4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC
(bbc.co.uk)388 points by donpott a day ago
388 points by donpott a day ago
I think eventually we will reach a point where laws like the Online Safety Act become so prevalent that it is basically impossible to comply with all of them simultaneously and still have a unified internet across the globe. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 10 years or so every country has its own version of the internet only intended for their own people.
> 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 strike to prevent such an outcome from becoming successful. I would have said TOR, but for most people it's a non-starter. What other options are there?
Yggdrasil is a decentralized mesh IPv6 network. It automatically forms one big network as more people connect together. It has end-to-end encryption, it's fast (unlike darknets), and it's pretty simple.
In such a "splinternet" scenario, it'd be a matter of setting up PTP links across borders. As long as a few people do so, it becomes one big network again.
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).
I've said it for years and I'm sticking to it that you can't solve political "problems" (real or otherwise) with technology.
Not for the masses and not sustainabl,
It's always easier to have a paper say "do this" than finding a tech to circumvent it.
Politics is fundamentally people business and involves lots of people who can't or won't understand the details of what is going on but who may still be interested in the end results.
i also want believe the same, but i am increasingly disillusioned that there's a political process that is capable of reforming it - think about the fact that no one asked for these measures of censorship, but they keep creeping in, as though some vested interest has been pushing it through at every opportunity.
So the lack of ability to solve this politically has made technological solution the only out.
> So as technologists here at HN, there needs to be a pre-emptive strike to prevent such an outcome from becoming successful. I would have said TOR, but for most people it's a non-starter. What other options are there?
The option here is to stop trying to solve everything with tech when a lot of the time it's not viable and actively makes things worse. Start putting that time into the non-tech options. Not as fun though, is it?
Reticulum is interesting. It's basically flowing through all network interfaces available on the devices and routing data packets. Making it very easy to connect say lora and bluetooth to the global internet, even using i2p.
Well, it's also what has enabled foreign nations to spread misinformation, what enabled people to disappear into their own bubbles filled with falsehoods, etc. Since these things are now tearing at the fabric of democracy, I wouldn't say it's a clean win for the internet so far.
Im sure you will be able to get a passport for digital travel
We do still have limited entry and exit points to other Countries internets. You could end up with Great Firewalls across the globe if it got bad enough. It doesn’t deter VPNs though
They will put you behind bars for years for using VPNs once they win.
The actual great firewall deters VPNs. Western internet blocking tends to be weaker for some reason (cheaper?) but there's no reason they can't be just as effective if the political will was there.
> impossible to comply with all of them simultaneously and still have a unified internet
We'll have 2 kinds of apps and websites.
One will be super nice products that only work in your country and you can't use it to communicate with outside people.
The other kind will work worldwide but because they would be spending so much more on compliance their product would be a bare minimum ad riddled crap.
> international laws such as the Online Safety Act.
It should be noted that the Online Safety Act is in fact not international, but UK-only.
As others gave said the UK left the EU 10 years ago.
Chat control (which isn't (yet) a thing) would not in fact lead to the outcome you describe.
Any company would be forced to comply or get the boot from EU market. Apple and Google will happily enforce that and that's probably good enough initially.
US Vendors could also decide to create an EU only version of their services.
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 burying their own graves.
I think they're saying that 4chan is not responding bc there is limited people at the helm, not that the UK gov is upset at their security.
That's not an outdated stack - just a stable one.
An outdated stack is a not-up-to-date version of Wordpress I foolishly set up because it was the last one compatible with a certain plugin used by a client on their website that I was recreating from the Wayback Machine.
The domain was put on a black list of dangerous sites (rightfully so, considering that the bot that hacked into it replaced the site with spam).
A Japanese man named Nishimura Hiroyuki bought and now owns 4chan. It's a mashup of their names.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroyuki_Nishimura
>Users on 4chan refer to him commonly as 'hiro' but also by the ethnic slur "gook moot", or the nickname "Jackie 4chan", "Hiroshima Nagasaki," or simply "hiroshimoot".
That's kind of misleading because it lists hiroshimoot alongside blatantly racist nicknames. But hiroshimoot simply appears to be the names of two people mixed together.
