It's #24 on this list https://companiesmarketcap.com/software/largest-software-com... so I'd say it's big tech.
Easier for torrent sites to tell people to use VPNs.
Don't defend them. Their decisions are arbitrary and it's really sad so much of the web has chosen to use their garbage services.
You can also access 4chan, Tattle Life, and other nasty gossip websites that the UK nanny state wants to ban.
And you can access the porn on Reddit and Twitter (though in some cases you'll have to make an account). And of course the "tube" sites work fine.
After you've done that, as a UK citizen, please go to https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903 and ask the government to repeal their awful law.
Bonus for using Nitter here, you can also see the latest posts from an account instead of the most popular posts, and see replies/interactions to individual tweets. Oh, and it gives you plain HTML.
Reddit pisses me off so much that despite the fact that I don't even use Reddit, just so that my experience sucks less when I'm linked to Reddit or have another reason to lurk it,
- I use the "Old Reddit Redirect" extension to force the browser to go to old reddit
- I use the "Load Reddit Images Directly" extension to bypass Reddit's hideous image viewer that tries to load if your browser makes the mistake of having text/html in the "Accept" headers when opening an image in a new tab. (Dear Firefox/Chrome/etc: maybe stop doing that? If I open an image in a new tab, there is a zero percent chance I want HTML.)
It might be some kind of phased rollout of course.
You can browse though
> please go to https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903 Signed!
But on a macro scale, the entire Tor network has fairly limited bandwidth and torrenting is a very easy way to saturate it. (Existential risk to the network / tragedy of the commons)
Probably going to be slower than over the Tor network without any manual tweaking.
...would also help with privacy and nasty telco letters.
Hey, we pay $100B/yr of tax money into the NSA/CIA/etc budgets every year so they can run exit nodes among other activities, I wouldn't exactly call it donated
bandwidth is a scarce resource on tor.
So, you anonymously make the requests through an exit node, but the request contains your IP, which defeats the entire purpose of Tor.
Make no mistake, the plan is to require 'KYC' for Google, reddit, Facebook, X soon and all that and then later require it for all web sites, even this one.
Australia recently passed a law requiring Google to KYC Australian account holders to check ages to decide if the user will be allowed to control the "safe search" setting.
I’m reminded of all-around-good-guy @patio11’s evergreen The Optimal Amount Of Fraud Is Non-Zero…
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
I almost said "solution" instead of workaround, but of course the only actual solution is to fix the legislation.
It is reasonably decent these days. Generally there are periods where Tor network is slow.
> A VPN is a more realistic workaround to this kind of geofencing
Generally I tend to use a combination of Tor / VPN depending on what I am doing. Some gossip sites have onion urls and I will use Tor if visiting those. Other sites that are geo-fenced (sites like Odysee) are easier to get to via VPN.
> I almost said "solution" instead of workaround, but of course the only actual solution is to fix the legislation.
That isn't going to get fixed anytime soon. In fact I expect it to get worse over time.
And get to solve a dozen whack-a-mole intentionally-slow-loading reCAPTCHAs just to see the page, or worse, end up in a Cloudflare redirect loop.
Though at that point might as well use Tor in Brave, because the additional ad&trackers blockers improves drastically the load times.
Now, if only Brave would go the extra mile of having the Tor browser window better mimick the Tor Browser.
That procedure depends upon your platform and client.
http://www.b3rn3d.com/blog/2014/03/05/tor-country-codes/
Edit: Use this link instead (thanks mzajc!):
https://web.archive.org/web/20180429212133/http://www.b3rn3d...
"uBlock filters – Badware risks"
There is literally no point in signing those petitions. The only disagreement between the major political parties in the UK is how draconian it should be.
They may work out that UK has a 2 party system where each one just takes turns and none of it makes much difference.
There would be more of an impact if, perhaps, everyone in the UK who has had to shut a web site because of this law wrote to their MP.
I don't think so. It says on the site "At 100,000 signatures, this petition will be considered for debate in Parliament".
I've seen people get excited about petitions before that got to 100,000 signatures and it all fizzled out, or it wasn't debated seriously in parliament. Often you will get a cookie cutter response with these petitions that is a paragraph long.
