> I've also gone back to Ofcom explicitly telling them the UK was now geoblocked (twice now) and I received a response that this was insufficient.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1rk690v/i_ru...
Ofcom really thinks that their laws apply globally.
How silly of them. Obviously, only the US jurisdiction can do that.
Not a big loss, but something to keep in mind. There is a risk the UK has long memory.
The cries of a long-since-dead empire slowly fading into geopolitical irrelevance.
So it really wouldn't be hard for the same legal framework that restricts age to happen in the US. It just takes compliance on our part. The UK is just one tentacle of the legal bureaucracy. It wouldn't surprise me if a bill appears called the Online Child Safey Act or something like that soon and it happens to coincide with a bunch of issues Ofcom raises in this lawsuit.
Just 2 months ago Italy tried to ban domains globally too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46555760
Otherwise each company, everywhere in the world, no matter how small, has to follow the arbitrary demands of every nation state? How does that make any sense?
I don’t recall the outcome exact outcome or what has happened since, but I think Gab basically told them off in a similar way, i.e., “ummmm, this is America, silly Europeans” and may have even submitted the foreign demand letters to Congress and for whatever reason may have still geo-blocked the UK and at the same time has blocked VPN IPs because they found it effective at blocking pornography and the bad actors who emanated from a certain country. The effect though is that they’ve effectively barred the UK from participating in free speech in America if that’s still the current state of things. I suspect that is exactly what the tyrannical forces have worked out too, and which is why they’re demanding something other than just geo-blocking.
If you agree to VPN blocking, you effectively enforce the geo-block as well as unmasking users for five-eye de facto domestic surveillance. But they only came after those horrible horrible “Nazis” that insist on their rights to free speech, “…and I did not speak out.”
The point is, regardless of what one thinks of Gab, the powerful and tyrannical elements clearly go after those the mainstream population hates due to the two minutes of hate, so to say, which people have been conditioned to loathe; where the tyrants refine their tactics and the strategy, and practice and normalize the process for when they are ready to go after the mainstream populace… which seems to be approaching. And then the mainstream people are shocked and surprised because they believe it all came out of nowhere, when they just ignored it all along.
This of course is not just limited to the digital realm, the tyrannical forces will always come after scapegoats, and the exposed and low hanging fruit, or and even deliberately cause the “troublemakers” to identify themselves so they can be tracked, monitored, and picked off if need be.
This is not new, and people seem to fall for the same tricks over and over and over.
- to conduct a suitable and sufficient illegal content risk assessment;
- to use proportionate measures to prevent individuals encountering priority illegal content;
- to use proportionate systems and processes to minimise the length of time priority illegal content is present;
- to swiftly take down illegal content when it becomes aware of it;
- to specify in its terms of service how individuals are to be protected from illegal content; and relating to content reporting and complaints procedures in relation to illegal content.
That's the only method that will scale, can be done "swiftly" and won't have the government kicking down your door if someone posts something illegal on your platform while you're sleeping or on vacation.
You need to buy it from compliance companies which lobbied for the law in the UK, run by ex regulators.
It really paints this authority in a special light if they believe they can force their rules on everyone on the planet. To be honest, I think this needs immediate psychological evaluation because you have to have a very distorted view on reality. Even if you give a lot of leverage to authorities being detached. But certainly the authority is very overwhelmed with itself and the world.
But while we are at it I demand that Ofcom removes it presence from my internet too. Perhaps flood some DNS server, so ofcom.uk to point to 4chan...
People really should turn to medical professionals and not internet strangers for help.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
Its like telling people don't talk to friends and family only go to a professional. This is how we end up in a worse mental crisis.
For your own safety, you are to only discuss your health with NHS certified healthcare providers and no one else. Doing so with others can lead to unprovoked, unsanctioned and dangerous anecdotes, advice and memes. Worse, you might find community and make friends with people who have similar life experiences, which can distract from your state sanctioned treatment plan. This extends to your friends and spouse, they might mean well, but they are not medical professionals.
Your health is your private matter, let's keep it that way!
Oh well, the uncensored web from my NL VPN still looks the same.
When OSA was announced I really expected the US to state clearly that they wouldn't let UK to threaten US citizens with millions of fines if they practice their rights to Free Speech.
