4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by Bender » Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 2:20 PM UTC

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 narrative. My question would be, would HN'ers also use bots to control the narratives on their chans or create the same daily and weekly threads?

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

#62

Post by CommanderData » Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 2:22 PM UTC

username332211 wrote: post #33

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.

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

step 6: Block non-compliant DNS servers

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

#63

Post by xoa » Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 2:24 PM UTC

GeoAtreides wrote: post #57

sunrunner wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious about what the plan is to differentiate between legitimate business use and personal use of any kind. Age verification obviously won’t work for self-hosted, so does age verification then get pushed to VPS providers? And at that point, so what? I’m already paying with legitimate bank details for legitimate personal use.

do you think the public at large knows what VPS are? How to set up a VPN? the public at large barely understands the concept of files nowadays, if it's not app they're lost banning selling VPN and VPN apps will solve 90% of the problem and that's enough

>do you think the public at large knows what VPS are? How to set up a VPN?

Do you think the general public NEEDS to know those things right now? Because that's what actually mostly drives what people put in the time to learn. This smug elitist "everyone is dumb except me the tech wizard" sort of comment shows up every such thread and it's deeply irksome. Most people are plenty intelligent and can easily learn things as trivial as setting up a VPN. For most that would just amount to "sign up for one of many turnkey services, install this app, scan this QR code" or even more commonly "ask one of the kids or techie person in circle of friends/neighbors to take care of it". All sorts of people working in a vast array of businesses use VPNs all the frickin' time, it's no big deal.

But there are endless such things in our lives and only so much time, so most people very reasonably triage and only put effort into things they enjoy personally or things they are forced to care about due to being important. Up until now, most people haven't needed to care in their personal lives, because they're satisfied enough with the fairly open internet experience we've had. If that changes, and it matters to them, the tools exist to easily deal with it and people will easily learn it.

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

#64

Post by orlp » Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 2:27 PM UTC

GeoAtreides wrote: post #57

sunrunner wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious about what the plan is to differentiate between legitimate business use and personal use of any kind. Age verification obviously won’t work for self-hosted, so does age verification then get pushed to VPS providers? And at that point, so what? I’m already paying with legitimate bank details for legitimate personal use.

do you think the public at large knows what VPS are? How to set up a VPN? the public at large barely understands the concept of files nowadays, if it's not app they're lost banning selling VPN and VPN apps will solve 90% of the problem and that's enough

> will solve 90% of the problem

Remind me again, what the problem they're trying to solve is?

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

#65

Post by supriyo-biswas » Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 2:29 PM UTC

username332211 wrote: post #33

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.

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

DNS poisoning and rejection of TLS handshakes based on SNI.

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

#66

Post by DeusExMachina » Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 2:29 PM UTC

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #29

doka_smoka wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't feel represented on the national or international stage AT ALL. Maybe I'll stop paying mine.

> I don't feel represented on the national or international stage AT ALL. Maybe I'll stop paying mine. Now gather a huge group of friends who are willing to fight for this cause (and for whose this cause is so important that they can accept ending in jail or even worse).

Be careful what you ask for. History has proven that such a group will exist at some point.

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

#67

Post by Fanofilm » Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 2:29 PM UTC

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.

Step 6: The facebook / Instragram / X equivalents then lose their ad revenue. They then may capitulate to keep the ad revenue.

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.

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

#68

Post by lm28469 » Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 2:34 PM UTC

fruitworks wrote: post #41

I wouldn't be so sure it's an ideological stand. 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 bu…

You can ban 75% of the web if your concern is outdated tech stacks and/or data breaches

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

#69

Post by lesuorac » Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 2:40 PM UTC

Amezarak wrote: post #17

blibble wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why the US dropped tea into Boston to have it's own Freedom. the 3% tariff on Chinese tea was seen as oppressive don't look at what has been imposed this year (without congressional approval)

The precipitating event behind the Boston Tea Party was actually a reduction in taxation that made it possible for the East India Company to undercut both official colonial tea importers and also American tea smugglers.

And many of those tea importers/smugglers happened to be prominent figures in the future US government.

A coup was just good business.

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

#70

Post by mindslight » Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 2:40 PM UTC

DeusExMachina wrote: post #66

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't feel represented on the national or international stage AT ALL. Maybe I'll stop paying mine. Now gather a huge group of friends who are willing to fight for this cause (and for whose this cause is so important that they can accept ending in jail or even worse).

Be careful what you ask for. History has proven that such a group will exist at some point.

System's got that on lock by setting it up so the people most predisposed to fight the government are actually cheering on the new taxes. Information/policy/consent flowing the opposite way from how is commonly understood has been my critique of democracy for a long time, but the effect just keeps growing. Social media is a hell of a drug.