If that were the case I'd expect them to block UK IPs (or ignore the threats entirely) rather than fighting it legally.
I wonder what they're going to do when the states mandating age verification for pornographic content start coming for them.
Very similar to these dystopian foreign laws. But because they're US states 4chan will not be able to use the "we only recognize US law" defense.
The latest Steam and visa/Mastercard debacle has the project2025 head behind it. They want to make pork illegal in the US as well.
> I wouldn't be so sure it's an ideological stand.... they definitely aren't going to implement all this chat control/ age verification bullcrap.
I read this as a plain contradiction.
> they were running a totally outdated software stack.
And this as a convenient pretense.
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.
Same thing has been happening for a long time in America. Politicians are typically risk adverse and the real world has complicated problems so they make up a 'virtual' problem to 'fix', or to turn into a new political football.
Politics has become its own end: politicians have job security, and nothing changes except for the worse because constituents keep falling for the same tired shit.
This is demagogy 101: invent or exagerate a problem, and offer yourself as the only true solution. It's a recipe as old as bread, nothing particularly US centric.
It's peaking again in the USA though and it's immigrants. They have replaced the "Commie" (when it last peaked in the 50s) as an imagined threat that lies around every corner that seems to appeal to a certain large minority in the USA that needs something to blame for everything other than their own inaction and choice to not adapt.
I don't know if that's really it. In the US, sure, there was a direct line of communication between all the large social media companies and the federal government. It was used to censor what was deemed "conspiracy theories" around covid and election interference. That could be seen as protecting politicians.
But in the UK, what I read about is cases where it offended someone, like the case of a an autistic teenage girl who was arrested after she made a comment to a police officer, reportedly saying the officer looked like her "lesbian nana." Obviously this doesn't threaten government control or politicians, so it doesn't exactly fit the same mold.
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-would-government-ce...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/15nddel/autisti...
This is part of a wider trend of trying to solve real world problems with the stroke of a pen. It’s not going well.
Banning 4chan is just part of the UK's efforts to prevent drought. Every jpg shared and string written helps drain the oceans:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/uk-government-ine...
Just give up a few more rights…for everyone’s safety. Think of the children!
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...
Sadly this trend is echoed in the US as well since 2023 many have been arrested for their freedom of speech https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rnzp4ye5zo
By the way at that scale it is very counterproductive.
If you are gonna end up being arrested for protesting or giving your opinion, it is funnier to do it in the streets than on facebook. And it is probably much easier to be anonymous nowadays in the streets with a mask than on social media.
This is probably why the UK went in flame recently, the government cracked down on the Internet and people just went in the streets instead.
The flip side of this is that convictions under the Communications Act have gone down compared to 2010, so it's a mixed picture:
https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...
It is hard to get good data on this, but it is probably a combination of overzealous policing (which is indeed bad) and an increase in arrests for behavior that arguably is a police matter, such as domestic abuse, harassment, etc. I would not be surprised to discover that there is more online harassment now than there was in 2010.
Yes. UK has every right to block whatever they want. US has no obligation to assist them in any way.
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.
The people in charge are largely hated by the electorate. They won by default effectively due to a quirk of how UK elections work (which was less of a problem when the monarch/aristocracy was still involved to counter balance things like this, but now that that's gone the state is effectively out of control.)
Unless by "democracy" you mean "sleepwalking administration everyone hates" the current UK government is unusually undemocratic.
I understand the people might wanna block porn on their kids mobile internet and home WiFi.
So why don't they mandate their ISP to implement this as an optional feature ?
Why do they instead try to boil the ocean by going after every website on the planet and outside of their jurisdiction?
I've posted this before, but it's relevant here:
'The UK’s Online Safety Act didn’t come from Parliament or the public'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ2AokZujC0 (watch from about 4:20)
> 'The UK’s Online Safety Act didn’t come from Parliament or the public'
It was debated at length in parliament and it was voted into legislation by parliament. It was developed by a Tory government and has been implemented by a Labour one.
