lol
This is why the US dropped tea into Boston to have it's own Freedom.
(But primarily done to protect colonial smugglers' and merchants' businesses which were being undercut by the English tea that was still cheaper than theirs, even with the small tax.)
the 3% tariff on Chinese tea was seen as oppressive
don't look at what has been imposed this year (without congressional approval)
I looked it up, and it was a 3 pence tax per pound. When tea was selling for 2 to 3 pence per pound. So yeah, a 100-150% tax combined with the fact that the East India Company was allowed to sell without paying the tax. That is very unjust and threatens their business a lot more than the tax alone.
When the mainstream swung to the left, 4chan shifted too and became more right-leaning, and took a stance of performative opposition to political correctness. A similar shift is happening now - away from right wing again as right wing is becoming more mainstream.
But we all know thinking of the children is a pretext.
A coup was just good business.
We should probably not forget that France gave nearly everything they had to the US to fund its revolution, what was a global power ended up in such an impoverished situation that it led to the French Revolution and ended the monarchy.
Not a small amount of support, if you are at the receiving end - certainly smells like good business.
Look at Musk who tried to work with the US President vs Trump who is the US president. Which one of them is gaining more?
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
Now, did they do that with the approval of the voters? Ostensibly, yes, but in reality, it's not that clear-cut.
This would be more like if the Thirteen Colonies had MPs and those MPs still voted in favor of the Stamp Act, or they voted to delegate the power to tariff to someone with a severe personality disorder.
For a long time now I've been banging the drum of "don't put power in the president's hands", because the downside has always been very clear to me: even if you trust the guy in office today, doesn't mean you will want the next guy to have that power. But people just don't care. They are quite happy to have unilateral power exercised by one man, because they don't bother to think through the consequences of such things.
edit: typo
Now gather a huge group of friends who are willing to fight for this cause (and for whose this cause is so important that they can accept ending in jail or even worse).
There are a lot of lawsuits about the executive branch doing things it supposedly doesn't have the power to do.
Generally the mood seems to be that only a SCOTUS ruling will potentially be taken seriously.
It worked pretty well as long as the ruling class were all pretty much on the same page about most things, with some "social issues" differences between the parties that they used for campaigning but never quite acted on. It works less well if different factions start competing and going against the status quo for real.
more likely, proving that this group of people never actually believed in anything.
"...the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign."
The fact that signposting "outgroup bad" is so psychologically rewarding, while nuanced discussions are more difficult, get less engagement from others, etc, is actually a critical reason we are where we are as a culture.
This isn't meant as a defense of or attack on GuinansEyebrows, more a self reflection of my own, similar behavior.
How will this work with chat control?
> "If Ofcom doesn't think this will be enough to prevent significant harm, it can even ask that ISPs be ordered to block UK access."
If you want to enforce stupid laws the burden should be upon you.
which might be the end goal - the internet, with freedom of communication, is a way that the plebs can organize and resist authoritarianism. And as countries are growing increasingly authoritarian (and i include UK here), they may be planning on preventing the old free internet that has enabled so much.
So as technologists here at HN, there needs to be a pre-emptive strike to prevent such an outcome from becoming successful. I would have said TOR, but for most people it's a non-starter. What other options are there?
We'll have 2 kinds of apps and websites.
One will be super nice products that only work in your country and you can't use it to communicate with outside people.
The other kind will work worldwide but because they would be spending so much more on compliance their product would be a bare minimum ad riddled crap.
It should be noted that the Online Safety Act is in fact not international, but UK-only.
Chat control (which isn't (yet) a thing) would not in fact lead to the outcome you describe.
Any company would be forced to comply or get the boot from EU market. Apple and Google will happily enforce that and that's probably good enough initially.
US Vendors could also decide to create an EU only version of their services.
4chan got hacked a while back because they were running a totally outdated software stack. It's been pretty much abandoned by its owner hiromoot.
If they aren't going to update the site for basic maintainance, they definitely aren't going to implement all this chat control/ age verification bullcrap.
I suppose a resistance to change is good when your competitors are burying their own graves.
Step 2, demand compliance.
Step 3, upon not hearing of compliance, levy fines.
Step 4, upon non payment of fines, declare in breach of (2).
Step 5, block site from UK using DNS, in the same manner as torrent sites etc.
5 was always the goal, 2 to 4 are largely just performative.
The UK acts like a madman on fire trying to attack everybody.
Just like Usenet, it will probably never die despite the antisocial controversies. Or at least in the case of 4chan, it will be replaced with another board-type system. As Twitch streamers are the contemporary version of AM radio, 4chan is the contemporary version of BBSes. You should be extremely skeptical of the idea that you could ever compete in the same space with a heavily commercialized product like a modern social network. Twitter is not a replacement, it never will be.