Because this is what's happening, the UK is making open threats against US citizens when they practice their rights to Free Speech. See e.g. Lobsters' take on it: they just wanted to have a webforum in the US but they couldn't because a foreign country threatened them with huge fines. No protection from the US.
"Just geoblock UK" seemed like a good enough in practice solution, although it is more action needed than I'd prefer.
Ofcom is probably full of non technical people who have been given a specific set of (stupid) instructions including that if its on the internet, its a product being sold to the UK.
Curious time to complain about the UK doing this (*points broadly eastwards*)
"Dear Sirs, In regards to your recent request, can I refer you to the reply given in Arkell and Pressdram (1971). Yours etc,"
If America introduced a law like this, especially the strong, late-aughts, pre-Trump America, I bet most countries would just cave in, just like most caved in when copyright and AML/KYC laws were concerned. Hell, Swicerland basically abolished anonymous bank accounts, something which the country was famous for, just because the US wanted them to. I don't think we'll see a similar resolution here.
And no, you don't do it because of some holy quest to protect minorities. Minorities never suffered from too much of freedom of speech. The opposite however...
It may dawn some people at some point that if you demand a certain behaviour from others, you might be neither liberal nor progressive.
Trump can easily point the finger at the EU because it lets him do that. I think the EU cannot take responsibility for itself or other if it doesn't correct course.
It is also accepted that enforcement can be an issue if the law is an absurd overreach (like the UK criminalising smoking in the streets of Paris).
They learned from the US
And enforceable. Let them fail but they have money behind them,
Meanwhile the UK is gnawed by corruption, scams and whatnot, yet there is no one able to do anything about. But harassing some Canadian forum? First to serve!
What, Ofcom is trying to restrict viewing outside UK?
Not only is this enforceable, it has been enforced, and people have been assassinated without charge for this crime.
One I remember was a site hosting streams of the 2022 football world cup. Or a number of Iranian-affiliated news sites just last year. Or offshore gambling websites in 2021.
People going "Those Crazy Brits! Thank God That'll Never Happen Here!" seem pretty ill-informed.
We were too small and bent, also US customers were 30% of the total which made it a non choice.
The kind of vague phrasing that makes one immediately suspicious. What were these 'several countries'? Iran? Cuba? North Korea?
> also US customers were 30% of the total which made it a non choice
You're literally operating in the US then. It's obvious US laws would apply if you're serving US customers.
They also force ISPs to block IPs [0].
I feel trying to say that's not "blocking websites" is playing games with words, and the results are functionally the same to the "average" user.
The fact that the US effectively claim juristiction over the root DNS system is a more a geopolitical power thing rather than a legal restriction.
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/us-court-orders-every-isp-in-the-un...
Well the second part of that is ill-informed but the first part is just... informed?
As far as the US seizing sites, does that happen when the site is hosted outside of the US and without the cooperation of authorities where ever it is actually hosted? I don't think so but I'm happy to be proven wrong there.
It's fucking stupid that an American site that is afforded free speech protection in its own country has to deal with the UK acting like a tyrant.
If you are to sell a toy in the UK you must be a British company. (and must pay VAT and comply with British safety standards).
If a consumer buys from overseas and imports a product then they do not have British consumer protections. Which is why so much aliexpress electrical stuff is dangerous (expecially USB chargers) yet it continues to be legally imported.
Just, no british retailer would be allowed to carry it without getting a fine.
Ofcom has a bad handle on web requests. Clients connect out. 4chan et al aren't pushing their services in anyone in the UK.
What Ofcom wants is for their consequences to happen extraterritorially.
It's a wonder why AliExpress flies under the radar. I assume it's impossible to keep up with it all.
The UK's comically over-engineered electrics are no match for some of these plug-in-and-die sketchy USB chargers from the Far East.
DiodesGoneWild on YouTube does teardowns of many of these incredibly poorly constructed deathtraps.
In hindsight it is dumb to buy random pills and take em.
Sometimes it self resolves - as you contributed here, yes, countries limit and interfere and fine other countries businesses, all the time!
I don’t know what yours means though. What electrics are made in the UK? How are they over engineered?
It's a stupid law and Ofcom are stupid. I wish that Labour hadn't continued with implementing the Tories authoritarian law, but then Labour seem to be a Tory-Lite party but with just less blatant corruption.