I don't like the OSA but the whole 'robber baron' organisation thing in that video is just .. well Andrew Carnegie died more than a hundred years ago. He funded a lot of charitable organisations including one that has funded work in this area.
Most people are either blissfully unaware or don’t understand the ramifications of a policy until it becomes law
> 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 our current democratic systems: like sure we can vote, but after the people we vote for get into power, we have no control over what they do until next election cycle. So you can be a democracy on paper while your government is doing things you don't approve of.
Most people I talk to in the west, both here in Europe and in North America, don't seem to approve of what their government is doing on important topics, and at the same time they feel hopeless in being able to change that because either the issues are never on the table, or if they are, the politicians do a 180 once they get voted to power or forget about them because political promises are worthless and non-binding, meaning they lied themselves into power.
So given these issues ask yourself, is that really a true democracy, or just an illusion of choice of direction while you're actually riding a trolly track?
The UK hasn't elected a government on 50% or more of the vote since the 1950s:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/717004/general-elections...
It is hard to call minority rule democratic, really. I've no issue with your point on the OSA and think it is widely supported, but let's be realistic, representation in the UK is virtual on matters like this: widely supported, but mostly by coincidence.
> 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.
The goal of the policy is supported by the voters. The polls used to measure this are shifty at best about the implementation details. Who doesn't want to prevent kids from looking at pornography? But plenty of things are popular if you ask people in a way that makes them ignore how it plays out in real life. Laws against tall buildings are a pretty good example. Land reform was extremely popular in many socialist countries until it actually happened. I'm sure you can think of other examples.
In this case the ministers know what the problems are. The policy is not new or unique to the UK and it has been done better in Louisiana of all places:
https://reason.com/2024/03/18/pornhub-pulls-out-of-seventh-s...
> The difference is in the details of complying with Louisiana's law. Verifying visitor ages in Louisiana does not require porn sites to directly collect user IDs. Rather, the state's government helped develop a third-party service called LA Wallet, which stores digital driver's licenses and serves as an online age verification credential that affords some privacy.
really?
From my anecdotal evidence, is that it's fucking stupid and hated
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.
> 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.
I feel like you are missing some words or have some typos because this isn't comprehensible English.
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.
Brave browser launched a blockchain based domains registry IIRC.
Or teach people how to point to a different DNS server in an area with laws more amenable to their preferences.
Until coutry implement the great firewall and it becomes a play of cat & mouse.
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.
Step 6: Someome buys (or steals) a new domain to mirror the site. Or piggybacks a subdomain.
Step 7: Rinse and repeat, fueling the domain-bureaucracy complex. Oceania has always been at war with the pirate bay!
Step 5 is problematic because when people won't put www.4chan.com but will type 4chan into address bar (90% users are doing exactly that) it will trigger search and will easily find some AMPed URL, URL shortener or subdomain to click on.
HMG can compel Google not to offer AMPed 4chan in the UK, and can compel ISPs to block mirrors in DNS and by IP. URL shorteners are just a client-side indirection and won't circumvent a block.
There's really nothing that they can realistically do about VPNs, however.
How does step 5 work? Switching DNS servers is trivial.
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...
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.)
This. Practically the entire Middle East has blocks on sites like porn. Every household I know pays for a VPN that they share with all their family members.
Ehh, if a youth of digital piracy has taught me anything, it's that people will develop the necessary computer literacy to get the entertainment they want. Even if they've completely failed to develop that same skill in the pursuit of self improvement.
I feel that says something about human psychology. Probably something very unpleasant.
DNS poisoning and rejection of TLS handshakes based on SNI.
IMO this whole situation is ridiculous.
#2-#4 are the government trying to impose its national laws on an entity in a completely different country, operating entirely in that completely different country, with no business relationship whatsoever with your country. It's a futile and frankly rather insulting effort; no different from if Iran declared it was illegal for UK women living in the UK to leave the house without wearing a burka.
#5 is an authoritarian offense against your own citizens; trying to prevent them from being able to communicate with people in another country even if they want to do so.
