performing the importing of this content (through the backbones). 4chan is involved at no part of that pipeline other than connecting their servers to the Internet.
There are two ways in which a country could control content:
1. Through a governing body capable of regulating global content, like an Internet UN (with actual power)
2. Banning content locally via (broken) technical means
The UK is pretending that there's a third option: Telling other country's they have to abide by UK law.
If only it were that easy. For me as a parent, my approach is to implement a "Great personal firewall" - that is, internet restrictions that decrease over time as they mature, and starting with essentially zero access. Unfortunately, it's probably doomed to fail as other kids their age (5 + 7) and in their peer groups are already walking around with smartphones.
To put it bluntly, too many parents are too unenaged and lazy (or self-centered).
Now it's just outright forbidden to have anything with a chat. And no Internet.
The problem is that other 10 year old have mobiles, free PC access, etc, so there constant peer pressure.
Kids go to school, have lessons, right ? And few minutes breaks between lessons ? How that parents want to censorship what kids talk about ? Not to mention phones use. And why exactly ?
Thing is as it always is: parents make fundamens in culture/world view eg via their views and religion they subscribe. And then society and reality takes over. What society you have ?
I don't remember this in my late 90s LAN chats.
At home measures are at best a delay, not a fix. What you also have to do is actually communicate with your child. If you're strict about what they can and cannot do on the internet, they will feel shame for doing it anyway, which may also mean they would be too ashamed to talk to their parents if for example they are getting groomed online.
I'm sorry, but if you're threat model is your kid getting a fucking burner phone, I don't know what to tell you.
Even this law won't fix it! Why, couldnt your kid just save up and buy a plane ticket to the US?? Oh no .. we need a global law don't we?
Or, maybe, we throw away that thinking and acknowledge that the problem is not that big and solving 99% of it is MORE than good enough.
Your kid is way more likely to die in a car wreck. Focus on that or something.
I tried setting up parental controls on Fortnite and it was a nightmare, having threats multiple accounts with multiple providers, it felt very much designed to force people to go “ahh forget it”.
They do; in the UK, if you want to have access to porn, you need to tell your ISP and they will unblock it.
Of course, that's a game of whack-a-mole because you can render porn in Minecraft servers or join one of many communities on Whatsapp or Discord if needs be. It mainly blocks the well-known bigger porn sites.
The conclusion is, it's a service problem, not a howto-block problem
kid-friendly content is under supplied and often bad maintained.
To quote GabeN: Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem
But it's not forbidden or hidden away, so kids aren't curious about it.
Yes, but the problem is, many (if not most) of those content or services were created by adults and dispised by kids.
pick one your kid's most interested topic, are there enough kid-friendly content/services that fulfills all the needs?
1. Educate children about bad actors and scams. (We already do this in off-line contexts.)
2. Use available tools to limit exposure. Without this children will run into such content even when not seeking it. As demonstrated with Tiktok seemingly sending new accounts to sexualised content,(1) and Google/Meta's pathetic ad controls.
3. Be firm about when is the right age to have their own phone. There is zero possibility that they'll be able to have one secretly without a responsible parent discovering it.
4. Schools should not permit phone use during school time (enforced in numerous regions already.)
5. If governments have particular issues with websites, they can use their existing powers to block or limit access. While this is "whack-a-mole", the idea of asking each offshore offending website to comply is also "whack-a-mole" and a longer path to the intended goal.
6. Don't make the EU's "cookies" mistake. E.g. If the goal is to block tracking, then outlaw tracking, do not enact proxy rules that serve only as creative challenges to keep the status quo.
and the big one:
7. Parents must accept that their children will be exposed at some level, and need to be actively involved in the lives of their children so they can answer questions. This also means parenting in a way that doesn't condemn the child needlessly - condemnation is a sure strategy to ensure that the child won't approach their parents for help or with their questions.
Also some tips:
1. Set an example on appropriate use of social media. Doom scrolling on Tiktok and instagram in front of children is setting a bad example. Some housekeeping on personal behaviours will have a run on effect.
2. If they have social media accounts the algorithm is at some point going to recommend them to you. Be vigilant, but also handle the situation appropriately, jumping to condemnation just makes the child better at hiding their activity.
3. Don't post photos of your children online. It's not just an invasion of their privacy, but pedophile groups are known to collect, categorise and share even seemingly benign photos.
