4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence • Hacker News Board

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#501

Post by gorgoiler » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 4:53 AM UTC

HDThoreaun wrote: post #399

ninalanyon wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not possible to censor the internet when VPNs are freely available. The obvious next step is to ban VPNs too or to block connections to their servers.

There are ways around this too. When the VPN entrance point is a static IP a ban may work but what happens when a product shows up that spins up dynamic VPSs in the public cloud? All the cloud providers have free trials that let people do this for free forever. Sounds difficult but surely people will come up with a streamlined approach if push comes to shove. Even in china where using a VPN is a major crime they are…

Off the top of my head here are some ways you could fairly easily shut down VPNs.

The big one is to start whitelisting good protocols only. That means everything must be https and you have to at least pass the hostname in plaintext. Random traffic on UDP ports is now illegal as it is assumed to be VPN traffic.

Another one is to pass a law telling ISPs to flag customers with traffic patterns only to a single IP address, set of IP addresses, or a single ASN. This means that you can’t just tunnel everything to your VPS in Amsterdam.

You might also pass a law that still allows, say, ssh and random UDP traffic, but with the provision that bandwidth on any non HTTPS ports is capped at 200kbps. You only use ssh for running a shell after all — why would you need more than that! /s

ASNs are a fun feature of the internet in that there are a lot of them but they are finite and scale on the order of organised human activity, mostly businesses. That means it is eminently tractable to categorize them all and regulate traffic from residential ISPs to commercial services ISPs only, and throttle traffic from home users to hosting providers. This already happens — try connecting to Reddit from anything other than a residential IP address.

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#502

Post by hexbin010 » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 4:56 AM UTC

What's funny is that behind much of the vitriol against Ofcom and the UK Parliament from American citizens is the USA's legal concept of Free Speech.

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.

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#503

Post by gorgoiler » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 4:59 AM UTC

mikkupikku wrote: post #377

jay_kyburz wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think its unreasonable for a government to ask company to abide by its laws if it want to do business with its citizens. 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…

If you honestly believe you can control what your two teens see and do on the internet, you've either got them chained up in a closet, or you're wrong.

Having worked with children from 10 all the way up to 18 in a residential setting, I couldn’t agree more.

In a way they are like addicts: you love them and want the best for them but you absolutely have to be on your guard for egregious breaches of trust cropping up without warning. Children / teenagers / young adults can be driven by curiosity, peers, and lack of judgment into all kinds of dreadful behavior, and it can come from the least likely ones just as much as the obviously naughty ones.

The best we can do is to warn them in advance, accept that mistakes will be made anyway, and support them in learning from their mistakes. Keep at it for even a short while and you too can experience the shock of how your most charming, academically brilliant, upstanding star pupil is found throwing up a bottle of vodka she just drank!

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#504

Post by Razengan » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 5:18 AM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #207

Razengan wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put anyone in charge of any space and they'll want to control what people say and think there. 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.

Well yes, because those who don't quickly lose users due to bad signal-noise ratio When was the last time anyone visited an unmoderated usenet group?

Frankly, LLMs with transparent prompts, as well as user-side filters based on LLM prompts (e.g. "Don't show me comment threads talking shit about Attack on Titan") could do a better and more "fair" job than meat-based moderators now.

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.

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#505

Post by drawfloat » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 5:24 AM UTC

grayhatter wrote: post #296

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the point. US has a lot of harmful cultural exports and one of them is streaming, where people degrade and humiliate themselves for money and the like. Then there is yt shorts, then 4chan, then social media. 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 playgr…

> These slowly degrade societies, like it or not. So, thought crimes?

Setting aside whether it’s true, that’s not a thought crime by any definition.

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#506

Post by aydyn » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 5:25 AM UTC

stinkbeetle wrote: post #144

cdfsdsadsa wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't want the government to decide which thoughts I can access and which ones I can't That would be an interesting discussion in itself, but even so - accessing material in isolation over the internet removes all of the benefits of cultural and community self-regulation. >freely run undercover propaganda and/or destabilization campaigns I'm of the opinion that WWW3 has already happened - it was a war for hearts a…

> I'm of the opinion that WWW3 has already happened - it was a war for hearts and minds waged over the internet, and we've already lost. Who is we, and who won? What did they win?

