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4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

alecmuffett.com

691–700 of 817 posts

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#691
post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the crucial part. Lots of people who do business in other countries either want to, or need to, visit the US from time to time. That doesn't do them any good because the set of people who never intend to set foot in the US is still vastly larger than the number of people required to set up an offshore internet casino. > On the other hand, I'm not particularly concerned about some tyrannical regime on the oth…

If diverting planes becomes a big enough problem for ordinary businesspeople and not just prominent opponents of certain dictators, I'm sure someone will build an app that helps us plan flights accordingly. Traveling from the US to France and need to avoid UK airspace? Sure, let's take a quick layover in Spain. Have you done any of the following things in the last x years? OK, we'll make a big detour around China thi…

> If diverting planes becomes a big enough problem for ordinary businesspeople and not just prominent opponents of certain dictators, I'm sure someone will build an app that helps us plan flights accordingly. Traveling from the US to France and need to avoid UK airspace? Sure, let's take a quick layover in Spain. Have you done any of the following things in the last x years? OK, we'll make a big detour around China this time.

There are two major problems with this.

The first is that you don't actually know which countries you have to avoid. There isn't going to be an app that can walk you through every law in every country.

And the second is that you're not the one flying the plane. You thought you were going to Charles de Gaulle but the weather in Paris is worse than expected or some drunk driver crashed the gate and drove out onto the runway and they're diverting all the planes, so after you're already in the air you find out you're actually going to Heathrow.

> Don't let slippery slope arguments take you into the dystopian future quicker than the world itself seems to be willing to

They already do stuff like this. The fact that they do it is now being used as a justification for doing it more and elsewhere. You can watch people telling you that slippery slope is a fallacy as they're greasing the hill.

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#692
post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the crucial part. Lots of people who do business in other countries either want to, or need to, visit the US from time to time. Whether for a "shopping trip to NYC", or for business reasons. That's why it's a big deal when the US wants somebody. On the other hand, I'm not particularly concerned about some tyrannical regime on the other side of the world that doesn't like the kind of content I have on my site.…

This isn’t about visiting for shopping. Billions of people, the vast majority of humanity, manage just fine without ever taking a holiday in the US. What matters is if any of their assets are ever denominated in USD, or ever use the international banking system that is also controlled by the US. No other country has that kind of long arm jurisdiction.

The thing I can't understand is that people keep bringing this up as if it's supposed to justify doing it because the US could actually make it work, but then there are still a zillion offshore internet casinos which is strong direct empirical evidence that it does not in fact work.

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#693

Oi, ‘av you got yer internet loisence?

Jokes aside, what on earth is going on with the UK? It seems to have serious demographic issues and actual ethnic English are understandably angry at having been largely vilified as Nazis and far-right for wanting to protect their heritage and identity. To reach into draconian surveillance and censorship to quell its own natives of the land who has lived there for thousands of years at the behest of those that have a…

> drastically incompatible culture with the British is a recipe for civil war.

That is the true reason for the surveillance state and these new transgressions. If you’ve had that thought it stands to reason they have also.

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#694
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you enter America, there may also be consequences That isn't much different. Say an adult American drinks alcohol in America; then they travel to a country where alcohol is illegal. Should they be prosecuted in that country for having drank in America?

Singapore does exactly that, and they explicitly warn outbound Singaporean travelers that any drug use outside Singapore will be prosecuted as if it has happened in Singapore.

If it's just the outbound Singaporeans, that would be different because they'd at least have the citizenship to claim jurisdiction on.

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try searching up porn on, say, hotel wifi, it won't work. I… very much doubt that.

What? Why are you doubting that? I can't even search for porn on cellular networks and I'm in the US. Hotels, Starbucks, my job, the library - they all block porn. The idea that kids just have free access to a wild internet is legitimately made up. Schools block that stuff too - universities, even. As I've said, this solution is not solving this problem because this problem legitimately does not exist. It's solving a…

My cellular network (Google Fi / T-Mobile), as far as I can tell, has zero content blocking. Hotels used to officially put porn on the TVs via pay per view. I'm very skeptical that they widely block it.

I have high-school aged kids; they all trade techniques for getting precisely that "free access to a wild internet". It's a game of whack a mole, and school IT administrators are on the losing side.

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#696

Going after 4chan is brilliant: No government is going to intervene on 4chans behalf, but dealing with 4chan might create a legal precedent.

They don't need intervention, the law is clear. Short of sending the Royal Marines to do a Zero Dark Thirty on 4chan headquarters, they have nothing they can do.

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#697

It seems the once "Great" Britain cannot let go of its grandiose delusions of ruling over and "civilizing" the entire known world. I've always held onto the suspicion that the distinction between left-wing and right-wing social views is more aesthetic than philosophical. All you have to do is tell a leftist "no", and they turn into everything they hate about their parents.

I don't think the psychology here is one of British world supremacy. I think it's one of moral supremacy where liberals in power think that laws must be subservient to the "greater good". This is pretty common in modern politics actually. People don't understand that government must operate on rule of law, and laws have tradeoffs. A law that is useful to take down mafia might also be misused to take down protesters. As such making laws is much more complex than taking a moral stand. But people would rather morally grandstand than wade into this complexity.

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Objection: The Chernobyl containment building generally speaking does its job. The Sarcophagus and the new containment building sure, I meant the original one before the accident.

You do know that they physically disabled the safety systems at Chernobyl before the accident. They were running an incredibly irresponsible test at the plant. The rumor is that that test was for the PhD thesis of the kid of a central committee member.

I know, I've been to Chernobyl myself. I'm also aware that the reactor there DIDN'T have another containment Unit like Fukushima which was the whole joke.

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#699
post #673
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 should know better than to give an answer that may include people not on the left. It might be time to put my sites back online.

You know that's a misstatement of the response (and oddly you responded to yourself, not to anyone else): It's not that the citations are of "people not on the left", but of people who are highly partisan for any persuasion (and also that you badly mischaracterize another citation). There are plenty of sources that are credible and not highly partisan.

Why be disingenous? Do you have something to lose by an honest search for the truth? Do you not want to look for it? Are you so sure that your narrow political group has the truth and no search is needed?

Re: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

#700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know if you know this, but when you put a website online there isn't a big switch that says "TURN ON TO SERVE TO UK" No, but it's a relatively trivial setting to block IP ranges, especially for a service the size of 4chan. > You can try to geolocate the IP for every individual visitor, but that's a ridiculous burden for website operators and it also doesn't even work. It's not a ridiculous burden (the range…

It is a strange definition of relatively trivial to ask each and every person on the planet who has served content to be aware of all constantly changing local judicial content restrictions, to identify the location of their users, and to identify which specific bits of the content they are serving is problematic. It is a massive global undertaking involving untold collective man hours developing, implementing, and u…

Not all people who serve a website need to be aware of that - I don't think my personal blog will be declared illegal anywhere, for instance. If a post is, I might just spare myself the pain and remove it. If a country wants to notify me, I'm pretty easy to find.

Now, for a relatively high-profile website such as 4chan, who deliberately dodges responsibility for the content it knowingly hosts, I'd say it is not a huge effort. They have the staff for that kind of thing. If they decide they aren't complying, then the UK government might order UK-based ISPs to block access and they will comply - as they did many times before. The people in charge of the company might face charges if they ever set foot in the UK, but that's a risk they need to balance.

And, in the light of legislation that sanctions whoever does business with sanctioned companies, sanctioning advertisers can go a long way to force compliance.

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