What terrifies me is that the EU is looking at UK’s OSA as a model, and will soon implement it here.
I'm old now, they don't :(
As much as I dislike the OSA, if you're not in the UK you can -- and probably should -- just ignore it. Unless you care specifically about interacting with users or businesses in the UK, in which case you probably need to comply.
Unlike the USA, we're generally incapable of successfully demanding everyone everywhere go along with whatever overreach we might think up.
I can understand why someone might think the UK still has as much influence as it did 50-75 years ago when you consider how prevalent that "UKCA" symbol is (the one that was introduced to replace the "CE" mark post-Brexit).
I'm sure the companies who put effort into adopting UKCA were really happy to have put in that effort :P. Even if it's I hope not as onerous as adopting it (or CE) from scratch, as they both have quite similar (if not originally identical?) requirements. It seemed more intended to give the impression of Brexit success than of actually making a difference to anything.
I imagine this would curtail a large proportion of mobile VPN usage.
Blocking desktop VPNs would be a bit more adhoc but it is possible to make it much harder for many people to download VPN clients.
[1] https://www.digitalsilk.com/digital-trends/mobile-vs-desktop...
I wonder if 4chan will simply decide to ban visitors from UK from visiting based on regulatory compliance. Sometimes when I accidentally clicked on a streaming sites that were not available in my country, their error page will be simply "This content isn't available in your country", but the URL contains GDPR, even though the site is not EU-based at all, and that I'm not visiting it from EU country either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation_and_...
Because it's art?
I'm with 4chan.
2. Wait for them to travel to the UK
3. ???
4. Profit
It's truly baffling stuff. If Roskomnadzor made demands of a UK-based website before dramatically fining them massive amounts daily (that will obviously never be collected), people would rightfully treat them as a laughing stock. Yet when Ofcom treats a foreign entity the same way, they somehow expect to be treated seriously.
Honestly 4chan treated this with far more respect than it was due by having their lawyers respond at all.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979869 ("Starlink in the Falkland Islands – A national emergency situation? (openfalklands.com)"—225 comments)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37645945 ("Saint Helena Island Communications (sainthelenaisland.info)"—145 comments)
>"Ofcom can instead ask a court to order other services to disrupt a provider's UK business, such as requiring a service's removal from search results or blocking of UK payments.
Lol
Starting with whatever allows criticism of their parody of a farce of so called leadership.
Criminalize this usage of UHF radio.
Well again I guess the UK never heard of VPNs, but they are trying to ban them still, it is like these pols have no clue how the internet works. They never learn these actions are like playing wack-a-mole.
The government itself has said it doesn't believe VPNs should be outlawed - that's even stated in the article.
Wanna bet that when they finally hear of them, they'll try to ban them (and mentions of VPNs, too)?
My old mind is like, COME ON, DNS is just a PHONEBOOK. Just make another one, or do something better.
Very similar to these dystopian foreign laws. But because they're US states 4chan will not be able to use the "we only recognize US law" defense.
I read this as a plain contradiction.
> they were running a totally outdated software stack.
And this as a convenient pretense.
The UK government has lost control of what happen in the physical world on their own island so now the bureaucrats play a fantasy game where they are gonna enforce their rules and dominion in their former colonies or the digital world.
Politics has become its own end: politicians have job security, and nothing changes except for the worse because constituents keep falling for the same tired shit.
It seems to me like said loss of control is largely the result of other actions by the same bureaucrats.
Police are arresting over 12,000 people each year for social media posts and other online communications deemed “grossly offensive,” “indecent,” “obscene,” or “menacing.” This averages to around 33 arrests per day.
These arrests are primarily made under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, laws which criminalize causing “annoyance,” “inconvenience,” or “anxiety” to others through digital messages.
Utterly insane.
https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru...
What do you mean by this?
Sorry but other countries are totally right to block whatever they deem to be USA shit.
See BlueSky just rolled out Terms ToS that the automated UN Safety (censorship) laws they will accept. This is an automated pipeline for the "censorship demand data notice" can be applied in an automated why. It is plumbing for automating censorship. See "DSA" part of those laws and how BlueSky's ToS is responding.
I feel like you are missing some words or have some typos because this isn't comprehensible English.
Visit a website and it was blocked by the "official" DNS? Declare the IP invalid in the webUI (or the browser plugin) of the local DNS and it will get you the previous IP from the database.
If you could come up with an alternative system to derive the IP address of desired remote host, or content, e.g. Magnet Link standard, you can just skip DNS and switch to that instead.
