4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence
alecmuffett.com
alecmuffett.com
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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
…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.
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.
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!
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 "
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same thing if I make a web request for content on a server overseas.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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??
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
What's to stop that same kid to buy a porno dvd? Or to download a torrent of a porno? Or a porn magazine?
[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
We must resist and do everything we can to shrink government power and grow our personal rights and freedoms.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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 know, freedom of speech, it's your money and not mine, etc.
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.