a lawyer representing the company - which has previously said it won't pay such fines - has responded to the demand with an AI-generated cartoon image of a hamster.
4chan is still a thing? I thought it died long ago. Perhaps I grew up.
It is still there. There is a GPT that keeps it looking active and people that reply to it daily. For about 9 days after their most recent big hack it was nice and quiet. It would be a ghost town if not for the GPT using a 4chan pass and seychelles proxies. The /pol/ board is probably the most active with real humans trying to shock and awe people with fake racism and other edge-lord behavior. The real racist are on other sites. I would invite them here to prove what that really looks like but they would be ultra-shadow-banned instantly.
> "Companies – wherever they're based – are not allowed to sell unsafe toys to children in the UK. And society has long protected youngsters from things like alcohol, smoking and gambling. The digital world should be no different," she said.
So the UK plans to fine Parisian bars that serve alcohol to British under-18s in France on holiday?
"In the only country in which 4chan operates, the United States, it is breaking no law and indeed its conduct is expressly protected by the First Amendment."[0]
It does seem like if the UK wants to do content filtration (blocking noncompliant websites) they will need to own up to it and set up a China-style firewall, rather than hoping they can badger the service providers into doing it for them.
People used to tell kids to not go to a shady part of town while they spent their afternoons outside unsupervised. Can parents not tell kids to not go to certain websites? We still went to the shady part of town and the kids will still go to 4chan but at least we don't need to give away freedoms. Such erosion of freedom for the common person because parents can't have an awkward conversation is irritating.
The response from Ofcom doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
If you are to sell a toy in the UK you must be a British company. (and must pay VAT and comply with British safety standards).
If a consumer buys from overseas and imports a product then they do not have British consumer protections. Which is why so much aliexpress electrical stuff is dangerous (expecially USB chargers) yet it continues to be legally imported.
Just, no british retailer would be allowed to carry it without getting a fine.
I was surprised by Ofcom trying to use that analogy as it's not at all relevant. 4Chan isn't selling anything in the UK, so why are Ofcom harping on about consumer protection?
It's a stupid law and Ofcom are stupid. I wish that Labour hadn't continued with implementing the Tories authoritarian law, but then Labour seem to be a Tory-Lite party but with just less blatant corruption.
>However, a lawyer representing the company - which has previously said it won't pay such fines - has responded to the demand with an AI-generated cartoon image of a hamster.
>The latest image is not the first picture of a hamster lawyers for 4chan have sent in reply to Ofcom
amazing. same energy as the pirate bay telling dreamworks to sodomize themselves. i cant help but laugh at the absurdness of it.
Meanwhile Google.com shows all manner of depravity if you click “safe search: off”.
I realize there’s a carve out in the legislation for search engines but if the goal is to stop little Timmy finding pictures of an X being Yd up the Z then it is a resolute failure.
The only thing that works with children is transparency and accountability, be that the school firewall or a ban on screen use in secret.
Adding, there are far worse sites than 4chan. 4chan just happens to be the most popular or at least made to look that way. 4chan has it's own AI that drive engagement creating a massive set of threads in many boards daily and weekly. It also responds to people.
Tor .onion chans have much more taboo content to put it mildly.
UK fining an American company for this is absurd. 4Chan isn't breaking any laws. You can make it illegal for your own citizens but you can't regulate a foreign business. UK citizens should fight for the right to free speech though.
> Last month Pornhub restricted access to its website in the UK, blaming the introduction of stricter age checks, and said its traffic had fallen by 77%.
assumedly the rate of consumption hasn't dramatically changed, so the OSA's immediate result has been either the decentralisation of porn providers (towards those small enough to dodge the law for now and be less exacting) or the mass adoption of proxies; I assume the former is the path of least resistance
this is notably the opposite of the feared outcome (which I suspect may be closer to the long-term effect) that the bar to meet the requirements would be so high (possibly involving hiring a lawyer) that smaller social/porn sites get regulated out of existence (see ie. https://lobste.rs/s/ukosa1/uk_users_lobsters_needs_your_help...)
There's always people that say it's the parents responsibility to monitor their kids. But as a parent, you either give your kids full access to the internet or nothing. The fault lies with the OS companies Google, Microsoft, Apple. They do a terrible job with parental controls. They make it very hard to setup, they're confusing and hard to use plus they barely work. I think they just do it as a checkbox for marketing or regulatory purposes. That's where I'd like to see regulation.
> Data shows that nearly 80% of the top 100 pornography sites in the UK now have age checks in place. This means that on average, every day, over 7 million visitors from the UK are accessing pornography services that have deployed age assurance.
