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When 4chan has the moral high ground, it's time to seriously reconsider a law.
If you’re making 4chan look like the good guys, you are seriously depraved and fucked.
There's enough room in my heart and head to wish 4chan a nasty departure and also not want the UK to dictate what happens in other countries. If they don't want people going there they can stop them on their own fucking soil.
Good.
This concerted effort of censorship needs to end.
If UK [REDACTED] want their internet cut up like China, that's up to their rulers.
UK government is sick and rotten. They are trying to create a nanny dictatorship.
Sadly my dyslexia got better of me so I kept reading it as Brine & Shrimp, this didn't make any sense so I asked family who laughed and told me I got it wrong 🤣
The People v Larry Flynt sets a precedent for smut peddlers taking a necessary moral stance, I guess
Didn't think I'd say this, but 4chan ia right: If the UK doesn't like it, they can have their ISPs block it.
I feel like that's the ultimate goal: simply not having "unmoral" content on the internet.
I used to think that when sites like Pornhub started geoblocking regions with those stupid laws, it was a sort of win for the open internet, some sort of fight back. Now I think that was the original goal of the fascist to begin with.
Geoblocking fascist regions is a win for everyone outside that region, and better than capitulating, but fascism is like a cancer that will continue expanding by force, and geoblocks will become less effective at protecting the internet for the rest of us. They are only a temporary measure. As long as the cancer remains the disease is terminal.
Online Safety Act vs 4chan
Can they somehow both lose?
This is the modern day version of "The people versus Larry Flint"
Law firm Byrne & Storm? Awesome name.
4chan is a real company? I thought they were just some enthusiasts who set up a few servers for trolls to have fun.
They became a real company when moot sold the site
I’ve been thinking about the idea that it should be on the government to implement any restrictions it might want to place, so than it’s not an undue burden to the site owner. That way if the UK wants age verification, it should implement it and then it can add whatever site it deems without impacting someone in another jurisdiction.
The downside is it means inserting the government into the network with each country (and state in the US) having its own firewall, so I don’t know if that’s any better. But somewhere along the way the government said that they want to control it, so it should be their problem to solve.
https?
What about it? There are tons of ways to deal with that. If it’s an SNI based site, the host header lives outside of the encrypted payload and can be actioned on. They could couple it with IP based whitelists. Or they could push it down to an account level and require it to connect to the internet period. They can approach it almost any way a corporation could. Sadly digital access hasn’t been enshrined as a right anywhere, and it’d be a fine line between enforcement and great firewall of China approach.
if the government is intercepting https requests and redirecting them to their own age verification thing wouldn't it have to be downgraded to http?
Again, it depends. If a site is using SNI, the host header is outside the encrypted payload. That can be scanned without breaking https. You can redirect like a proxy, verify the age and then let the original traffic through.
For old style SSL sites you could evaluate by IP and do the same though it would be a broader stroke.
The worst one would be if they forced a national proxy with their own trusted root certificate, but I don’t even want to get into that one.
Who tf is funding 4chan with a lawyer?
They run ads. They actually have pretty reasonable ads policies, too.
Note that while the US does not recognize a US based server as being under foreign jurisdiction just due to being accessible in that country, there are also some subtle rules that can cause it to be considered to be doing business there by the US legal system, even if they don't have a physical presence there and are not directly selling product there. One of those is targeted advertising to people in that foreign country.
I don't know whether selling ads aimed at people in a country qualifies. It may not, or that bit might not have been hammered out by courts yet, but if I were 4chan, I'd be really careful on that, as they're explicitly mentioning that they have a British userbase on that ad sales page:
Location: United States (47%), United Kingdom (7%), Canada (6%), Australia (4%), Germany (4%)
Regardless, 4chan is in the US. UK has no power here. They would have to compel the US to do something, and it (probably) won’t.
Regardless, 4chan is in the US. UK has no power here.
If the US legal system recognizes that a company in the US is doing business in the UK, then the US legal system will view the UK legal system as having jurisdiction and enforce rulings against them from the UK's legal system.
4chan's argument here is going to be that they don't meet that bar. I expect that 4chan is most-likely going to be able to successfully make that argument, but the "doing business" bit does matter.
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2025
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