1. https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/digital-threats/tikto...
My oldest girl is 5. She's already very aware that other kids in her class have access to tablets and phones. How on earth do I responsibly explain to her the dangers? I have enough trouble asking her to get dressed and keep her nappy dry at night.
I say "I consider", because skills self-evidently essential to a good life (emotional regulation, focus and attention span, ability to read other people's emotional states, effective communication, physical skills) are increasingly not generally considered that way.
By who, and for who? My kids (ages 5+7) watch significantly less TV than their peers (as well as currently almost zero internet access), and are frequently complimented on their command of vocabulary and ability to express themselves.
>And if we are talking about the internet in general and not just twitter/tiktok, then its largely NOT doomscrolling and ragebait.
By amount of time that people spend on the internet, it is mostly doomscrolling and ragebait. If only we could take that part of it away.
ages 0-6, increased vocabulary with increased screen time https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.13927
> My kids (ages 5+7) watch significantly less TV than their peers (as well as currently almost zero internet access), and are frequently complimented on their command of vocabulary and ability to express themselves.
Compliments are nice I suppose, but theyre a poor metric when regarding vocabulary size.
> By amount of time that people spend on the internet, it is mostly doomscrolling and ragebait. If only we could take that part of it away.
"most" people I assume doesnt include you? Youre too smart to fall for it, obviously.
>theyre a poor metric when regarding vocabulary size.
I'm talking about school reports, among other things.
>"most" people I assume doesnt include you? Youre too smart to fall for it, obviously.
It's something I struggle with daily, and have put a lot of thought into what I want from my use of online technology. Eg, I don't have a smartphone. How can a kid be expected to make good choices if I can't?
Follow the science bud. The science is telling you to give them screentime
>I'm talking about school reports, among other things.
well yeah, you are now.
> It's something I struggle with daily,
this actually explains a lot
If I see some science that says this, I'll think about it.
Because the time is fast coming when countries around the world will have to start banning regime-aligned US businesses from operating in their borders full stop; protecting children is going to look like a quaint concern.
4chan, like any company is free to withdraw their business if they do not agree with the laws there.
This is how every law works in every country for every type of business.
Vpn is not always a solution, at least in my experience (nordvpn).
I haven’t tried 4chan, but e.g. reddit rejects anonymous vpn traffic (shows an error message, forces login); streaming platforms also often don’t work.
Many Americans believe absolutely in Free Speech – their exact version of it, as has been upheld by the courts of the USA. And they believe firmly they have the right to it worldwide. (And many also believe in the USA's moral right to spread its concept of Free Speech worldwide.)
If people were honest, they would admit that they are aghast at this attack on what they perceive their right to Free Speech wherever they are in the world. (And of course, slapping the UK down any chance it can get because of history – another fine example of the bullying, domineering and self-righteous behaviour of the USA that the world constantly has to put up with.)
I really do hope the hypocrisy is obvious to the many fine and educated people here.
We must resist and do everything we can to shrink government power and grow our personal rights and freedoms.
The risks of such technology are grave. It is hard enough, for example, running a distributed national police service while keeping a lid on corruption, miscarriages of justice, and incompetence. Willfully using technology to scale up human effects will risk amplifying bad actors to a national scale.
Suppose North Korea sends you a letter demanding that you take down a blog post joking about Kim Jong-un being chubby, because that's illegal in North Korea. Do you feel obligated to comply with that demand? After all, your blog could possibly be read by someone in North Korea.
I don't have anything against the UK. They've been our good buddies since a spat we had a couple hundred years ago. But I feel every bit as obligated to follow UK law as to obey North Korean law, which is to say, not at all.
Just because UK internet users are able to establish a network connection to 4chan’s server via ISP peering agreements does not mean 4chan are subject to UK law.
Second, again, 4chan does not operate in the UK. If someone in the UK purchases a 4chan pass, they have electronically transmitted their "money" over to the US to buy it. I would compare this to a UK citizen flying over to the US and buying a ticket, and bringing it back with them to the UK.
It's very clear, 4chan did not perform any business or transactions within UK jurisdiction.
Here here!
None of what Labour are doing makes sense to me from a "tHinK oF tHE cHilDreN!!" perspective because it's so easy to get round with a VPN.
It's far more plausible, to me anyway, that's it's really a push to remove anonymity for online activity.
