4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC

This is demagogy 101: invent or exagerate a problem, and offer yourself as the only true solution. It's a recipe as old as bread, nothing particularly US centric.

Banning 4chan is just part of the UK's efforts to prevent drought. Every jpg shared and string written helps drain the oceans:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/uk-government-ine...

4chan and websites like it have never been the problem.

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

I understand the people might wanna block porn on their kids mobile internet and home WiFi.

So why don't they mandate their ISP to implement this as an optional feature ?

Why do they instead try to boil the ocean by going after every website on the planet and outside of their jurisdiction?

The people in charge are largely hated by the electorate. They won by default effectively due to a quirk of how UK elections work (which was less of a problem when the monarch/aristocracy was still involved to counter balance things like this, but now that that's gone the state is effectively out of control.)

Unless by "democracy" you mean "sleepwalking administration everyone hates" the current UK government is unusually undemocratic.

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

> generally supported by the voters

you could say the same about the US... that doesn't make it right and it doesn't mean people aren't violently voting against their own best interests.

> AIUI, the UK is a democracy and these policies are generally supported by the voters.

When were UK citizens polled on these policies before politicians started enforcing them? And I think after Brexit, the UK government learned never to ask the opinions of their citizens again, because they will vote in direct opposition of the political status quo out of sheer spite of their politicians.

There are huge flaws with our current democratic systems: like sure we can vote, but after the people we vote for get into power, we have no control over what they do until next election cycle. So you can be a democracy on paper while your government is doing things you don't approve of.

Most people I talk to in the west, both here in Europe and in North America, don't seem to approve of what their government is doing on important topics, and at the same time they feel hopeless in being able to change that because either the issues are never on the table, or if they are, the politicians do a 180 once they get voted to power or forget about them because political promises are worthless and non-binding, meaning they lied themselves into power.

So given these issues ask yourself, is that really a true democracy, or just an illusion of choice of direction while you're actually riding a trolly track?

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

The UK hasn't elected a government on 50% or more of the vote since the 1950s:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/717004/general-elections...

It is hard to call minority rule democratic, really. I've no issue with your point on the OSA and think it is widely supported, but let's be realistic, representation in the UK is virtual on matters like this: widely supported, but mostly by coincidence.

> AIUI, the UK is a democracy

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

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

"What happened next..."

That's one domain down. Only 3,524 domains that just cropped up yesterday to go.

Never mind the fact that doing a Google search will surface pages on various wikis, git repositories, and other sites that conveniently list all of the mirrors.

Encrypted Client Hello and DNS over HTTPS.

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

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

Millions of British people are already engaged in a cat-and-mouse game against online censorship, for one main reason - football (soccer).

If you're a British football fan and want to watch every live televised match, you'll need to pay £75 a month for subscriptions to both Sky Sports and TNT Sports. That won't actually allow you to watch all of the matches that are played, because for weird historical reasons there's a TV blackout on matches played on Saturday afternoon - even if you've paid for your subscriptions, you'll only be able to watch about half of all league matches on TV.

Alternatively, you can pay some bloke in the pub £50 for a Fire TV Stick pre-programmed with access to a bunch of pirated IPTV streams and a VPN to circumvent blocking, or get a mate to show you how to do it yourself - no subscription, no blackout. As a bonus, you get free access to Netflix and Disney+ and everything else.

Sellers of dodgy Fire Sticks occasionally get caught and imprisoned, a handful of users occasionally get nasty letters from the Federation Against Copyright Theft, but it's too widespread to really stop. Practically every workplace or secondary school class has someone who knows the ins-and-outs of circumventing DNS- and IP-level blocking; the lad who showed you how to watch live football on your phone or get free Netflix will be more than happy to show you how to access adult sites without verifying your age.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/illicit-streaming...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_on_television...

https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls

The iOS instructions are the most onerous (IMO) but still easy enough to follow. It's 15 minutes of fumbling around for the non-technical person, then they're protected.

(Though, as others have pointed out, this is probably moot. The blocking is more effectively done by ISPs.)

