Ofcom fines 4chan £20K and counting for pretending UK's Online Safety Act doesn't exist Ofcom, the UK's Online Safety Act regulator, has fined online message board 4chan £20,000 ($26,680) for failing to protect children from harmful content. The fine could rise by a further £6,000 – £100 per day for a maximum 60 days – if it continues to ignore its duties to comply with the regulator's request for information …
The fact OFCOM are happy to name the porn companies but not the 'suicide forum' sums it up. A legitimate cause, and grieving parents, weaponised by mainly Tory puritans for much greater control.
Do you want to be the one MP who stands up in Parliament trying to argue that the research shows videos of graphic bum sex are not really that bad for children, quite fun to have a laugh at during lunch break actually, all part of the learning process, that it should be up to parents and teachers to control internet access, and decide how & when they educate children, and that the legislation is wholly disproportionate?
Only to be shot-down by the argument that parents clearly can't successfully control internet access and kids have died as a result. Shame on you for even questioning this bill.
No you don't. So they all got in line.
The 2015 Tory Manifesto is where it began (so not actually the Brexiteer faction). They weren't successful until it got tied to the suicide harms which weren't even mentioned to begin with:
We will protect childrenEvery child deserves a warm, loving home, and to feel safe online and at school. We have made improving support for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities a priority blah blah blah, lots of other pretty great stuff to pad the section and leave the controversial bit til last And we will stop children's exposure to harmful sexualised content online, by requiring age verification for access to all sites containing pornographic material and age-rating for all music videos
repeating comment from Wikimedia Foundation loses first court battle to swerve Online Safety Act regulation
[Link]
The OSA 2023 was drafted, debated and passed under the previous Tory administration - but with little guidance on how the Act was to be complied with. This Labour administration has put it on steroids by the guidance it has established on what organizations need to do in order to comply with the Act, and possible means of compliance.
The Tories rightly deserve heavy criticism for the original OSA 2023, but Labour has earned the opproprium being directed at it for what it has done in beefing up the Act.
(and since you were asking about facts - https://votes.parliament.uk/votes/commons/division/1926)
This is rubbish, especially the 'steroids' quip. The original act compels the government to set thresholds once OFCOM has advised what those thresholds should be. This is just part of the timeline for the Act coming into effect, and was set in 2023.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/schedule/11
Count the number of occurrences of 'The Secretary of State must make', also note the requirements for OFCOM to 'carry out research' first. The vote you link is just secondary legislation being rubber-stamped without debate following OFCOM's 'advice' which was always going to be followed unless a government was willing to invest significant political capital U-turning the whole show.
Here is the original Act's impact assessment, the numbers brought into the highest categories seem reasonably close to how it's panned out: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6231dc9be90e070ed8233a60/Online_Safety_Bill_impact_assessment.pdf
There appears to be no consideration of the risk or impact of data breaches of the age verifiers. Search for "breach" produces most hits on breach of contract. There are very few mentions of "personal data". There are a few hits for "privacy including this magnificent piece of hand-waving:
"There are a number of indirect costs and wider impacts on society which have not been monetised, these include ... privacy implications*, and trade impacts - these have all been thoroughly assessed qualitatively." followed, unsurprisingly, by an empty table in which benefits could be but aren't listed.
* Yes, next to last.
The root is the old concept of whether the Internet constitutes 'publishing' or not. It really doesn't help that all the tech people will happily talk about 'publishing to a website' but then the website owners claim they aren't covered by laws written when printed publication was all there was.
I don't really care personally as I'm a person who honestly never accesses online sexual imagery but I know my teen is most annoyed at the mess this law has made of their browsing habits.
So a fairly typical Act that says do something and sets a timetable for doing something and empowering the Secretary of State to do it; without saying what is to be done.
Advice from another body is not binding and politicians (of all sides) are quite renowned for either putting the fix in beforehand to get the result they want, or punting stuff into the long grass, or simply not following advice (with or without good reason).
To be clear, I think the OSA 2023 is bad legislation (which all sides supported during prepaaration) and the Tories can add it to their long list of sins. But I disagree with you that Labour had no choice in what they set as the threholds and means. Indeed, during the debate and preparation of the 2023 Bill there was cross-party support with some from the Labour side wishing to strengthen and broaden the Bill (though they were not alone in that respect). Labour has its own puritans driving issues.
