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4chan got hacked a while back because they were running a totally outdated software stack.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.
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 they were running a totally outdated software stack.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.
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 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
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.
And if it is the case... I guess it's so undetectable that it doesn't matter anyway.
Do you have proof of this?
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.
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)?
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.
My old mind is like, COME ON, DNS is just a PHONEBOOK. Just make another one, or do something better.
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.
