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Comment by okasaki | Hacker News Reader

UK site blocking isn't done with DNS. I think they mess with routes at the ISP level. There's not much you can do except use a VPN.

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4chan uses Cloudflare. Blocking routes to Cloudflare may have an interesting impact unless CF are cooperating with the UK.

4chan could stop using CF but their moderators will have to step up their game as CF is being used to detect and block CSAM.

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

I think you may be right. [1] It's the same IP I've had in my hosts file for a long time.

[1] - https://whoisfreaks.com/tools/dns/history/lookup/4chan.org?t...

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

I doubt it heavily. CF has control over a large chunk of the global internet - they're not going to go thru their clients one by one and make sure they're doing age verification. That's absurd and far too expensive.

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.

Won’t it just be the UK telling Cloudflare to block 4chan specifically for the UK (or we’ll fine you too)?

Yeah that's option 3, for now. But they won't go after cloudflare in the general case because it's too risky IMO. And cloudflare will only comply to the absolute minimum they can get away with, because they can't burn money auditing every single customer behind cloudflare.

> they're not going to go thru their clients one by one and make sure they're doing age verification

no, they just drop customers when people complain that they host legal content they happen to disagree with (KF).

You're complaining that Cloudflare doesn't want to host a site that literally killed people?

I think if you want cloudflare to host your site, don't kill people with your site. That seems fair IMO.

I think if that were true, there would have at least been an attempt at a court case at the very least. But AFAIK every case they have been involved in, they've won. I am not defending their content, merely a right to exist, especially when you're not breaking any applicable laws.

If you want to talk about content that objectively breaks laws... 8chan hosts monkey torture videos.

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

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

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