The vote then followed party lines (314/216) - which is typical polticking. It is also typical politicking from both sides to leave "hot potatoes" for an incoming government to deal with. All tawdry business which adds to the contempt in which politicians are held by many.
Labour supported this Bill during its preparation and had control of setting the Threshold Regulations (again voting followed party lines 320/178). They are not solely to blame for the mess, but they have earnt their castigation.
So a fairly typical Act that says do something and sets a timetable for doing something and empowering the Secretary of State to do it; without saying what is to be done.
Really bemused sure how you reach this conclusion. Most of the public issue with the Act is mandatory age verification which has nothing to do with the thresholds established in the secondary legislation you linked. Those define a small number of large sites to which more onerous extra duties apply.
The original act is very clear https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/part/5/enacted
81 Duties about regulated provider pornographic content [Applies to all sites publishing their own porn](2)A duty to ensure, by the use of age verification or age estimation (or both), that children are not normally able to encounter content that is regulated provider pornographic content in relation to the service.
(3)The age verification or age estimation must be of such a kind, and used in such a way, that it is highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a particular user is a child.
Highly effective AV. In black and white in primary legislation.
For user-to-user sites (this includes the vast majority of modern popular porn sites) it's only slightly more complicated, section 12 applies 'Safety duties protecting children' and the same wording is used:
(4)The duty set out in subsection (3)(a) requires a provider to use age verification or age estimation (or both) to prevent children of any age from encountering primary priority content that is harmful to children...(6)If a provider is required by subsection (4) to use age verification or age estimation for the purpose of compliance with the duty set out in subsection (3)(a), the age verification or age estimation must be of such a kind, and used in such a way, that it is highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a particular user is a child.
'Primary priority content' is defined in section 61 as porn, and promotion of suicide, self-harm & eating disorders: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/enacted#section-61
Of course like any law this could be amended by the current government if they wanted the battle, and yes all parties supported it originally, but it's ridiculous to pretend Labour are solely responsible for it being actually implemented after the Tories spent 8 years doggedly preparing and enacting this thing so it could actually work, and Ofcom went to work on the implementation before Labour came to power. We live in a country where parliament has the say on the law. Despite your claims, the government of the day absolutely cannot just decide to ignore primary legislation by kicking it into the long grass if they wish to.
It doesn't matter who passed the legislation if it is wrong. Labour's track record show they are absolutely delighted to have any censorous legislation regardless who passed it. Your remark is a perfect example of why any political leaning should not interfere with free speech, because the next party might use it to suppress them. If you are on the left, ask yourself; are you happy to hand Reform all the tools of dictatorship?
It doesn't matter who passed the legislation if it is wrong. Labour's track record show they are absolutely delighted to have any censorous legislation regardless who passed it. Your remark is a perfect example of why any political leaning should not interfere with free speech, because the next party might use it to suppress them. If you are on the left, ask yourself; are you happy to hand Reform all the tools of dictatorship?
> Continued construction of the Great Wall of Starmer continues apace
If there's one thing in common between the two major UK political parties, it's that they often want to restrict what the "common people" can do.
The only real difference tends to be the justification: the right-wing tend to whitter on about moral principles, while the left is more likely to ask if anyone is thinking of the children.
Meanwhile, both sides tend to want exceptions for themselves.
And it's not just in the UK; over in the USA, it's perhaps quite telling that services such as Grindr see a major spike in usage whenever there's a Republican convention, despite the fact that said politicians spend much of their time seeking to shut down that type of service, while simultaneously preaching about things like the sanctity of marriage and the sins of the flesh...
https://www.fusemagazine.com.au/lgbtiq-news/world/834-the-grindr-superbowl-in-the-bizarre-world-of-us-republicans.html
https://unherd.com/newsroom/grindr-ceo-confirms-significant-user-spike-during-rnc/
Further back than all of that.
It's the Blair Wall Project. It turns out that both major parties have been accepting Blair's associates as members for a long time now and now there's actually a decent chance of them both losing a bunch of them are "defecting" to Reform.
I'm beginning to understand the countries that elect elderly leaders now. Those ones go away quicker after they turn bad.
See https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and-data/online-research/other/perceptual-hashing-technology.pdf?v=328806
The CSAM perceptual hash function, and list of matching hatches, are private. There are hash functions that are public, but you try asking OFCOM to publish the list of hashes in N different formats and see what happens....
So small web sites, FOSS etc are SOL.