TLS can be a problem as a lot of moving parts of WWW now depends on DNS. But all of those can be solved.
Step 7: Rinse and repeat, fueling the domain-bureaucracy complex. Oceania has always been at war with the pirate bay!
There's really nothing that they can realistically do about VPNs, however.
4chan could stop using CF but their moderators will have to step up their game as CF is being used to detect and block CSAM.
Same way most attempts to stop piracy work. The people who are serious about getting around the blocks will find ways, but the less motivated will just give up (again, this is most people).
#2-#4 are the government trying to impose its national laws on an entity in a completely different country, operating entirely in that completely different country, with no business relationship whatsoever with your country. It's a futile and frankly rather insulting effort; no different from if Iran declared it was illegal for UK women living in the UK to leave the house without wearing a burka.
#5 is an authoritarian offense against your own citizens; trying to prevent them from being able to communicate with people in another country even if they want to do so.
I know it's an odd nitpick, consider it a compulsion of mine.
Think about the logic of KYC/AML laws - introduced wehn HSBC were fined $1.9 billion for laundering Mexican drug cartels and Saudi terrorist cell money. The impact and burden were almost wholly on the consumer, and did nothing to stop institutional bad actors being malfeasant on a macro scale. This was beautifully illustrated HSBC were caught doing the exact same thing 10 years later. And again. And again.
Fast forward to UK culture and politics today and how they're dealing with a globalised world watching them post-Brexit.
Labour (and to an extent the BBC) were pilloried for having an anti-semitism problem over the last decade, and Northern Ireland is typified by proscribed terrorist groups doing public marches with large public terrorist murals. Rather than mitigate any of the causes, or engage with the problem on a societal level, the UKs answer is to arrest 80 and 89 year olds pleading to stop infanticide in Gaza, and charge native-Irish speaking Rappers and Sundance Award Winning actors under the terrorism act
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/24/uk-police-de... https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/20/uk/irish-rapper-terrorism...
When looking at the current passion for control and restriction of the internet under the guise of combatting CSAM, its important to understand the context under which these disingenuous ploys arise.
US and European readers might not realise that the BBC, the House of Lords, and specific Political Parties in the UK have a very serious child-grooming and paedophilia scandal they've been trying to keep under wraps for 50 years that had the lid blown off by the revelations following Jimmy Saville's death. This is outside the major child-grooming and abuse scandals in the cultural pillars and cultural groups of the UK - e.g. Church of England, The Boy Scouts, the British Public School system etc...
I can't even go into the more recent and utterly appalling Rotherham debacle - and the dereliction of duty of both the police and the legal system - as it would simply take too long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
In 1981 Sir Peter Hayman - Diplomat and MI6 operative who held highly sensitive posts at the MOD and NATO - was called out for being a paedophile, using parliamentary privilege, as he had not been jailed after it was discovered he had left a package containing child pornography on a bus. The DPP and AG declined to prosecute, but Thatcher advised him that he would be stripped of his honours if was caught in a Public Toilet engaging in homosexual acts again, as he was in 1984.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_paedophile_dossier... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tory-mp-warned-o...
Now that the statute of limitations is running out, and official secrets acts files are due to be unsealed, its time for a pallaver about VPNs and protecting the children from the 'internet'. Given their age and new-found riches in a disenfranchised post-Brexit Britain, the ruling classes of the UK have never been in a more trepidatious position - some commentators even predicting civil war in the next 5 years - so time for some large-scale distractive measures.
Is the UK headed for civil war? | UK Politics | The New ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4urbhc_cOQk
And if it is the case... I guess it's so undetectable that it doesn't matter anyway.
Do you have proof of this?
I think the question we should be asking is "What about SSHing into a VPS?" and "What about seedboxes".
You can disguise a VPS as any server outside of your country, it could serve up an HTTPS page and no one snooping the connection would be any wiser.
That still leaves space for a lot of unpleasant, but plausible, alternatives:
* Banning under-18s from using VPNs; enforced by ordering Visa+Mastercard to deny UK-originating payments to VPN operators that don't verify their users' identity.
* Introducing a "VPN license"; initially only granted to large corporate users. All encrypted VPN traffic will be required to periodically broadcast their VPN license-number in cleartext so that ISP-based traffic monitoring will let it pass, otherwise the connection will be reset.
Help run a Snowflake proxy! You can do it from your browser.
>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".
But in the UK, what I read about is cases where it offended someone, like the case of a an autistic teenage girl who was arrested after she made a comment to a police officer, reportedly saying the officer looked like her "lesbian nana." Obviously this doesn't threaten government control or politicians, so it doesn't exactly fit the same mold.
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-would-government-ce...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/15nddel/autisti...