The chances they eventually enforce the usage of their new Digital ID as the sole form of acceptable age verification in the UK seem pretty high.
> What should I do if there is confidential information in my response?
> You must provide all the information requested, even if you consider that the information, or any part of it, is confidential (for example, because of its commercial sensitivity).
> If you consider that any of the information you are required to provide is confidential, you should clearly identify the relevant information and explain in writing your reasons for considering it confidential (for example, the reasons why you consider disclosure of the information will seriously and prejudicially affect the interests of your business, a third party or the private affairs of an individual. You may find it helpful to do this in a separate document marked ‘confidential information’
> Ofcom will take into account any claims that information should be considered confidential. However, it is for Ofcom to decide what is or is not confidential, taking into account any relevant common law and statutory definitions. We do not accept unjustified or unsubstantiated claims of confidentiality. Blanket claims of confidentiality covering entire documents or types of information are also unhelpful and will rarely be accepted. For example, we would expect stakeholders to consider whether the fact of the document’s existence or particular elements of the document (e.g. its title or metadata such as to/from/date/subject or other specific content) are not confidential. You should therefore identify specific words, numbers, phrases or pieces of information you consider to be confidential. You may also find it helpful to categorise your explanations as Category A, Category B etc
> Any confidential information provided to Ofcom is subject to restrictions on its further disclosure under the common law of confidence. In many cases, information provided to Ofcom is also subject to statutory restrictions relating to the disclosure of that information (regardless of whether that information is confidential information). For this reason, we do not generally consider it necessary to sign non-disclosure agreements. Our general approach to the disclosure of information is set out below.
> For the avoidance of doubt, you are not required to provide information that is legally privileged and you can redact specific parts of documents that are legally privileged. However, where you withhold information on the basis that it is privileged you should provide Ofcom with a summary of the nature of the information and an explanation of why you consider it to be privileged. Please note that just because an email is sent to or from a legal adviser does not mean it is necessarily a legally privileged communication. Further information is available in paragraph 3.18 of our Online Safety Information Powers Guidance.
So ofcom's position is:
We want your data, you will give us your data, the GDPR does not apply to you, and if it does, we will decide whether it does. You must explain yourself to us. You must not redact anything. Even if you think you can redact anything (you know, because GDPR) you cannot redact anything. The GDPR and data protection laws do not apply because we have said so. You are required to break confidentiality agreements. We will not sign an NDA because we do not need to and we will not justify ourselves to you in any way shape or form.
We are the UK, and therefore, because we asked you to, you will comply with our every demand, whim and whimper. Otherwise we will continue to send strongly worded emails.
And fine you. And block you. Because that's the only thing we can do. And you best not advertise VPN's or we'll...Send another sternly worded email!
Good job UK!
(I cannot see how that paragraph is in any way legal, it must break the EU/UK's data protection laws in trying to compel disclosure of third party data. I cannot see any court in the UK ever upholding that paragraph if legally challenged as it's way above Ofcom's remit to be demanding confidential data. In any case, they should absolutely be required to sign NDA's)
That certainly used to be the case pre-2012. All the former hactivists have long since left. marriage, kids, real life, etc... Now it's mostly handfuls of edgy boys on cell phones in school and 4chan-GPT creating and responding to threads. I wish I were wrong. The site went mostly dead for about two weeks when USAID was defunded and had to shift funding sources then all the usual re-re-re-re-re-posted topics in /g/ returned. Some of them are on this site too ... inb4 they reply. Adding to this now the general public have the real names, IP addresses and locations of all the moderators so they are less likely to participate in doxxing.
There was a quote, "4chan is where smart people go to act stupid, facebook/reddit is where stupid people go to act smart". That probably needs to be updated.
I never said that. USAID manipulate narratives on all popular multimedia and social media sites. Anyone may post on 4chan and anyone with a 4chan-pass may use proxies and VPN's.
I wouldn't be surprised to read that on 4chan, but on HN ... we need some credible citations. :)
Speaking of misinformation, there are efforts to suggest USAID is actually US AID inferring they are some type of AID organization including putting "AID" in a different color in their logo. A few times a year they contribute small amounts of resources so they can get away with saying it but they are actually the United States Agency for International Development [3] originally meant to sway public opinion in other nations but started targeting people in the USA and its allies.