Completely besides your point, but Iran mandates a hijab (head scarf, no veil). Burkas (often blue, net in front of face) are mainly found (not sure if mandated or expected) in Afghanistan, whereas the Saudis use niqabs (the black veils). The hijab mandate being the least repulsive.
I know it's an odd nitpick, consider it a compulsion of mine.
UK site blocking isn't done with DNS. I think they mess with routes at the ISP level. There's not much you can do except use a VPN.
4chan uses Cloudflare. Blocking routes to Cloudflare may have an interesting impact unless CF are cooperating with the UK.
4chan could stop using CF but their moderators will have to step up their game as CF is being used to detect and block CSAM.
AFAIK Cloudflare gives 4chan a dedicated ip to simplify blocking.
I think you may be right. [1] It's the same IP I've had in my hosts file for a long time.
[1] - https://whoisfreaks.com/tools/dns/history/lookup/4chan.org?t...
spain block CF every weekend to try to avoid football piracy. crazy, but its happening and nobody cares.
ironic how CF will host 4chan and 8chan but not kiwifarms
I mean, downstream from 1 it's all as it should be. 100% of the issue is #1, no?
Performative yes, but it's about controlling their subjects, not punishing the act or preventings its recurrence. Such as it ever was in UK politics.
Think about the logic of KYC/AML laws - introduced wehn HSBC were fined $1.9 billion for laundering Mexican drug cartels and Saudi terrorist cell money. The impact and burden were almost wholly on the consumer, and did nothing to stop institutional bad actors being malfeasant on a macro scale. This was beautifully illustrated HSBC were caught doing the exact same thing 10 years later. And again. And again.
Fast forward to UK culture and politics today and how they're dealing with a globalised world watching them post-Brexit.
Labour (and to an extent the BBC) were pilloried for having an anti-semitism problem over the last decade, and Northern Ireland is typified by proscribed terrorist groups doing public marches with large public terrorist murals. Rather than mitigate any of the causes, or engage with the problem on a societal level, the UKs answer is to arrest 80 and 89 year olds pleading to stop infanticide in Gaza, and charge native-Irish speaking Rappers and Sundance Award Winning actors under the terrorism act
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/24/uk-police-de... https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/20/uk/irish-rapper-terrorism...
When looking at the current passion for control and restriction of the internet under the guise of combatting CSAM, its important to understand the context under which these disingenuous ploys arise.
US and European readers might not realise that the BBC, the House of Lords, and specific Political Parties in the UK have a very serious child-grooming and paedophilia scandal they've been trying to keep under wraps for 50 years that had the lid blown off by the revelations following Jimmy Saville's death. This is outside the major child-grooming and abuse scandals in the cultural pillars and cultural groups of the UK - e.g. Church of England, The Boy Scouts, the British Public School system etc...
I can't even go into the more recent and utterly appalling Rotherham debacle - and the dereliction of duty of both the police and the legal system - as it would simply take too long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
In 1981 Sir Peter Hayman - Diplomat and MI6 operative who held highly sensitive posts at the MOD and NATO - was called out for being a paedophile, using parliamentary privilege, as he had not been jailed after it was discovered he had left a package containing child pornography on a bus. The DPP and AG declined to prosecute, but Thatcher advised him that he would be stripped of his honours if was caught in a Public Toilet engaging in homosexual acts again, as he was in 1984.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_paedophile_dossier... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tory-mp-warned-o...
Now that the statute of limitations is running out, and official secrets acts files are due to be unsealed, its time for a pallaver about VPNs and protecting the children from the 'internet'. Given their age and new-found riches in a disenfranchised post-Brexit Britain, the ruling classes of the UK have never been in a more trepidatious position - some commentators even predicting civil war in the next 5 years - so time for some large-scale distractive measures.
Is the UK headed for civil war? | UK Politics | The New ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4urbhc_cOQk
> Two days later, US Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson warned big tech firms they could be violating US law if they weakened privacy and data security requirements by complying with international laws such as the Online Safety Act.
How will this work with chat control?
> "If Ofcom doesn't think this will be enough to prevent significant harm, it can even ask that ISPs be ordered to block UK access."
If you want to enforce stupid laws the burden should be upon you.