If it's outdated tech stacks, I'm sometimes in favor of those. Move fast and break things isn't always the best.
An outdated stack is a not-up-to-date version of Wordpress I foolishly set up because it was the last one compatible with a certain plugin used by a client on their website that I was recreating from the Wayback Machine.
The domain was put on a black list of dangerous sites (rightfully so, considering that the bot that hacked into it replaced the site with spam).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...
Is that comparable, for the UK? Maybe other EU members would agree?
As an American, I have trouble comprehending multiple governments colluding to enable mass government censorship, and expecting to stay in power. But, I know nothing of the European mindset.
As for censorship, because it's hierarchical, they'd have to remove an entire country code from the root servers.
This could be a non-native speaker, but the complexity of the attempted sentence structure leads me to think it is a native or fluent speaker who made some mistakes (I make those kinds of mistakes all the time.)
If native speakers have to talk to people of other languages to understand it, then it's not even English at that point. What it is, who knows.
banning selling VPN and VPN apps will solve 90% of the problem and that's enough
Do you think the general public NEEDS to know those things right now? Because that's what actually mostly drives what people put in the time to learn. This smug elitist "everyone is dumb except me the tech wizard" sort of comment shows up every such thread and it's deeply irksome. Most people are plenty intelligent and can easily learn things as trivial as setting up a VPN. For most that would just amount to "sign up for one of many turnkey services, install this app, scan this QR code" or even more commonly "ask one of the kids or techie person in circle of friends/neighbors to take care of it". All sorts of people working in a vast array of businesses use VPNs all the frickin' time, it's no big deal.
But there are endless such things in our lives and only so much time, so most people very reasonably triage and only put effort into things they enjoy personally or things they are forced to care about due to being important. Up until now, most people haven't needed to care in their personal lives, because they're satisfied enough with the fairly open internet experience we've had. If that changes, and it matters to them, the tools exist to easily deal with it and people will easily learn it.
Setting a VPN is 100% not trivial, I know that because I recently set up a wireguard vpn on a VPS. Not impossible, sure, but out of the reach for a normal person.
Sure, one can ask a techie friend (if one's has a techie friend capable of self-hosting a VPN). So now instead of the gov ban covering 90% of the population, it covers what? 85%? 80%?
All self-hosted tools will not make a difference. Selling turnkey tools will be banned.
You can't win against the government. Not in 2025.
The public doesn't need to know how it works behind the scenes to use it. It just needs to be packaged in a way so that they don't need to know. Which it will.
Fair point. As you say regarding files, it's easy to vastly overestimate the familiarity with computing concepts when you're writing anything in the orange bar website.
Remind me again, what the problem they're trying to solve is?
Not for the masses and not sustainabl,
It's always easier to have a paper say "do this" than finding a tech to circumvent it.
Politics is fundamentally people business and involves lots of people who can't or won't understand the details of what is going on but who may still be interested in the end results.
So the lack of ability to solve this politically has made technological solution the only out.
The problem is when tech people try apply tech to political problems crudely, without understanding or without caring about the human aspect of it. You need sociologists and political scientists to study what impact a technology will actually have, and normal people to see how they feel about it, not just programmers who may incorrectly assume that e.g. designing an open and secure protocol will automatically and directly map to creating an open and secure society.
For example, in this case, the blunt approach is "How do we design a protocol that can't be censored/monitored?" The answer is TOR, which as parent comment noted, is socially a non-starter. But maybe a better approach could be, "How do we design a protocol which removes the incentives/makes it politically untenable for people to censor/monitor it?"
One way you might approach this is to create a system that's organically useless for bad actors. Clearly different platforms have different levels of "safe" and "awful", due to their structure. Could we design a platform with such strong prosocial incentives that authoritarians are not able to fearmonger about it?
Another approach could be to chain common citizen rights to authoritarian interests. For example, the US government cannot backdoor AES, because doing so would also compromise their own communciations. Can we make it so authoritarians are forced onto the same boat as us for our other communication technologies too, and therefore disincentivized from weakening our privacy because doing so would damage theirs too?
ActivityPub, ATProto, and blockchain could also be seen as technologies that are designed to create a social structure that incentivizes specific political outcomes, with varying degrees of success.
It's people business. So you design around questions like "Where is this technology going to put different types of people, and how are they going to feel about that?"
The option here is to stop trying to solve everything with tech when a lot of the time it's not viable and actively makes things worse. Start putting that time into the non-tech options. Not as fun though, is it?
The adoption speed is critical, exactly because of what you're saying. It's easy for a wannabe authoritarian to make a decision to "just block all of ECH and QUIC traffic" if that breaks 0.8% of all traffic - but not if that breaks 80% of all traffic.