AGAIN
Many (many, many) years ago when I was writing forensic investigation tools - as a sideline to writing and using data recovery tools - a library of hashes was readily available. You had to sign up for it which makes sense but it wasn't a secret. The feature was really very useful. Our file system explorer used it by default and it would colour code directories to indicate that they were known installs (one colour, for 'as expected', another colour for 'not as expected'). Our software would also create a separate virtual folder where everything that matched with a 'naughty' hash would appear. We also flagged files whose extensions didn't match what the hash indicated - a common trick employed by 'wrong uns' at the time apparently.
Then again this was so long ago that we were only just starting to consider switching from MD5 to something with fewer collisions and the library updates came on a CD.
Today we've seen it in action, holding platforms to account...
They really are utterly deluded, aren't they?
As 4chan's lawyers have already pointed out in a legal response (TL;DR - "Fuck Off"), 4chan has no assets in the UK and the chances of anyone getting a confiscation order by stomping all over their First Amendment rights in the US is about 0% of the square root of bugger-all.
So all this is actually meaningless.
Stomp their feet and scream.
Well, I suppose they could compel British providers to block their IP address, but that might show up the harsh level of censorship that the current government is engaging in (because that's going so well when trying to label supporters of Palestinians a bunch of terrorists, right?).
And if they did so, then it would be simple to set up a VPN to get around this.
Are the UK authorities going to ban access to VPNs set up from outside the UK (Nord comes to mind pretty much instantly; they're in Panama and the Netherlands, IIRC.)? Because if they aren't, it would be trivial to get a VPN and then just ignore officialdom.
"Are the UK authorities going to ban access to VPNs set up from outside the UK"
Yes they are eventually. They will do it bit by bit until they get critical control mass then all at once followed by brutality for remaining dissidents. Once they feel confident it turns to old style tyranny.
In the grand scheme of "bUt tHEyRe gOInG tO BaN OUr VpNs" uproar of late, I had a lot of contempt for the idea that the government were somehow going to blanket ban any use of VPN. That said, I see a likely route in taking the same approach with the Online Safety Act and pushing it across the mainstream commercial VPN providers. That'd leave a cohort of smaller providers that went unregistered (as with adult sites), with the understanding that these were so sketchy there'd be a high quotient that were credential harvesting or session hijacking any throughput. Anyone using one would be likely subject to greater risk of bank accounts being drained or losing an email account, and teaching kids the importance of this sort of safety (as with the historical lesson "don't go looking at adult content" expanding to "...if you do you'll see disproportionate and less safe content") leading to longer more complex discussions where children have to "grow up" younger and younger as a result.
Crux is, it's not unusual for a curious early-teen to go looking for pictures of the opposite sex without clothes, blocking the lighter end when no controls can be placed for the heavier less-safe content will funnel them at it with the duality that discussions/explanations about how grim the world can be have to be had at an earlier age, or worse still, they'll experience it directly. Same goes for dodgy VPN issues.
In the grand scheme of "bUt tHEyRe gOInG tO BaN OUr VpNs" uproar of late, I had a lot of contempt for the idea that the government were somehow going to blanket ban any use of VPN. That said, I see a likely route in taking the same approach with the Online Safety Act and pushing it across the mainstream commercial VPN providers.
Oh, it's already coming. So OSA has MPs thinking of the children, but hoping they don't get caught. So we have age verification requirements, implemented in a variety of pretty insecure ways. So as that "isn't working", Labours charging ahead with their Digital IDiot vcard. Which will provide for easy & secure online ID verification, including age. Then the EU is pushing for mandatory 'Chat Control', which will require the scanning of all messages to prevent CSAM, or people calling Starmer a muppet. So the toolbox to remove any security or privacy is almost complete. Obviously VPNs would either need to comply with OSA, Digital IDiot and Chat Control, or they'd break one or more laws.
Then layer on some AI and automate the issuing of FPNs for calling politicians muppets, and won't someone think of the money to be made?
OPNsense has a domain routing feature where you create a list of destinations that will go out via a VPN interface. I already use this for sites where HMG wants me to upload a blood sample from my first born to 'prove my age'.
If I ever lose my way enough to want to visit 4chan, I will certainly add its domain to that.