I think the take-away is that everything on the internet including references and citations are probably misinformation of misinformation of misinformation. I have sympathy for AI trying to ingest all of it.
[1] - https://unherd.com/newsroom/documents-reveal-us-government-a...
[2] - https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA14/20190521/109537/HHRG...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Inter...
Why be disingenous? Do you have something to lose by an honest search for the truth? Do you not want to look for it? Are you so sure that your narrow political group has the truth and no search is needed?
1. Raise the cost of conducting malign influence operations against the United States and its allies.
2. Close vulnerabilities that foreign adversaries exploit to undermine democratic institutions.
3. Separate politics from efforts to unmask and respond to foreign operations against the U.S. electoral process.
4. Strengthen partnerships with Europe to improve the transatlantic response to this transnational threat.
5. Make transparency the norm in the tech sector.
6. Build a more constructive public-private partnership to identify and address emerging tech threats.
7. Exhibit caution when reporting on leaked information and using social media accounts as journalism sources.
8. Increase support for local and independent media.
9. Extend the dialogue about foreign interference in democracies beyond Washington.
10. Remember that our democracy is only as strong as we make it.
It's significant that a political faction does everything it can to remove barriers to disinformation, for example using lawfare and other attacks to shut down research into it, using political power to disable the country's ability to protect itself.
i know, freedom of speech, it's your money and not mine, etc.
Least thats what happened with a scene I'm rather involved in, the threads in recent years became nothing but a cesspool of negativity and most people knew who was behind the constant drama. What people didnt expect was the leak revealed one of the mods was among the group constantly causing it.
how does this relate to what i said? i get the "we're a free platform where everyone can do everything and no one is responsible for anything", just a cheap excuse from my POV considering the unhinged, doxxy culture on there. sure, there are cute boards, nice. i am talking about the inhumane, unhinged slurry of shit.
"Sure my neighbour has a couple of cadavres in his cellar, but have you seen the pretty flowers on his balcony?"
but per usual you can't criticize 4chan in the slightest without its warriors appearing to defend it. i get it. 4chan did and does cool stuff. it also does absolutely disgusting things, surprisingly this always gets dismissed as 'it's only the couple of rogue boards which are crazy'.
i agree :)
> people buy their blue checkmarks there all the time
sadly, yes.
as someone who left reddit so long ago that they don't remember it and really does not care about it, please tell me what's worse on reddit than the constant xenophobic, transphobic and general *phobic stuff on 4chan.
phobic does not even do it justice, as it just straight up advocates for whole races or genders to kill themselves (b-b-b-but, i-i-it's just a joke, kawaii).
maybe this is my bias, could very well be. maybe i should give it a 10th chance and browse the more useful boards.
i guess /g/ would be a start, do you have other recommendations? i mean i'm open to change my mind. for me 4chan stands for alt-right pipelines, spreading far-right ideology online etc., so i just really have a sour taste in my mouth when thinking about it.
The Sarcophagus and the new containment building sure, I meant the original one before the accident.
Most threads still get plagued by a circlejerk of wannabe neonazis repeating shibboleths and transphobia at each other ad infinitum, or if you're lucky enough you find a crumb of quality discussion, often generals, often around derivative content from other platforms or popular media.
There are the rare productive generals that do have people curating information in meaningful ways, or even rarer actually doing things themselves. Far more often generals are just toxic loosely held together "friend" circles who cant get along anywhere else due to a perpetual veil of irony that can only survive in anonymous spaces, often attacking each other for little more than to stir the pot and keep conversation going. They'll still hold a superiority complex over their use of the site even though every single bad thing they'll say about others can be said for 4chan times 10.
Its not 2006 anymore, 4chan isnt a creator of internet culture, 4chan is a dumpster of the web, where art goes to die.
I've always held onto the suspicion that the distinction between left-wing and right-wing social views is more aesthetic than philosophical. All you have to do is tell a leftist "no", and they turn into everything they hate about their parents.
But I can see how this argument would make sense in the retarded mind of a lawyer. The first amendment doesn't give people rights: people already have those rights. Instead, the first amendment constrains the power of the US government to infringe upon those rights. It doesn't constrain the power of any other government.
Says who? Prove it. Go to Russia and say something bad about the government and see how well this right you think you magically get holds up.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/
Why would an US constitution amendment have any effect in Russia?