Server could have multiple QUIC output nodes to migrate connection in case one of them is blocked. The output node network can be shared by many servers and DoQ endpoints so blocking it entirely would scare government.
This solution still needs to connect to some known IP in order to establish connection first. And the same goes for DoQ. To mitigate this we can use Encrypted Client Hello as other commenter mentioned and connect to a pool instead of single IP.
In such a "splinternet" scenario, it'd be a matter of setting up PTP links across borders. As long as a few people do so, it becomes one big network again.
Almost certainly. Relevant donor tie from the Tiburon Trestle Trail Project https://imgur.com/a/3JAW9ku (2017)
The easiest way to accomplish this is to add the address into your .hosts file (as sibling post says) and just use the name.
There are places more toxic than 4chan but skill levels don't compare, and 4chan and 2chan also share nothing culture wise, so it must be in the architecture.
Anyways, image boards are ephemeral because the devs were incompetent and cheap, it wasn't some genius design, or design at all.
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.
And it’s all because of corporate interests at IETF.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/uk-government-ine...
The alternative to that is either:
1. UK blocks cloudflare (unlikely, come on now)
2. UK gives cloudflare a pass (fairly common)
3. Somewhere in-between. Maybe UK cares about highly visible people behind cloudflare like 4Chan but not others.
no, they just drop customers when people complain that they host legal content they happen to disagree with (KF).
[1] - https://whoisfreaks.com/tools/dns/history/lookup/4chan.org?t...
It blocks mainstream vpns, but that's about it. Behind the scenes, who knows, but it's not as obviously full of low effort bait as Twitter, and no account is necessary.
> And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
Right now most of the privacy violations are covert and everyone is dishonest. Nobody reads TOS or EULA, Google just say "pinky promise we're not mean!", etc.
But there's no way to automate scanning someone's face to view a Garfield comic.
Governments are getting far too cavalier. They're flying too close to the sun here. They've already gotten away with murder and then some, they should quit while they're ahead.
Their greed will be their downfall. People will eventually push back.
It is elitist though to not go into why that's the case and instead just assume it's because, what, people are dropping in IQ? A lot of (though not all granted) the cause boils down to the same reason as mechanical skills (engine repair and such) atrophying: lack of need. Things have gotten very polished for the average use case. Most people don't need to know all the inner workings, but that's not necessarily a bad thing right? I can remember easily in the 90s and much of the 00s when many OS crashed if you looked at them funny and had some pretty funky edges, and the state of the art advanced so fast diving into the internals was important. And it was great fun for me and I miss a lot of it. However it made life a lot harder for someone who only wanted an appliance tool, and now that's the changed. But while when comfortable a lot of us have a tendency to coast, as we see in disaster after disaster folks can get extremely inventive and learn in a real hurry if they experience enough motivation.
>Sure, one can ask a techie friend (if one's has a techie friend capable of self-hosting a VPN).
lol what? Why on earth would that be necessary?
>Selling turnkey tools will be banned.
I'm American. The british crown can kiss my red, white and blue ass. Just as with tor, I will contribute for free just to stick it in their authoritarian eye. As well as services from huge parts of the rest of the planet that aren't the UK, there is no reason there won't be fully open source apps where you put in a VPS API key and it does the rest and spits out a profile for you the end. On the contrary that's technically trivial, but there hasn't been that kind of need amongst the developed world.
The UK government will have to go all the way to the level of China for it to work like you're claiming, if they're even capable of that.
Nowhere in my comment did I mention or assumed IQ, that's all you.
>Selling turnkey tools will be banned
you can't escape the state financial control, it's impossible
sure, you can do it on a very very small scale, but nothing that would have any impact
https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...
It is hard to get good data on this, but it is probably a combination of overzealous policing (which is indeed bad) and an increase in arrests for behavior that arguably is a police matter, such as domestic abuse, harassment, etc. I would not be surprised to discover that there is more online harassment now than there was in 2010.
There is simply more people online now than in 2010.
> The DHS statement says that Ms Kordia had overstayed her student visa, which had been terminated in 2022 "for lack of attendance". It did not say whether she had been attending Columbia or another institution.
I think it's entirely different arresting people who overstay their visas or people on student visas that disrupt academic life. The UK regularly arrests citizens for offensive memes. There have even been cases where someone got a harsher sentence based on a tweet about sexual assault than the person who actually committed a sexual assault.
You can feel any way you'd like about free speech in America, but let's not conflate the two as being equal.
If you are gonna end up being arrested for protesting or giving your opinion, it is funnier to do it in the streets than on facebook. And it is probably much easier to be anonymous nowadays in the streets with a mask than on social media.
