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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).
by nickdothutton 1y ago
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.
- fruitworks 1y agoStep 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!
- username332211 1y agoHow does step 5 work? Switching DNS servers is trivial.
- postexitus 1y agoFor you - not for 99% of the public.
- username332211 1y agoEhh, 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.
- anonym29 1y agoHuman adaptivity is perhaps both our biggest strength and biggest weakness. It's the same force behind our greatest innovations and our greatest tragedies, and even fuels the apathetic indifference towards those tragedies, too.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y agohttps://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls 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.)
- ramesh31 1y ago>It's 15 minutes of fumbling around for the non-technical person, then they're protected. You and I have very different ideas of what "non-technical" means. If it involves anything beyond pressing "download" on the app store, it's out of reach of the vast majority of users.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y agoFair enough, there's a wide variance there. I'd still hesitate to say it's out of reach for most people as they'll likely have someone they know who would be able to follow those instructions for them. For the purpose of being able to access something they used to be able to access, I think most people will be able to figure this out. The point is that it's one-and-done in most instances. (To that end there's a reasonable worry that OS updates reset these settings but that's kind of a separate problem.)
- saberience 1y agoMulvad is totally non technical, you just download it and press “connect” and boom you’re on a vpn? Is that really so complex the average person can’t do it? It’s less complex than sending an email.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y agoThe instructions I linked are to set up DoH/DoT with their (free!) service, so it's a little bit more involved than downloading an app; just not too much more involved to someone who's motivated to regain something they lost.
- aaomidi 1y agoIn countries like Iran 80%+ of the population knows how to. It’s all a matter of incentives.
- qingcharles 1y agoThis. 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.
- jdietrich 1y agoMillions 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-devices/illicit-streaming-devices https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/illicit-streaming... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_on_television#3pm_%22blackout%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_on_television...
- HPsquared 1y agoCopyright and censorship involve similar technological issues, but the ethics and legal aspects are totally different.
- SoftTalker 1y agoI've tried the "IPTV streams" to watch blacked out NHL games, and they are often terribly overloaded or just don't work at all. Not something I'd pay for.
- chatmasta 1y agoJust search for the name of the sport and “bite” and you’ll find some sketchy successor of the original subreddits for pirated sports streams (“r/nflbite,” “r/nbabite,” etc.) Or find the latest streameast mirror which is usually the best. Make sure your ad blocker is working. Then it’s just a matter of finding the best stream, extracting the playlist, and opening VLC. I documented [0] some useful tricks for this technique and the comments also include more useful snippets and bookmarklets. [0] https://gist.github.com/milesrichardson/4661c311199b98023701f6cecd3b89b0 https://gist.github.com/milesrichardson/4661c311199b98023701...
- sejje 1y agoMy dad can hardly use a mouse, but the systems I put in place for him are pretty complex. He has no idea.
- CommanderData 1y agostep 6: Block non-compliant DNS servers
- kps 1y agoStep 7: Camera AI that can catch the people scribbling “Sci-Hub is 190.115.31.218” on a bathroom wall.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoDoes that even work anymore? I thought plain IP addresses were a thing of the past ever since we started doing virtual hosts 25 years ago. I just get a 503 when I use the address you posted...
- thedrexster 1y agoPut it in your hosts file ;)
- CWuestefeld 1y agoIf you just point your browser to https://<ip_address> then it won't work. You also need to have the correct hostname in the http request headers. The easiest way to accomplish this is to add the address into your .hosts file (as sibling post says) and just use the name.
- 1y ago
- supriyo-biswas 1y agoDNS poisoning and rejection of TLS handshakes based on SNI.
- aaomidi 1y agoThis is why I’m really pissed off at how long ECH has taken. And it’s all because of corporate interests at IETF.
- LexiMax 1y agoThat's one domain down. Only 3,524 domains that just cropped up yesterday to go. Never mind the fact that doing a Google search will surface pages on various wikis, git repositories, and other sites that conveniently list all of the mirrors.
- HDThoreaun 1y agoBig enough barrier to stop most users
- LexiMax 1y agoMost users default to search engines instead of typing in a URL. I searched for "pirate bay" just now and all of the top results are mirrors or lists of mirrors.
- worewood 1y agoEncrypted Client Hello and DNS over HTTPS.