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

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

It’s all a matter of incentives.

Ehh, if a youth of digital piracy has taught me anything, it's that people will develop the necessary computer literacy to get the entertainment they want. Even if they've completely failed to develop that same skill in the pursuit of self improvement.

I feel that says something about human psychology. Probably something very unpleasant.

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

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

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

Cloudflare isn't capable of that - it can only block downloading CSAM not uploading it. (Which means the moderators wouldn't be able to see it either.)

ironic how CF will host 4chan and 8chan but not kiwifarms

spain block CF every weekend to try to avoid football piracy. crazy, but its happening and nobody cares.

A similar argument can be made against the tariffs though.

US consumers will be paying the bulk of the tariffs through price increases. We do have representatives in Congress, they just weren't the ones imposing tariffs.

edit: as fun as silent down votes are, it would be interesting to hear where you might disagree

Technically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_representation

These tariffs may have representation, but constitutionally not from the right representative. Congress has the authority and only delegated it to the president in limited circumstances that don't apply. Trump says the ones on China are imposed for fentanyl being shipped in by mail and other means, and within days of saying that pardoned the largest opiates by mail operator in US history, Ross Ulbricht.

I don't feel represented on the national or international stage AT ALL. Maybe I'll stop paying mine.

And many of those tea importers/smugglers happened to be prominent figures in the future US government.

A coup was just good business.

Applications based on QUIC and/or P2P might be an option. QUIC is designed to not be as easy to filter as TCP + TLS. But then right now it can be blocked by just blocking UDP. But if majority of the internet would use QUIC then blocking UDP would mean blocking most of the internet so the governments wouldn't be so eager do nationwide firewalls (hopefully).

Well, it's also what has enabled foreign nations to spread misinformation, what enabled people to disappear into their own bubbles filled with falsehoods, etc. Since these things are now tearing at the fabric of democracy, I wouldn't say it's a clean win for the internet so far.

They will put you behind bars for years for using VPNs once they win.

Agreed--if the concern is data breaches, we can just ban 100% of databases, even those offline.

If it's outdated tech stacks, I'm sometimes in favor of those. Move fast and break things isn't always the best.

A Japanese man named Nishimura Hiroyuki bought and now owns 4chan. It's a mashup of their names.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroyuki_Nishimura

>Users on 4chan refer to him commonly as 'hiro' but also by the ethnic slur "gook moot", or the nickname "Jackie 4chan", "Hiroshima Nagasaki," or simply "hiroshimoot".

Most people in websites like HN have absolutely no idea what 4chan is, how it works, and what kind of things people post in there. It shows because every time you read a comment here about 4chan you are confused as to what website they may be talking about.

Actually 4chan does have accounts, otherwise you get extremely nasty captchas.

Anyways, image boards are ephemeral because the devs were incompetent and cheap, it wasn't some genius design, or design at all.

The stuff that Free Speech Absolutists like to say on twitter, judging by the date they included.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...

racism

They bragged about it for a while but after the bragging stopped my proof is only anecdotal. When the United States Agency for International Development was defunded the bots went quiet and shortly thereafter the site was hacked using a vulnerability that had been well known since 2012. It was peaceful for a few weeks prior to the hack and for a couple weeks after the hack. Most of the fake racists disappeared from /pol/ and /g/ stopped shilling products. It was just real people and the site was just as active as the hundreds of other chans. Best I can tell 4chan is a test site to fine tune social manipulation GPT's. All the bots, fake racists and shillers are back now suggesting to me the manipulators started getting funded by other means. Before someone says it, there are a few real racists there too. The bots attract and egg them on. Most moved to 8chan. I think that is part of the experiment and tuning. Perhaps some day the veil will be lifted.

I doubt GPT is posting NSFW content. I think /b/ is mostly teen boys on the cell phones at school. Prior to 2012 it was diverse porn but then it started to lean heavily into gay porn. I don't know what to make of that. Perhaps Pornhub does not have enough gay porn and they are filling the void?