This is probably why the UK went in flame recently, the government cracked down on the Internet and people just went in the streets instead.
I think if you want cloudflare to host your site, don't kill people with your site. That seems fair IMO.
If you want to talk about content that objectively breaks laws... 8chan hosts monkey torture videos.
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...
Make sure your ad blocker is working. Then it’s just a matter of finding the best stream, extracting the playlist, and opening VLC.
I documented [0] some useful tricks for this technique and the comments also include more useful snippets and bookmarklets.
[0] https://gist.github.com/milesrichardson/4661c311199b98023701...
People don’t want to ly for content, that’s as old as the hills.
I don’t do sport, and I wouldn’t fund such a terrible exploitative industry (televised sports is all about getting people hooked on gambling), but I’ve certainly spent that much for entertainment I do like in the past - and far more. A night at the theatre will cost a lot more than subscribing to all the sports channels. A weekly cinema visit too.
good that you ignore the actual point of the comment that you replied to
>That won't actually allow you to watch all of the matches that are played, because for weird historical reasons there's a TV blackout on matches played on Saturday afternoon - even if you've paid for your subscriptions, you'll only be able to watch about half of all league matches on TV.
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.)
You and I have very different ideas of what "non-technical" means. If it involves anything beyond pressing "download" on the app store, it's out of reach of the vast majority of users.
Is that really so complex the average person can’t do it? It’s less complex than sending an email.
It’s all a matter of incentives.
I feel that says something about human psychology. Probably something very unpleasant.
Personally I have no problem with people acquiring shows which are otherwise unavailable, as long as it’s not simply an excuse not to pay, which it so often is.
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?
Why is this allowed? Why aren't there laws in place to hold politicians accountable for the promises they make to get elected?
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?
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-1-1-1-1-for-families...
The correct solution (in addition to bill layer control and arguably compulsory support for an “over 18” tag in dns which would be easy enough to implement for the same sites that currently demand over 18s, would be to help parents utilise parental controls (having recently been through it with Minecraft and fortnight it was a nightmarish gordian knot.
The hand wringing about how evil vpns are is the same. My son can’t install mullvad or whatever on his phone without my approval thanks to apple’s parental controls. I assume android has the same.
The goal has never been to empower parents though
'The UK’s Online Safety Act didn’t come from Parliament or the public'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ2AokZujC0 (watch from about 4:20)
It was debated at length in parliament and it was voted into legislation by parliament. It was developed by a Tory government and has been implemented by a Labour one.
I don't like the OSA but the whole 'robber baron' organisation thing in that video is just .. well Andrew Carnegie died more than a hundred years ago. He funded a lot of charitable organisations including one that has funded work in this area.
Let's be careful here, the point in favor of democracy is not that the majority knows best, but rather if that people are to be subject to laws, then those same people should have an equal share in determining what those laws are. IOW, the point of democracy is to give the people what they deserve, and no more.
With liberal democracies, I believe it's more about self-determination or fair representation than who knows best. The point is to prevent tyranny, including majority tyranny.
There can be no liberal democracy without the protection of human rights and the of law.
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.
In a monkey's paw moment for everyone who dislikes only having effectively two parties to choose from, this may soon be changing as Reform is poised to overtake the Tories.
Arguably, minority rule is more democratic than majority rule, because minority rule isn't "the minority does whatever they want".
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.
First they came for 4chan and I said nothing, because good riddance!
This is not a slippery slope; this is a spring trying to return to the center. The harder the resistance at the extremes, the more energetic the oscillation will be, so if we want to minimize that, work on undermining the intolerable extremes.
The sheer anarchy of the libertarian mindset that much of this site supports is not a good thing.
I wasn't trying to imply that at all... I just meant that voting for age verification laws themselves were against peoples' best interest, not the blocking of any particular website.
In any case... sites like 4chan itself existing (ignoring any actual moderation issues like CP/etc. or other clearly illegal stuff), to me, simply means that free speech still exists, and I will defend their (anyone's) right to exist and to free speech if I have to. It doesn't mean I agree with/support them or their content though.
Absolutely, 100% incorrect. You obviously don't approve of 4chan's content or mission, but that's not the point. It benefits everyone when anyone takes a stand because their legal rights are under attack.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
>This is not a slippery slope
Again, incorrect.
Any type of punishment for 4chan due to their legal content is damn close to the definition of "slippery slope". You're familiar with the "anti-slippery slope" argument already ("First they came for 4chan and I said nothing, because good riddance!"), so you're obviously cogent enough to understand what you're saying.
>The sheer anarchy of the libertarian mindset that much of this site supports is not a good thing.
This is not for you to decide. Your mindset is why free speech laws must exist in the first place.