I am not sure it is legal to import dangerous electrical equipment to the UK.
It may be unenforced, that doesn't make it legal.
>The latest image is not the first picture of a hamster lawyers for 4chan have sent in reply to Ofcom
amazing. same energy as the pirate bay telling dreamworks to sodomize themselves. i cant help but laugh at the absurdness of it.
> Messages sent to 4chan's press email went unreturned. One of the two dozen or so alleged moderators purportedly exposed in the hack wrote back using their 4chan email address to say that the site had released a "video statement." The user then pointed Reuters to an unrelated, explicit four-minute video montage. A request for further information was followed by a link to a different video with similar content.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/notorious-i...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation#Lower_bounds,...
I used to go on a curated version of 4Chan via Telegram. Yes there is a lot of racism (although it flies in every direction, between every ethnicity you could imagine) but there is also (due to the anonymous nature) some genuinely interesting discussions. I remember one thread about aircraft carriers being of no use being debated by US and UK submarine officers.
There are also some genuinely funny bits. There was a guy in Greece who had found out that as long as he never graduated, he could live a basic life for free at university. His nickname was Dormogenes.
To mock and ridicule, yes. to speak your mind, sure, But first and foremost to discuss between true equals, because you can only be judged by what you write, because the value you are bringing to the discussion comes from your words and not from your reputation as the real-world human you are.
Being free to discuss controversial topics without having repercussion to your job or family (which is why doxxing was so frowned upon back then)
Being free to do some stupid childish fun, just for laughs.
Something we still had when it was just forums, even though we did have accounts they did not represent our whole persona, and we could be different people on different platform.
Something that was almost lost for good when normies invaded the internet due to social networks. It's not completely lost yet, and we must fight to keep it.
I remember him. Sadly he got evicted in the end. F.
"Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point"
4chan has produced some hilarious/interesting stuff, and they have also driven people to suicide. i suppose it is up to everyone individually to make the value judgement there.
As has Reddit, Facebook, etc.
Bad things occasionally happening on a platform doesn't make the platform/site inherently bad.
Trying to make a "value judgment" and boil the whole thing down to "4chan good" or "4chan bad," seems with even the most generous interpretation... incredibly reductive and foolhardy.
"In the only country in which 4chan operates, the United States, it is breaking no law and indeed its conduct is expressly protected by the First Amendment."[0]
>>>
"Companies – wherever they're based – are not allowed to sell unsafe toys to children in the UK. And society has long protected youngsters from things like alcohol, smoking and gambling. The digital world should be no different," she said.
"The UK is setting new standards for online safety. Age checks and risk assessments are cornerstones of our laws, and we'll take robust enforcement action against firms that fall short."
<<<
Quite frankly she seems completely out of touch with her own argument. The UK can certainly legislate away tobacco sales, for instance; they can't go after tobacco producers in a foreign state. 4Chan operates in the US and is a US company. They have no jurisdiction over it, even if their citizenry can access it; it's on them to block that access if they don't like it. Unless they're also implying that the US government should be allowed to go after UK companies that don't follow it's free speech regulations because American citizens can access them.
Precedent in the US is that courts do in fact have jurisdiction over a foreign website's owner if the owner "purposefully availed itself of the U.S. forum or purposefully directed its activities toward it", a test which is less demanding than it sounds. [1]
And US has taken advantage of this to go after foreign websites such as Megaupload, BTC-e, Liberty Reserve, etc.
Therefore, if there were a US law requiring companies to follow free speech rules, it could potentially be enforced against foreign website owners. But no such law currently exists. The First Amendment itself only applies to the US government (and to companies working on behalf of the US government). There is also the SPEECH Act, which, among other provisions, creates a cause of action where if someone sues a US person in a foreign court over their speech, they can sue back in US court. But only for declaratory judgement, not damages or an injunction. The goal is mainly just to prevent US courts from enforcing judgements from the foreign court in such cases.
[1] https://tlblog.org/how-to-find-personal-jurisdiction-over-fo...
Not even China and North Korea whine about or send fake “fines” to offshore entities. They just block their sites and move on with life.
The fact that's technically hard to do (at least without going full-on CCP) doesn't change the situation. Attempting to fine a foreign entity for doing something that breaks no laws in the foreign entity's jurisdiction is just risible.