They'll probably try and find a way to justify a request to the High Court to get the addresses blocked at ISP level and at Cloudflare level for all UK visitors, just like what was done at the start of the month for a dozen or so torrent trackers, which would effectively block 4chan in the UK.
https://lumendatabase.org/notices/72394250
Yeah, I'm quite surprised that Ofcom is still making a noise about this. Surely they realise they haven't a hope of extracting any money from 4chan? Would be much better for Ofcom to quietly let this "investigation" get forgotten, and focus on investigations where they do have some legal power.
They're building dystopia with bureaucracy. The state wants to control everything. The child safety thing is a joke. They don't give a damn about kids because they are collective psychopaths, i.e., no feeling or empathy for others. All they see is that they must control, control, control ...
"As 4chan's lawyers have already pointed out in a legal response (TL;DR - "Fuck Off")..."
Arkell v. Pressdram vibes here and I'm just wondering how anyone thinks that OFCOM can police Web sites based outside the UK.
What I'm afraid of is that this stupidity will chill technology related investment in the uk. A lot of 'start up' kind of activity is spammy and most go bust but it does provide employment and allow people to develop skills.
I'm also concerned that small volunteer based organisations who have no intention of distributing smut in any form and who would not tolerate any kind of manipulation of children will simply geoblock UK as they have no resources to address the requirements of this legislation.
"will chill technology related investment in the uk"
Well, between this and Brexit and a chancellor that talks about growth while inflicting pain, what does the UK have going for it? The only saving grace is that Trump is in charge on the other side of the ocean and the UK as bad as that...yet.
The general response available is going after whatever mechanism is used to make money. I do not use 4chan, so I don't know how it works, but simple searches suggest they have ads. If they run advertisements in the UK, paid for by UK advertisers, that is money that can be taken by UK authorities before it can be transferred away. As long as they either are or are willing to operate without any revenue from UK users, they can mostly ignore complaints and let the UK handle it.
I quite like the sound of this. I like to think it'll turn out like Tolkien's Shire, happy-go-lucky and we can look at pictures of massive pumpkins all day long. When you're tired of that, endless tea forums await. Marvellous. Good luck world, its been nice knowing you.
They will just add an endless number of sites that do not cough up cash to ISP block lists.
The UK is like China now. You do not want to develop tech here, base tech here or allow your tech to be used or accessed from here.
On the plus side, I now hate Labour for passing this when we had optional ISP blocks as much as I hate the Tories for Brexit and cooking it up. I will not vote for either party for the rest of my life. As much as I think Reform will be a disaster, I would like to see both Labour and Tory get wiped out at the next election. The UK is over. Broken beyond fixing by its politicians. So no reason to care what happens next.
This is no Labour government, they're Temu quality Tories using the Labour name.
And given the awfulness of the Tory days, it's actually quite astonishing how badly Labour are fucking this up, it's almost as if they're doing it on purpose...
If you haven't worked out why what a political party in the UK say's it wants to do vs what actually gets done, leaving no difference between the parties when they are "in power", it's because the incompetent civil service is who actually runs the country and refuses to do what the government of the day tells it to do. It really won't matter if the Conservatives or Reform replace Labour - the civil service will ignore the policies that they don't agree with, the status quo remains and the problems that the civil service thinks aren't problems will carry on being problems.
They're blairites. Blair did an absolute number on our political system and none of his successors has even hinted at overturning anything he did, except in the most superficial or peripheral sense. His government instituted numerous quangos that answered directly to the cabinet, bypassing parliament entirely, and drawing so much power into number 10 that he became a dictator in all but name. He totally inverted the relationship between the state and the people and utterly destroyed our institutions. Centralised digital ID cards were his baby, to the point that he's lobbied every government in power to implement them and even released a video just this week extolling the supposed virtues of the system.
Cameron followed in his footsteps (famously declaring himself the heir to Blair) and every PM since then, with the notable exception of Truss, had been fundamentally more of the same.
Should child pornography be freely available online, as an unfortunate consequence of a commitment to freedom of speech?
If your answer is anything other than "yes", then you've agreed there is a line, and now all we're debating is where the line should be drawn. Some will argue the OSA draws it too broadly, or not broadly enough, or that the government shouldn't be the one drawing it (which means unaccountable corporations do - those are your choices).
I know that if I ran a startup that let people post stuff, I'd be pretty horrified if I found they were using it to do awful things like tell teens to starve themselves, and would do something about it even if it hit my bottom line. But that's because I'm not a total creep like the guys who actually run the platforms. So I'm not agin my elected representatives using their clout to enforce a bit of due diligence to see who's a creep and who isn't.