- supriyo-biswas 1y agoDrop all ECH TLS connections, as China does.
- themafia 1y agoCreating the "Great Firewall of the UK" without actually calling it that: Priceless.
- raydev 1y agoAnd yet most people won't bother doing it. Same way most attempts to stop piracy work. The people who are serious about getting around the blocks will find ways, but the less motivated will just give up (again, this is most people).
- okasaki 1y agoUK 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.
- Bender 1y ago4chan 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.
- GoblinSlayer 1y agoAFAIK Cloudflare gives 4chan a dedicated ip to simplify blocking.
- Bender 1y agoI 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?type=a,aaaa https://whoisfreaks.com/tools/dns/history/lookup/4chan.org?t...
- ovi256 1y agoCF will cooperate with UK authorities because they're not in 4chan's business.
- const_cast 1y agoI doubt it heavily. CF has control over a large chunk of the global internet - they're not going to go thru their clients one by one and make sure they're doing age verification. That's absurd and far too expensive. The alternative to that is either: 1. UK blocks cloudflare (unlikely, come on now) 2. UK gives cloudflare a pass (fairly common) 3. Somewhere in-between. Maybe UK cares about highly visible people behind cloudflare like 4Chan but not others.
- sunshine-o 1y agoThis 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.
- lokar 1y agoWhile 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.
- 123pie123 1y agoreally? From my anecdotal evidence, is that it's fucking stupid and hated
- lokar 1y agoThey have fair and competitive elections, no?
- dijit 1y agoour two party system means that more often than not you are voting against some party having power. The left wing has been vote split for some time, now the tight wing is getting vote split. It’s not a fair characterisation to say that the UK government is popular, the last actually popular government was probably Tony Blair (though many regret him in hindsight), though Boris had his followers I guess.
- rich_sasha 1y agoI mean, downstream from 1 it's all as it should be. 100% of the issue is #1, no?
- Fanofilm 1y agoStep 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.
- shkkmo 1y ago> 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.
- betaby 1y agoIt's an understandable English even for non-native speaker like me. You are probably not very exposed to non-native speakers.
- jawilson2 1y agoEnglish speaker for approximately 43 of my 44+ years on this planet. I have almost no idea what this sentence is trying to convey.
- teaearlgraycold 1y agoDamn what’s up with that gap? You’re falling behind.
- machomaster 1y agoI am non-native speaker and I confirm that the post was gibberish.
- shkkmo 1y ago
- general1726 1y agoStep 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.
- gnfargbl 1y agoHMG 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.
- piltdownman 1y agoPerformative 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-detain-pro-palestine-protester-80-almost-27-hours-search-house https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/24/uk-police-de... https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/20/uk/irish-rapper-terrorism-charges-intl-gbr 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_exploitation_scandal 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#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_paedophile_dossier... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tory-mp-warned-of-powerful-paedophile-ring-30-years-ago-8507780.html 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4urbhc_cOQk
- Ajedi32 1y agoIMO 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.
- gherkinnn 1y agoCompletely 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.
- sejje 1y agoTo be fair, there's no logical problem with an example of Iran demanding UK women to wear burkas even if burkas aren't their cultural norm.
- M95D 1y agoWe 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.
- SoftTalker 1y ago/etc/hosts, and /etc/resolv.conf.
- M95D 1y agoAnd get the original IP from where?
- patrickmay 1y agoOr teach people how to point to a different DNS server in an area with laws more amenable to their preferences.
- prmoustache 1y agoUntil coutry implement the great firewall and it becomes a play of cat & mouse.
- M95D 1y ago... or until the blocking starts at the root name servers. There are only a few of them.
- immibis 1y agoThe root zone file is publicly distributed by IANA [1] so you can download it and ignore the servers themselves. Then your lookup (from the resolver you're running yourself) starts at a particular country's top level. As for censorship, because it's hierarchical, they'd have to remove an entire country code from the root servers. [1] https://www.iana.org/domains/root/files https://www.iana.org/domains/root/files
- PartiallyTyped 1y agoPerformative or outright extortion.
- newsclues 1y ago6 the 4chan fans all know how to bypass the ban and it’s ultimately ineffective
- nly 1y agoAnd the irony is the law itself is encouraging more VPN use, which in turn will allow bypassing of any outright blocks.