Keyword: "The UK".
> cornerstones of our laws
Keyword: "our laws".
> and we'll take robust enforcement action
Enforcement action can only take place within the jurisdiction (with a notable exception of the US which doesn't give a single fuck about someone else's law).
So it's clearly operating globally.
Country flags are a major feature of the board.
Mother Britain will be happy to make an example out of them if Uncle Sam doesn't intervene.
CCP "Great Firewall" style.
So the UK plans to fine Parisian bars that serve alcohol to British under-18s in France on holiday?
If someone from the UK calls me on the phone and I start reading them posts on 4chan, is the UK going to fine me too?
I don't think UK law governs foreign companies' overseas operations based on the nationality of the customer though, no.
There is a famous quote regarding this nature of British parliamentary sovereignty that is taught to every law student in the UK: "If Parliament enacts that smoking in the streets of Paris is an offence, then it is an offence" - Ivor Jennings.
The UK isn't going to get a cent from that but the leadership is banned from entering the UK for the foreseeable future.
Doing this a lot as a country is how you achieve pariah status and losing a bunch of trade, though.
The us does that regularly. There's thousands of companies that cannot do business with entities from countries like China or they can face criminal charges in US.
A former company I had as a client, EU based SaaS faced this.
Sure they can. It’s unlikely they can do anything about it though.
We have other crimes like this, like child sexual abuse committed in a foreign country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_blocking_in_the_United_Kin...
Tor .onion chans have much more taboo content to put it mildly.
[1] I'm not going to quote studies, but plenty exist. I think it's pretty self evident to everyone here how bad internet can be for the mental health even of adults, let alone children with developing minds.
I realize there’s a carve out in the legislation for search engines but if the goal is to stop little Timmy finding pictures of an X being Yd up the Z then it is a resolute failure.
The only thing that works with children is transparency and accountability, be that the school firewall or a ban on screen use in secret.
”screens where I can see ‘em!”
https://www.scribd.com/document/117922444/the-pirate-bay-res...
I'm pretty sure in one they responded saying their lawyer was alseep in a ditch and would reply when he woke up lol
Gab refused to pay the fine, and it was over.
> The enforcement notice itself highlights the structural tension. Despite acknowledging Gab’s US address, the German government asserts authority to pursue collection, including formal enforcement proceedings, without identifying any German subsidiary or office.
> The payment instructions route funds directly to the German federal treasury, showing that the action is punitive rather than remedial.
> Germany’s approach also reveals the paper trail behind modern censorship enforcement. The fine stems not from a specific post or statement, but from alleged failure to comply with aspects of NetzDG. That procedural hook enables broader regulatory reach, transforming administrative requirements into a mechanism for speech governance.
https://reclaimthenet.org/gab-refuses-to-pay-germanys-fine-c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_blocking_in_the_United_Kin...
4chan creates another TLD on another IP, just like TPB and the whole show starts again.
Instead of, why don't we. The UK government.
assumedly the rate of consumption hasn't dramatically changed, so the OSA's immediate result has been either the decentralisation of porn providers (towards those small enough to dodge the law for now and be less exacting) or the mass adoption of proxies; I assume the former is the path of least resistance
this is notably the opposite of the feared outcome (which I suspect may be closer to the long-term effect) that the bar to meet the requirements would be so high (possibly involving hiring a lawyer) that smaller social/porn sites get regulated out of existence (see ie. https://lobste.rs/s/ukosa1/uk_users_lobsters_needs_your_help...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...
> Data shows that nearly 80% of the top 100 pornography sites in the UK now have age checks in place. This means that on average, every day, over 7 million visitors from the UK are accessing pornography services that have deployed age assurance.
I would have expected that most people would switch to other pornography sites that don't have age checks rather than doing an age check. But apparently that isn't the case. (Or their data is misleading. People in the UK who are using VPNs presumably can't be easily identified as British.)
I'm not sure if I'm allowed to include links as a new user but Pornbiz posted an article showing AV lost them 90% of traffic. There's a BBC article where researchers found AV compliant sites were decimated on their top traffic ranking on Similarweb. And I working in the industry saw our traffic drop by 99.9% during our AV test.
Users don't use VPN, they certainly don't upload ID... they just go to noncompliant sites. Don't believe UK government's gaslighting.