Your comparison is invalid. There are two types of regulation. The one you're positing is making some types of content illegal. The OSA is not making content illegal, it is restricting access to content which remains legal. Someone can support making some types of content illegal, restricting access to legal content, both, or neither.
If you would like to argue that analogy, your point of comparison should be whether everybody should be allowed to access any content, as long as it is legal, without government restriction. If people say no to that, then the OSA's categories can be argued, but I think you'll find more people answering yes than with your perpendicular argument.
I am seeing more and more internet broken in the UK. It's very much unusable without VPN.
For instance, on one specialist forum that I use, people post content to imgur and then link images to the forum. Given that imgur geoblocked UK, you cannot see what people are talking about.
Then some UK services block access from VPN.
So you have to constantly change VPNs and turn them on and off.
4chan can stop the additional fines by providing copies of its illegal content risk assessments and information about its qualifying worldwide revenue to Ofcom.
When opening the investigation, Ofcom said it was looking to understand whether 4chan has failed, or is failing, to abide by its duties under the Online Safety Act.
4chan is well regarded as the cesspit of the internet, I'd imagine there is plenty of content there to take more proactive enforcement including speaking to regulators in the nations that host 4chan & also invoking law enforcement in this jurisdictions to quash the content and those posting it. the fact they are not doing so demonstrates this is more about control of content by strong-arming those that run the sites.
Tech secretary Liz Kendall said: "The Online Safety Act is not just law, it's a lifeline. Today we've seen it in action, holding platforms to account so we can protect people across the UK.
"Services can no longer ignore illegal content, like encouraging self-harm or suicide, circulating online which can devastate young lives and leave families shattered.
"This fine is a clear warning to those who fail to remove illegal content or protect children from harmful material. We fully back the regulator in taking action against all platforms that do not protect users from the darkest corners of the internet."
First look at beefed-up requirements
Among Ofcom's proposed amendments to its obligations to platforms was the requirement for in-scope apps and websites to make use of hash-matching technology, which is seen as a more accurate, automated way of preventing the dissemination of illegal content such as CSAM.
Hash matching involves a system fingerprinting an image and comparing the hash it generates to a database of known harmful images, which are also hashed. If an image's hash matches or shows signs of similarity with one in the database, then it can be removed entirely autonomously and reported to local authorities for follow-up investigations.
again shows its enforced self censorship by the content providers using extensible tools the government controls.
While platforms are forbidden from guiding users toward these types of workarounds, this alone is unlikely to prevent VPNs being used to bypass geo-blocks and similar measures.
so this drivers normal users into using extra techniques to restore service to the services they use which will look just like the techniques used by the bad actors who are posting & hosting the nasty content we all want to be eradicated.
this won't stop the evil doers but does Beverly impinge on normal peoples ability to use services and severely impacts our privacy.
Of course it's about strong-arming those running the services. This is a bloody stupid piece of legislation, but let's play devil's advocate for a moment. Assuming that you want to regulate content on the internet, which is cheaper and faster - policing the content yourself (by hiring more... uh... police officers?) or trying to force those hosting the content to police themselves and their users? To be fair to legislators, this is hardly a new trick. Just look at laws regarding alcohol, cigarettes, or betting shops. It's not actually illegal for minors to drink, smoke or gamble - it's illegal to allow them to do so. The threats and regulatory risks are all on the supply side.
The problem is, those things pose immediate material threats to minors, and are relatively simple to gate in a manner that doesn't impinge on the rights or privacy of adults. The 'material threat' posed by a teenager seeing some pornography isn't anywhere near as severe, or as clear, and the intrusive manner in which the gatekeeping is required to take place respects neither rights nor privacy as we've come to understand them in the internet era. The law imposes significant burdens on internet platforms and services without regard to context - equivalent to requiring newsagents to check the age of everyone so much as looking through the window - and it does so in a way that totally disregards the historic precedent on these things. It creates a massive privacy risk by generatinga whole bunch of additional processing activity around personal data that must now be gathered by law. It pushes people towards using further anonymisation methods that make actually finding and cracking down on the problems this law ostensibly solves all the harder (wow - sounds like that problem might need a few more police officers to deal with, good thing this law saved us some dough to spend on that!). And it further masks the problem by giving parents a false sense of security that obviates the need for them to hold awkward conversations in order to actually educate their kids.
