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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

#311

Post by numpad0 »

M95D wrote: post #160
nickdothutton wrote: post #22

Step 1, pass law. 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.

We need a DNS server with a history database, not just a cache, preferably with a distributed history database. 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.

Domain Name System was an app on the Internet. It wasn't something that always existed. The purpose of it is to provide intuitive means to look up IP address from more intuitive domain name strings.

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.

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

#312

Post by oblique »

ionwake wrote: post #302

The next step I assume is banning VPN use for anyone under 18 in the UK, followed by only allowing academics or certain roles to use them.

Banning VPNs seems effectively impossible. Any ip address can act as a vpn. There are also zero identity providers like mullvad.

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

#313

Post by cut3 »

sunshine-o wrote: post #52
nickdothutton wrote: post #22

Step 1, pass law. 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.

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.

isnt this everyone in power?

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

#314

Post by ACCount37 »

Kazik24 wrote: post #281
chii wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> still have a unified internet across the globe. 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 s…

Applications based on QUIC and/or P2P might be an option. QUIC is designed to not be as easy to filter as TCP + TLS. But then right now it can be blocked by just blocking UDP. But if majority of the internet would use QUIC then blocking UDP would mean blocking most of the internet so the governments wouldn't be so eager do nationwide firewalls (hopefully).

Encrypted Client Hello is also a puzzle piece towards that - makes it much harder to kill TLS connections that are trying to reach specific websites. Also makes it easier to conceal proxies.

The adoption speed is critical, exactly because of what you're saying. It's easy for a wannabe authoritarian to make a decision to "just block all of ECH and QUIC traffic" if that breaks 0.8% of all traffic - but not if that breaks 80% of all traffic.

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

#315

Post by bko »

sunshine-o wrote: post #52
nickdothutton wrote: post #22

Step 1, pass law. 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.

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.

I heard things about UK arresting people for social media posts but thought it was just a few cases cherry picked. But I recently looked up the scale of arrests and it's really insane.

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...

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

#316

Post by ACCount37 »

numpad0 wrote: post #305
OldfieldFund wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is really not far from 4chan in 2025.

Always has been. A lot of prominent Twitter accounts in my primary language, especially the old ones, has telltales of having been on 2chan. net. There must be something to that format that installs a basic social media amplification skill in your brain that do not develop otherwise. There are places more toxic than 4chan but skill levels don't compare, and 4chan and 2chan also share nothing culture wise, so it must…

My guess would be that to be on 2chan/4chan "back in the day", you need to be terminally online. And being terminally online is a soft prerequisite to being really good at posting interesting things online. Excellence isn't an act - it's a habit.

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

#317

Post by LexiMax »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #212
LexiMax wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one domain down. Only 3,524 domains that just cropped up yesterday to go. Never mind the fact that doing a Google search will surface pages on various wikis, git repositories, and other sites that conveniently list all of the mirrors.

Big enough barrier to stop most users

Most users default to search engines instead of typing in a URL. I searched for "pirate bay" just now and all of the top results are mirrors or lists of mirrors.

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

#318

Post by tomjakubowski »

potato3732842 wrote: post #104
lesuorac wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And many of those tea importers/smugglers happened to be prominent figures in the future US government. A coup was just good business.

It was terrible business. They'd have all been way better off working with the dominant global and economic power than starting a new country. And that's before you average in all the ones who lost everything and/or died.

"We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch! We had the King. We had a tea port. We had everything we needed, and it all ran like clockwork. You could've shut your mouth, smuggled tea and made as much money as you ever needed. It was perfect. But, no, you just had to blow it up. You and your pride and your ego! You just had to be the man. If you'd done your job, known your place, we'd all be fine right now."

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

#319

Post by mattnewton »

o11c wrote: post #304
mattnewton wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t seem weird at all, Britons are saying a) I agree children watching porn is bad but b) I value my privacy online and c) don’t think sending in photos of an ID is really going to stop kids. Actually seems pretty reasonable, and a reasonable democratic representative should look at that and say “well, how else can get A if method B is unpopular and unlikely to work?” Instead they seem to have conflated B with A.…

> Instead they seem to have conflated B with A. Maybe they are afraid that any criticism on this method is interpreted as attack on doing anything at all for kids watching porn on the internet or even twisted into some kind of endorsement. In all fairness, I have seen quite a few people explicitly arguing "I want kids to watch porn" of late.

That’s not really being fair if you’re assuming that fringe argument by default though right?

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

#320

Post by m-s-y »

o11c wrote: post #300
ranger_danger wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> generally supported by the voters you could say the same about the US... that doesn't make it right and it doesn't mean people aren't violently voting against their own best interests.

It's a huge stretch to call the existence of 4chan in anyone's best interests. First they came for 4chan and I said nothing, because good riddance! This is not a slippery slope; this is a spring trying to return to the center. The harder the resistance at the extremes, the more energetic the oscillation will be, so if we want to minimize that, work on undermining the intolerable extremes. The sheer anarchy of the lib…

>It's a huge stretch to call the existence of 4chan in anyone's best interests.

Absolutely, 100% incorrect. You obviously don't approve of 4chan's content or mission, but that's not the point. It benefits everyone when anyone takes a stand because their legal rights are under attack.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

>This is not a slippery slope

Again, incorrect.

Any type of punishment for 4chan due to their legal content is damn close to the definition of "slippery slope". You're familiar with the "anti-slippery slope" argument already ("First they came for 4chan and I said nothing, because good riddance!"), so you're obviously cogent enough to understand what you're saying.

>The sheer anarchy of the libertarian mindset that much of this site supports is not a good thing.

This is not for you to decide. Your mindset is why free speech laws must exist in the first place.

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