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4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC

bbc.co.uk

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Re: 4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC

#141

Post by jdietrich »

postexitus wrote: post #34
username332211 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does step 5 work? Switching DNS servers is trivial.

For you - not for 99% of the public.

Millions of British people are already engaged in a cat-and-mouse game against online censorship, for one main reason - football (soccer).

If you're a British football fan and want to watch every live televised match, you'll need to pay £75 a month for subscriptions to both Sky Sports and TNT Sports. That won't actually allow you to watch all of the matches that are played, because for weird historical reasons there's a TV blackout on matches played on Saturday afternoon - even if you've paid for your subscriptions, you'll only be able to watch about half of all league matches on TV.

Alternatively, you can pay some bloke in the pub £50 for a Fire TV Stick pre-programmed with access to a bunch of pirated IPTV streams and a VPN to circumvent blocking, or get a mate to show you how to do it yourself - no subscription, no blackout. As a bonus, you get free access to Netflix and Disney+ and everything else.

Sellers of dodgy Fire Sticks occasionally get caught and imprisoned, a handful of users occasionally get nasty letters from the Federation Against Copyright Theft, but it's too widespread to really stop. Practically every workplace or secondary school class has someone who knows the ins-and-outs of circumventing DNS- and IP-level blocking; the lad who showed you how to watch live football on your phone or get free Netflix will be more than happy to show you how to access adult sites without verifying your age.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/illicit-streaming...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_on_television...

Re: 4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC

#142

Post by adiabatichottub »

hluska wrote: post #123
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AIUI, the UK is a democracy and these policies are generally supported by the voters. When were UK citizens polled on these policies before politicians started enforcing them? And I think after Brexit, the UK government learned never to ask the opinions of their citizens again, because they will vote in direct opposition of the political status quo out of sheer spite of their politicians. There are huge flaws with…

That’s a form of political change - direct representation democracy and recall legislation are both possibilities. The solution is to make electoral change happen, not to complain that everything is hopeless on the internet.

But how can those changes be made if the representatives don't act to make them? It would take a pretty big act of solidarity amongst various constituencies to send the message that failure to act is not an option.

Re: 4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC

#143

Post by Bender »

gs17 wrote: post #95
Bender wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a way it does not exist any more. Most of the threads are started by 4chan-GPT yes this is a thing and most replies to threads are 4chan-GPT. They uses 4chan passes to allow proxies and not have to deal with a craptcha. Anyone could start their own chan, implement GPT bots and have the same level of popularity. I would wager a dozen HN'ers could implement this in a day. I think the goal on 4chan is controlling the…

> yes this is a thing and most replies to threads are 4chan-GPT Do you have proof of this?

They bragged about it for a while but after the bragging stopped my proof is only anecdotal. When the United States Agency for International Development was defunded the bots went quiet and shortly thereafter the site was hacked using a vulnerability that had been well known since 2012. It was peaceful for a few weeks prior to the hack and for a couple weeks after the hack. Most of the fake racists disappeared from /pol/ and /g/ stopped shilling products. It was just real people and the site was just as active as the hundreds of other chans. Best I can tell 4chan is a test site to fine tune social manipulation GPT's. All the bots, fake racists and shillers are back now suggesting to me the manipulators started getting funded by other means. Before someone says it, there are a few real racists there too. The bots attract and egg them on. Most moved to 8chan. I think that is part of the experiment and tuning. Perhaps some day the veil will be lifted.

Re: 4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC

#144

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

ramesh31 wrote: post #82
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls The iOS instructions are the most onerous (IMO) but still easy enough to follow. It's 15 minutes of fumbling around for the non-technical person, then they're protected. (Though, as others have pointed out, this is probably moot. The blocking is more effectively done by ISPs.)

>It's 15 minutes of fumbling around for the non-technical person, then they're protected. You and I have very different ideas of what "non-technical" means. If it involves anything beyond pressing "download" on the app store, it's out of reach of the vast majority of users.

Fair enough, there's a wide variance there. I'd still hesitate to say it's out of reach for most people as they'll likely have someone they know who would be able to follow those instructions for them. For the purpose of being able to access something they used to be able to access, I think most people will be able to figure this out. The point is that it's one-and-done in most instances. (To that end there's a reasonable worry that OS updates reset these settings but that's kind of a separate problem.)

Re: 4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC

#145

Post by 1gn15 »

Bender wrote: post #61
sunshine-o wrote: post #2

I assumed 4chan didn't exist anymore and it was renamed/replaced by another board... Great advertisement. The UK acts like a madman on fire trying to attack everybody.

In a way it does not exist any more. Most of the threads are started by 4chan-GPT yes this is a thing and most replies to threads are 4chan-GPT. They uses 4chan passes to allow proxies and not have to deal with a craptcha. Anyone could start their own chan, implement GPT bots and have the same level of popularity. I would wager a dozen HN'ers could implement this in a day. I think the goal on 4chan is controlling the…

I frequent the NSFW boards and that doesn't seem to be the case?

And if it is the case... I guess it's so undetectable that it doesn't matter anyway.

Re: 4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC

#146

Post by macinjosh »

lokar wrote: post #77
sunshine-o wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the only power they have left. 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.

While I disapprove of what the gov is doing here, I think it’s incorrect and unhelpful to put all the blame on them. AIUI, the UK is a democracy and these policies are generally supported by the voters.

Democracy is a form of government, not an ideology. Just because +50% of an electorate thinks something is OK, doesn't make it so.

Re: 4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC

#147

Post by sunaookami »

Joker_vD wrote: post #16
jeroenhd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VPNs are next: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn438z3ejxyo

So they're lagging about 3-4 years behind the Russian practices, but steadily catching up. Quite impressive!

Par for the course for European countries.

Re: 4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC

#148

Post by HPsquared »

burkaman wrote: post #125
jdietrich wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weirdly, the majority of the British public a) support age verification, b) aren't willing to use age verification themselves and c) don't think it'll actually work. https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-...

Reading the polling questions, it doesn't actually seem that contradictory. > To what extent do you support or oppose the introduction of age verification checks to access platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and pornography? Most people say support, presumably thinking "yeah those things seem bad and kids shouldn't be able to look at them". > How likely or unlikely would yo…

It's all very "how to lie with statistics".

Re: 4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC

#149

Post by 1gn15 »

fruitworks wrote: post #47
firesteelrain wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Onion networks?

They need bridges. 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.

Related: https://snowflake.torproject.org/

Help run a Snowflake proxy! You can do it from your browser.

Re: 4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC

#150

Post by decremental »

mintplant wrote: post #135
sunshine-o wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the only power they have left. 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.

> The UK government has lost control of what happen in the physical world on their own island What do you mean by this?

[dead]
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