It was entirely possible to put a mechanism in place that was lighter-touch, but also had teeth for the bigger players, but they ignored that because our legislators have no clue how the internet actually works or is used beyond their own use of social media to campaign and search engines to Google their own names.
It was entirely possible to put a mechanism in place that was lighter-touch, but also had teeth for the bigger players, but they ignored that because our legislators have no clue how the internet actually works or is used beyond their own use of social media to campaign and search engines to Google their own names.
That was my point. They could have done something more focussed & constructive but chose this route which is open ended & vague with obvious scope for mission creep without needing additional legislation.
They used a feeble excuse & now have a huge privacy concerning tool to gather data on what you did when & where which effectively turns law abiding citizens into criminals until investigation proves otherwise while the real criminals will just carry on as they where before hand.
If they can’t find them now, forcing everyone to provide id when going online still won’t find them.
This will stop people openly discussing things that the government deems as unpalatable though which could simply be complaining about paying taxes or loss of freedom rights.
A better way to keep citizens and. kids safe online would be for the BBC to run a walled garden Internet that can be accessed via an app on our phones/tablets or a website.
The BBC can then run scam scanning and provide a means and mechanism to report dangerous content.
parents can then rely on the service to keep kids safe online and adults can use it too safe in the knowledge that there is less risk of happening across undesirable material & if we did we could report it & prompt action can be taken.
it would go some way to justifying our licence fee.
Personally I'd open it up for global use as kids planet wide can take advantage of the walled garden approach.
The fact that government hasn't come up with the idea or that big tech hasn't either just shows that no one is interested in stopping the nasty content but they are interested in censoring us using the nasty content as the stick.
if it was run by big tech with a requirement that in order to reach their subscribers vendors must adhere to these scanning solutions etc it'll have a better chance of success,
everyone would know that to go raw internet there be dragons but go by walled garden & your kids are safe. easy message to get through.
yes there will be monsters who would seek to deliberately put nasty content in there but as a walled garden it should be easier to spot, easier to report & easier to stamp out. all while leaving the raw internet for the rest of us.
I think your faith in the BBC to provide this service is wildly misplaced, let a lone why on earth you would even expect the BBC to do it.
Have a look in to using a DNS service that filters adult and malware services (Cloudflare for families / OpenDNS Family Shield) if you want something along those lines.
something more along the lines of AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy where the intermediary can do all the scanning etc and not left to the client.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe
Yes I'm well aware of dns filtering, makes you wonder why they are taking the approach they are when other methods are available.
The number of organizations issuing TLS/SSL certs is decreasing and once the 47 day requirement hits, there isn't much of a business model left for most of that industry. That means the number of groups that can control who has a valid web site goes way down. Right now there are about 500 top level domains so it is trivial to hop from example.com to exmaple.somethingelse but there are less than 70 organizations that can issue a valid SSL certificate and about half of those are country specific.
There are 0 organizations that can issue a valid SSL certificate, as that insecure protocol has long been depreciated.
There are only really 2 organizations that sign TLS certificates without requiring credit card payment and therefore are less controlled as to what they can sign.
If TLS certificates get screwed with enough, that would force a 3rd party TLS root or site hosting via tor onion, or i2p eepsite or GNUnet site, which I don't think is really wanted.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it true that 4Chan has no official presence in the UK? If this is so, then how, exactly, is a UK organization planning on collecting even one penny from them? As I understand it, wouldn't HM Boyos have to bring suit in 4Chan's legal residence? I suspect that the odds of a UK org getting legal cover in the US for something like this to be near zero. It's not like Apple, or Google, or Microsoft, all of which actually have UK-based arms which can be hit; I rather suspect that 4Chan isn't even a registered company in the UK.
And, besides... VPNs are your friends.
It is true that 4chan has no business registration in the UK and thus Ofcom can't do anything unless the site controller decides to visit the UK (but why would you do that?).
Although, Hiroyuki Nishimura does live in Paris, so it wouldn't be hard to have him kidnapped and brought to the UK if wanted (but that wouldn't do anything - as he doesn't go and actually maintain the site or anything (see the previous exploit caused by running known vulnerable versions of "Free"BSD and GNU Ghostscript that hadn't been updated) - he just collects what remains after the host and staff costs as profits).