"4chan is a US company operating in the US, sure it serves content to global users but the jurisdiction is the US, we have free speech, ..."
"Sure, Company X is operating in Europe, but it also serves US users so it has to respect our laws and it's warranted for the US to apply pressure and fines."
at least decide for one side of the argument instead of just going the blind patriot way.
It is the role of customs to inspect the physical goods (i.e. physical light) that crosses the border. These are fiber connections the UK themselves chose to install. No one forced these data imports on them.
North korea and China for example have extensive infrastructure to inspect and reject imported data.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71209929/4chan-communit...
There's no way anyone sensible would give over their identity to dodgy websites. It's easier to just pretend to be in a different country.
Ofcom has today fined 4chan £450k for not having age checks in place
At least in the US, you have 70+ year old lawmakers proposing (not even writing) laws they do not understand, passed to them by opaque groups with a obscured, albeit clear, interest.
See the latest age verification bills passed by Meta through a convoluted web of influence. Bring back the technocrats.
Doesn't really seem like there's an anti-authoritarian party available to us either.
Please report to the closest police station
Miniluv
If you think about it, it's the Internet Service Providers in the UK who choose choose to allow this US content into the UK. Why go after 4chan?
The ISPs could just shut down the BGP protocol and set up their own ICANN alternative with their own DNS system which is completely separate from the US one. So it's the UK government's choice to allow this content to the UK, not 4chan's. Or they could just put up a China-style great firewall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_blocking_in_the_United_Kin...
Do they understand the futility? I suspect most do. But trying to be high-functioning, in a low-functioning system, is also a good way to lose your job.
they have literally no power over things outside their own land borders and people are right to tell them to piss off.
This nonsense, and yet they allow GBNews to keep spewing propaganda and violate almost all broadcast standards that Ofcom is supposed to enforce.
For ofcom, 4chan is just a sticking their toes in the pool. If they fall, ofcom will have complete freedom to censor the entire Internet as they wish. It's madness.
I haven't thought about it at all since the last time I looked there maybe about 2 years ago.
Still looks shit.
What's the enduring appeal?
>people can only truly discuss something when they don’t know each other.
>If there is a user ID attached to a user, a discussion tends to become a criticizing game. On the other hand, under the anonymous system, even though your opinion/information is criticized, you don’t know with whom to be upset. Also with a user ID, those who participate in the site for a long time tend to have authority, and it becomes difficult for a user to disagree with them.
>Under a perfectly anonymous system, you can say, “it’s boring,” if it is actually boring. All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument will work
These days everything on the internet is controlled and monitored. Modern 4chan is hosted on cloudflare and is without any doubt "pozzed". Any illusion of real anonymity has dissolved a long time ago. Lots of bots there too. You missed it by at least 15 years.
Clowns
> or requiring Internet Service Providers to block a site in the UK.
Ah, that's what they want.
Other places have 'hate speech' laws that severely erode it. Genuine criticism or discussion of certain topics is forbidden.
It is still there. There is a GPT that keeps it looking active and people that reply to it daily. For about 9 days after their most recent big hack it was nice and quiet. It would be a ghost town if not for the GPT using a 4chan pass and seychelles proxies. The /pol/ board is probably the most active with real humans trying to shock and awe people with fake racism and other edge-lord behavior. The real racist are on other sites. I would invite them here to prove what that really looks like but they would be ultra-shadow-banned instantly.
The onus is on the parent to the be parent. Not the tech industry, and especially not the government.
I'm a millennial, I had access to porn as a kid, that's 25 years ago.
What's the deal with it?
The biggest issues are social media related, not by seeing how people exchange body fluids.
The same goes for the freedom of speech. Europeans should make it legal guarantee instead of trying to build walls around speech. So when X or 4Chan etc deletes a post, it may lead to freedom of speech fines if deletion wasn't justified. Tha same for the algorithm, if a post that doesn't break the rules is discriminated by the algorithm, a hefty fine should apply.
Suddenly we will have companies that keep their business clean and no claim for moral high ground.
For them there're far worse things than giving up some freedoms.
One can agree or disagree with this but Europe's actions are far more understandable if you see where they're coming from.
From what it's worth, the younger generation doesn't seem to see this the same way so whatever censure Europe introduces today will most likely be temporary.