The House of Lords disagrees and the Monarch disagree. Sometimes they cosplay as a democracy.
This action to prorogue was however later deemed unlawful by the Supreme Court on the 24th September 2019 (2). See recent changes to senior members, and subsequent rulings on matters of state importance by the Supreme Court for a look at what happens when they try to correct parliamentary actions by the ruling party. They have been singing from the governmental hymn sheet ever since.
Whither democracy? Whither justice?
1. https://labourheartlands.com/parliament-has-been-prorogued-a...
2. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/decision-of-the-supreme...
In this case the ministers know what the problems are. The policy is not new or unique to the UK and it has been done better in Louisiana of all places:
https://reason.com/2024/03/18/pornhub-pulls-out-of-seventh-s...
> The difference is in the details of complying with Louisiana's law. Verifying visitor ages in Louisiana does not require porn sites to directly collect user IDs. Rather, the state's government helped develop a third-party service called LA Wallet, which stores digital driver's licenses and serves as an online age verification credential that affords some privacy.
Actually, land reforms were spectacularly popular—and very successful—in many countries like Guatemala or Vietnam (coincidentally, two places that were invaded by the US in an attempt to revert those reforms, one successful and the other not).
Unless by "democracy" you mean "sleepwalking administration everyone hates" the current UK government is unusually undemocratic.
From my anecdotal evidence, is that it's fucking stupid and hated
However opinion polls consistently put support for the “anti porn” bill up high amongst multiple demographics.
The cause for this is a lack of computer literacy, in both government and the population, but that doesn’t really matter.
Consider how badly off "will you vote R or D in 7 days" polling is in the US, even with the top national experts on the problem. Opinion polls are much, much more troublesome.
I’m reading this as you saying that the system is worse now that the monarchy and aristocracy have less power. Is that correct? If so, how do these unelected groups make it better?
I said it's less democratic. That's not necessarily less bad unless you believe democracy is the ultimate measure of fitness for a state.
The electorate legitimately did not want these people or their policies, they effectively weren't given a choice. To call that democracy delegtimizes democratic elections.
As we saw in the case of the Winter fuel Payments : if a policy is unpopular with voters, it is abandoned. The Online Safety Act is popular, so it will stay.
The winter fuel payments were very unpopular with a very vocal part of the population, while any benefits were very thinly distributed on the rest of the electorate.
The cost of the online safety act is very small and almost invisible distributed across everyone. Any major effects (leaking of personal data) can be blamed on the victims (most people assume that only perverts will have to verify their age). Another effect where security conscious people will be excluded from online discussions is probably in invisible (if not a benefit) to most people.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-...
> To what extent do you support or oppose the introduction of age verification checks to access platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and pornography?
Most people say support, presumably thinking "yeah those things seem bad and kids shouldn't be able to look at them".
> How likely or unlikely would you be to submit any proof of age (e.g. a photo/ video, photographic ID, using banking information, digital ID wallets etc) in order to access... Messaging apps / Social media websites / Online discussion forums / User-generated encyclopedias / Dating apps / Pornography websites
"Ok no I don't like this method, and obviously I'm not going to submit a photo of myself to look at porn." I don't think anybody hearing the first question was thinking "yes I support age verification even if it means blocking Wikipedia".
> And how confident, if at all, are you that the Online Safety Act will prevent children and people under 18 from seeing illegal and harmful material online?
Nothing contradictory about supporting a policy that you don't think will completely work, especially after realizing that you yourself would probably try to get around it.
I think combining or switching the first two questions might produce very different results.
"To what extent do you support or oppose the introduction of age verification checks to access platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and pornography"
is like asking me
"To what extent do you support the detainment of people suspected of theft"
and then concluding I support vigilante mobs dragging people out of their homes when I answer in the affirmative. The means IS the question - the sad meltdown we're all about to witness as the UK government realises their lack of jurisdiction is because the actor is wrong, not because the end is wrong.
The phrasing should be "To what extent do you support or oppose the British government enforcing the introduction of age verification checks to access platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and pornography"
Forcing major device manufacturers to implement these content blocks to a certain level of rigour is the obvious, enforceable, effective, minimally invasive way to achieve this entirely reasonable goal. I can believe that pornography consumption by preteens is not a good thing and that this implementation is stupid at the same time.
Instead they seem to have conflated B with A. Maybe they are afraid that any criticism on this method is interpreted as attack on doing anything at all for kids watching porn on the internet or even twisted into some kind of endorsement.
George Carlin used the analogy of restaurant to modern democracy. You have the appearance of choice because you are handed a menu where you can choose liberal or conversative or green party, etc. But all of the actual policies and laws are drawn up by the same chefs in the back and you eat what you are served.