At most Ofcom could make 4chan block "UK IPs", but Ofcom has already made ISPs sabotage the connection to many censored sites (including 4chan) already.
More likely 4chan can reply by detecting UK IP addresses and responding with pictures of kittens instead of the usual content.
The more sites that simply pull the plug on the UK, the more pressure there will be to understand that a piece of shit legislation is a piece of shit legislation.
The spirit and what its actually doing are very different things.
The spirit as you say is "keeping kids away from harmful material" what its actually done - as the article shows - is made the safer, moderated and well managed sites inaccessible leaving the likes of 4chan as the only thing the kids can access..
>to its obligations to platforms was the requirement for in-scope apps and websites to make use of hash-matching technology
The issue with that is only companies like microsoft etc have a database of such hashes and refuses to provide the hashes or any API to any individual who actually wants to deal with the issue - they only work with approved big businesses.
Alex Gleason wanted to add hash-matching to prevent the posting of such images, but microsoft said no.
4Chan is a US website and is operating within US law... They have no obligations to comply with some random UK nonsense... nor do they have any obligation to censor / restrict Americans Free Speech they can absolutely get on their bike and bugger off with this... 4Chan is suing Ofcom is US courts as well they should... They are not getting a dime from 4Chan or any Kiwi Forums... muppets, what is wrong with the UK now????
It was laughable last year after the Southport attacks and subsequent protests that some UK official was trying to threaten to prosecute Americans for comments made online in America, protected Free Speech under the U.S. Constitution. Doubtless someone from the US Embassy called them and pointed out that America would absolutely not allow this and that they should probably shut their mouth, as I never heard any one in the UK gov mention this very stupid idea ever again.
In short... UK needs to understand their laws mean very little here...
Goodday...
Principle sure... The UK and Ofcom have absolutely zero right or business trying to interfere with the Free Speech of Americans / American websites operating inside the United States.
Ofcom isn't getting that money (or any money) as such fines from foreign powers trying to be levied on U.S. Companies operating without a presence in the said foreign state are unenforceable when a US company has no presence in the Foreign location. Ofcom has absolutely zero jurisdiction over 4Chan, or other U.S. based media / websites who do no have operations within the UK. In or for extraterritorial cooperation from the US Gov with Ofcom would require the actions / content to be actionable under U.S. law.... which in this case it isn't. Additionally the Current Administration has already been telling the UK to back off and not try to interfere with Free Speech in the United States, and Have been clear their concerns around lack free speech in the U.K.
Regardless of what I think of 4Chan and there practices.. We (America) will not stand by and allow the United Kingdom / Ofcom to try to interfere with Free Speech (Protected by Constitution in the USA) at all in any way... absolute nonsense..
If the U.K. wants to build the Great Firewall of Britain absolutely they should knock themselves out, and further betray their growing authoritarian governance of their own people...
But if they wish to try to meddle with us in the USA, well with all due (lack) of respect they can "suck it".
You realize the USA has "Significantly" more influence globally than the UK right? As such others may feel "more" pressure to play ball?... is it fair? no is life fair no..... but if you want extraterritorial cooperation from the US the actions of US companies / citizens involved had better be a crime in the US as well as the UK (or whatever). If it is protected free speech or not illegal under US law you can absolutely go pound sand... The UK or any foreign power has zero right or authority to mess with the actions of US companies / Individuals operating within the Constitution / Laws of the United States of America..
See whats happening now is that all of the "legitimate" sites with the tame/vetted/safe content have blocked UK traffic or implemented age verification meaning the only avenue for kids is sites like 4 chan or dodgy russian hosted porn sites with no vetting/verification etc.
They've arguably made the problem worse, little 14 year old jonny cant get on hentai heaven anymore to see some animated furry boobs, so instead he's found xxxSuperPorn.ru and is about to have his whole reality shattered watching mexican cartel videos...
Of course it is, and I’m sure every single person working at OFCOM absolutely understands this. But what can they do?
The terms of the OSA mean that they have to ‘go through the motions’, give the impression that they are complying with their statutory obligations etc. All of them know that this will go nowhere, but they can't embarrass their political masters by outright saying ‘well this is a pile of crap, obviously we have no jurisdiction over a foreign institution, we know that, they know that, you know that - but it is what it is and so as to spare certain politician’s blushes we’ll put out a completely meaningless and toothless statement’!
Job done, move on, everyone’s happy, no?