I would have expected that most people would switch to other pornography sites that don't have age checks rather than doing an age check. But apparently that isn't the case. (Or their data is misleading. People in the UK who are using VPNs presumably can't be easily identified as British.)
I used to go on a curated version of 4Chan via Telegram. Yes there is a lot of racism (although it flies in every direction, between every ethnicity you could imagine) but there is also (due to the anonymous nature) some genuinely interesting discussions. I remember one thread about aircraft carriers being of no use being debated by US and UK submarine officers.
There are also some genuinely funny bits. There was a guy in Greece who had found out that as long as he never graduated, he could live a basic life for free at university. His nickname was Dormogenes.
While there's plenty of legit, true racism throughout 4chan I was always struck by how incredibly specific it could get. Like "Congolese Bantus subjugating pygmies" kind of specific.
I haven't gone on in many years, almost decades. I feel like it was both a huge waste of time but also useful. I eventually lost interest in keeping up with it all. I am surprised anyone's mind can handle being there for long. Even m00t himself left and I don't think ever came back.
107 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 90.1 ms ] threadIt is still there. There is a GPT that keeps it looking active and people that reply to it daily. For about 9 days after their most recent big hack it was nice and quiet. It would be a ghost town if not for the GPT using a 4chan pass and seychelles proxies. The /pol/ board is probably the most active with real humans trying to shock and awe people with fake racism and other edge-lord behavior. The real racist are on other sites. I would invite them here to prove what that really looks like but they would be ultra-shadow-banned instantly.
So the UK plans to fine Parisian bars that serve alcohol to British under-18s in France on holiday?
"In the only country in which 4chan operates, the United States, it is breaking no law and indeed its conduct is expressly protected by the First Amendment."[0]
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c624330lg1ko
If you are to sell a toy in the UK you must be a British company. (and must pay VAT and comply with British safety standards).
If a consumer buys from overseas and imports a product then they do not have British consumer protections. Which is why so much aliexpress electrical stuff is dangerous (expecially USB chargers) yet it continues to be legally imported.
Just, no british retailer would be allowed to carry it without getting a fine.
It's a stupid law and Ofcom are stupid. I wish that Labour hadn't continued with implementing the Tories authoritarian law, but then Labour seem to be a Tory-Lite party but with just less blatant corruption.
>The latest image is not the first picture of a hamster lawyers for 4chan have sent in reply to Ofcom
amazing. same energy as the pirate bay telling dreamworks to sodomize themselves. i cant help but laugh at the absurdness of it.
I realize there’s a carve out in the legislation for search engines but if the goal is to stop little Timmy finding pictures of an X being Yd up the Z then it is a resolute failure.
The only thing that works with children is transparency and accountability, be that the school firewall or a ban on screen use in secret.
”screens where I can see ‘em!”
Tor .onion chans have much more taboo content to put it mildly.
https://27bslash6.com/overdue.html
We have other crimes like this, like child sexual abuse committed in a foreign country.
assumedly the rate of consumption hasn't dramatically changed, so the OSA's immediate result has been either the decentralisation of porn providers (towards those small enough to dodge the law for now and be less exacting) or the mass adoption of proxies; I assume the former is the path of least resistance
this is notably the opposite of the feared outcome (which I suspect may be closer to the long-term effect) that the bar to meet the requirements would be so high (possibly involving hiring a lawyer) that smaller social/porn sites get regulated out of existence (see ie. https://lobste.rs/s/ukosa1/uk_users_lobsters_needs_your_help...)
> or requiring Internet Service Providers to block a site in the UK.
Ah, that's what they want.
> Data shows that nearly 80% of the top 100 pornography sites in the UK now have age checks in place. This means that on average, every day, over 7 million visitors from the UK are accessing pornography services that have deployed age assurance.
I would have expected that most people would switch to other pornography sites that don't have age checks rather than doing an age check. But apparently that isn't the case. (Or their data is misleading. People in the UK who are using VPNs presumably can't be easily identified as British.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation#Lower_bounds,...
I used to go on a curated version of 4Chan via Telegram. Yes there is a lot of racism (although it flies in every direction, between every ethnicity you could imagine) but there is also (due to the anonymous nature) some genuinely interesting discussions. I remember one thread about aircraft carriers being of no use being debated by US and UK submarine officers.
There are also some genuinely funny bits. There was a guy in Greece who had found out that as long as he never graduated, he could live a basic life for free at university. His nickname was Dormogenes.