Im going to guess nobody? Nobody won. Everybody lost.

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#507

Post by aydyn » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 5:36 AM UTC

energy123 wrote: post #194

tokai wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The outcomes are manifestly bad. That's just as bad of an argument as so-called intellectual walls of text. Nothing needs to be done, the outcomes are not bad. My argument is as strong as yours.

The Internet Research Agency organizing multiple Black Lives Matter protests due to control over approximately 50% of the largest identity-based Facebook groups is just one small example on a long list of examples of social unrest and the consequential ushering in of sectarianism and destruction of democracy that the current status quo is enabling. The pro-freedom types do not even know this is happening let alone ha…

Lets assume you are right that there is effectively a constant stream of low level sybil attacks attempting to destabilize society, and they are effective.

Censoring view points is equivalent to signal boosting other view points. Why do you trust the UK government to select the correct view points given all the strong evidence to the contrary?

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#508

Post by integralid » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 5:52 AM UTC

Razengan wrote: post #493

econ wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has to be a better formula to design this game. It seems valuable enough to explore. It will be hard to design a formula that can only be gamed by making quality contributions. A quality discussion requires parties who disagree, exchange of ideas and facts and ideally some kind of eventual agreement. The hardest part is to make it enjoyable to use.

Maybe transparent AI is the only way to fairly govern masses of people? Let people regularly vote on which prompts should be added/removed, and have the AI justify all of its decisions, show which information it used etc.

That's the most dystopian thing I've read today

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#509

Post by integralid » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 6:03 AM UTC

galangalalgol wrote: post #472

NicuCalcea wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I run a lemonade stand, and a UK citizen walks up a pays a dollar for a glass of lemonade, then that doesn't give the UK jurisdiction over the lemonade stand. You are allowed to sell lemonade to British tourists. But if you're shipping lemonade to the UK, you are subject to UK lemonade regulations. That doesn't mean that the UK has jurisdiction over your business and can shut it down or anything like that, but i…

Why is it the website operators job to figure out where people are from? It isn't even generally possible for them to do correctly. A better analogy would be that a british person hired someone who looked and sounded american to go to the us to buy some lemonade and have it shipped to the uk where having it breaks the law, and then blaming the lemonade stand.

A good start would be to use geoip. It's not perfect, but it will almost certainly be enough to make UK happy (the same happens when detecting European for GDPR purposes).

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#510

Post by mmooss » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 6:20 AM UTC

Bender wrote: post #375

mmooss wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> USAID manipulate narratives on all popular multimedia and social media sites. I wouldn't be surprised to read that on 4chan, but on HN ... we need some credible citations. :)

Some of the text and PDF's by congress discuss some of the findings but there are other sites that reported on it in the last couple years. [1] Some documents try to justify it [2]. There are countless more documents, mostly in PDF form because people can't HTML for whatever reason. Just use "site:.gov usaid 4chan" on Google. I have more of them bookmarked on my workstation. There are also disinformation documents to…

I'm aware of the conspiracy theories, and of course there are plenty of sources that repeat them. The first link is a highly partisan website that is quoting America First Legal, founded by Stephen Miller (yes, that Stephen Miller). The second is not as described: Its aim is to prevent enemy states from conducting propaganda campaigns in free societies, an undeniable danger. Its recommendations are,

1. Raise the cost of conducting malign influence operations against the United States and its allies.

2. Close vulnerabilities that foreign adversaries exploit to undermine democratic institutions.

3. Separate politics from efforts to unmask and respond to foreign operations against the U.S. electoral process.

4. Strengthen partnerships with Europe to improve the transatlantic response to this transnational threat.

5. Make transparency the norm in the tech sector.

6. Build a more constructive public-private partnership to identify and address emerging tech threats.

7. Exhibit caution when reporting on leaked information and using social media accounts as journalism sources.

8. Increase support for local and independent media.

9. Extend the dialogue about foreign interference in democracies beyond Washington.

10. Remember that our democracy is only as strong as we make it.

It's significant that a political faction does everything it can to remove barriers to disinformation, for example using lawfare and other attacks to shut down research into it, using political power to disable the country's ability to protect itself.