The left wing has been vote split for some time, now the tight wing is getting vote split.
It’s not a fair characterisation to say that the UK government is popular, the last actually popular government was probably Tony Blair (though many regret him in hindsight), though Boris had his followers I guess.
https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...
It's always slightly surprising to see Americans online react to this thinking there is some Illuminati conspiracy happening. Britain and Europe are not the US, we don't have much of an interest of having 4chan dictate public policy.
It's also a good lesson in how effective platforms like Twitter can be in manipulating public perception, given that the same users now seem to be able to openly agitate over there.
Too late by about nine years at the very least.
> ...this may soon be changing as Reform is poised to overtake the Tories.
How long has the Farage-shaped tail been wagging the dog? It probably was before 2010. He managed notch many wins without winning a majority government by getting the 2 major parties - especially the Tories - to adopt his parties' positions.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1478478/uk-election-resu...
The left wing is seeing Labour voters shift to the Lib Dems, Greens, Jeremy Corbin's new party, and Reform.
[1] https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/services_lsdm.html (April)
[2] https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/blogs/ec_vipoll_20250625... (June)
[3] https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html (July)
[4] https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/blogs/ec_rrose_20250731.... (August)
Unfortunately, voters rejected that change quite strongly, and that probably set the trend for a while against further steps to proportional or more direct democratic systems.
AV is a type of transferable vote system, and a step closer to proportional representation. In AV you get two votes, so you can vote for your preferred candidate first (who may be niche but represents you better), and your tactical-vote candidate second (who doesn't represent you but are better than the even-worse candidate). As opposed to the current FPTP system, where you often have to tactical-vote for candidates who don't represent your interests much, and your actual preference is not recorded at all.
Even though AV is far from ideal, if voters had said yes then I think just the symbolism of changing the system, would have resulted in a greater inclination to change the system again later.
AV, STV and PR have been debated a number of times in the UK parliament in the last centery, so it does keep coming up, and will likely come up again, eventually.
Both major parties united in a ridiculously aggressive campaign for the No (there were literally, I mean literally, billboards equating the electoral reform to killing babies).
Incorrect. Source: I had a checking account before I was 18.
For example, if you have a stack of explicit DVDs and it becomes apparent that your child has access to them, then you will likely get a visit from social services and potentially suffer legal consequences up to and including removal of custody. I honestly have no idea why stuff on the internet is treated differently. Internet providers are already required to check that you are over 18 (much as the person selling you those DVDs is) - if you then share the content that this makes available with a child, then you should be held responsible in the same way. It was sufficient with print, VHS, Sky TV, etc. - why not the internet?
In all fairness, I have seen quite a few people explicitly arguing "I want kids to watch porn" of late.
> so most people just didn't vote because they didn't see anyone running to vote for.
Probably shoulda voted then
The last time the Lib Dems got a taste of power in 2010 it was by going into coalition with the Tories at the cost of dumping key election pledges. Next election they were dumped by the public and their leader Nick Clegg was hired by Meta - presumably for his connections as he has no particular talent to sell.
I say that those who didn't vote knew it was a foregone conclusion and would have voted in the same proportion as those who did vote.
What percent of the electorate voting for the biggest party would be acceptable to you?
Obviously if you tell people you're doing something to protect children and that's its only for porn or whatever they'll say yes. You've primed them - you immediately put their minds on the focus of negative things like porn and children getting hurt. Nobody wants children hurt.
You need to ask the question more generically. "Do you support age verification to access certain categories of websites?"
Something tells me the numbers of agreeance will fall.
I agree. It's not a very robust solution, but it's better than nothing at all .
And it's annoying sometimes. One thing I found is that it somehow forces Google safe-search, which appears to block some non-pornographic search results.
Bureaucrats are the ones making the rules of the game we have to play. So why shouldn't we blame them?
But the lobbyists work for the rich and the power. They are ultimately the chefs and ones who decide what the rules will be.
A successful and well functioning democracy requires constant monitoring, involvement and pressure from citizens to hold it accountable, otherwise it gets captured by monopolies and malicious actors with money, who will steer politics in their favor instead of the citizens' favor.
The problem with that is that most citizens today are too burdened by the cost of living and sorting their own lives to have time and energy for political activism. The only ones who do are retired boomers and they only care that their pensions and house prices are going up.
Yes, but when you ignore citizens' demands for too long, they will then over-correct in the opposite direction: see Hitler, Brexit, Trump, AFD, LePenn, Meloni, etc. History has proved this to be correct 100% of the time.
>For example the progressive movement in the US
Can you provide more details, I'm not an US citizen.