The reality is that most of the public are indifferent or supportive of the current legislation and most MPs know that.
> There would be more of an impact if, perhaps, everyone in the UK who has had to shut a web site because of this law wrote to their MP.
Each MP would get maybe a max of 10s of emails/letters each. Many of those MPs wouldn't even bother answering you. Those that do will often will probably give you the brush off.
I've written to my MP before (about encryption legislation), spent a lot of time presenting a clear and cogent argument and I got a "well I might have a chat with the home secretary" and they were still singing the same tune years later. What I was telling them was largely the same as other industry experts. They don't care and that is the unfortunate reality.
The fact is that the direction the UK government (doesn't matter whether it was Red Team or Blue Team) has been going in has been clear for well over a decade at this point. It would take a major political shake up for this to change IMHO.
MPs have been known to respond to letters. I have had responses to various issues. It obviously depends on the MP. Many MPs were very much opposed to this issue.
I think they are both ineffective. So I don't believe that is true.
> MPs have been known to respond to letters. I have had responses to various issues.
Getting a response is one thing. Having something done is another.
> It obviously depends on the MP. Many MPs were very much opposed to this issue.
The legislation was going to happen at some point or another. The direction of travel was quite clear. There are always going to be some dissenters, but the awful legislation got passed anyway. So what did their dissent achieve? Nothing.
I came to the realisation a number of years ago that for the majority of people, the only care about being able to use their Netflix, shopping on amazon, check their email and post photos on Facebook. Concerns outside of that are simply too abstract/distant to care about.
I disagree that writing to MPs is always ineffective. Some campaigns have been successful. Whether it will be effective in this case is another matter. Maybe when people start to experience the block it will gain traction.
Of course if you don’t even make low-effort attempts to make your voice heard and exercise your democratic rights, you can be certain that you’ll lose them.
Not a fake one, but the real deal trying to charge me £0.00.
I don’t have the patience to investigate that further but I am all behind banning scummy sites like that.
It's weird too how I don't want to prove my age, guess it's the taboo aspect of it vs. say showing your id at a bar.
You could roll your own but wireguard/openvpn going to random hosting provider is gonna achieve the same thing if they are playing hardball.
But if the blocking is happening somewhere other than the ISP, this is less effective. A hypothetical TPB user might want to proxy via Luxembourg now (seems like the shortest hop to somewhere with sane legislation)
They also exercise an IWF proxy so your already MiTM'd.
if cloudflare were to host malware on their own IPs, it would have been trivial to see CF's steps.
Unless you want to suggest that CF is developing and distributing sophisticated malware and making botnets across the world
- The Silent Generation, in charge at the time, had no idea what was this Internet thing about.
- The US Intelligence community understood it was a powerful tool to operate abroad.
- Nobody dared derailing the only engine of growth and progress in many economies
It obviously got out of control and is very abnormal in fact if you consider how power really works.
As of today, as a user of a reputable VPN, I am blocked from a lot essential websites or have to prove I am an human every 5 minutes, it sucks.
Anyway we are one major cyber disaster away for our the state to switch from a blacklist to whitelist paradigm. A safer and better Internet for everyone.
We will probably still have ways to access the "Free" Internet. It is gonna be fun, slower and might get you in serious troubles.
Centralized power, centralized censorship.
At approximately the same time, social networks became less social and more propaganda feeds.... so it went from a feed of content made by your friends for other friends (from complaints in status messages to photos of their plates) and moved to whatever crap they try to serve you now,...
I have to do that using corporate and residential US networks, simply because I use Firefox.
As great as Cloudflares services might be to each individual user, the centralization of infrastructure, and by extension the centralization of power, doesn’t seem to be worth it at a macro level. The tragedy of the commons strikes again.
Can't they at least set a first-party cookie to avoid repeated captchas per site, given that they're terminating HTTP?
But as soon as you had ISPs started, centralization came. Now, most countries will have at most 5 major ISPs, and in reality geographical availability within countries make 1 or 2 available.
Then, originally people had their own websites (I was there!) in their own servers. But Geocities started the centralization trend. And then CDNs, and then MySpace/Facebook and all that.
The only way we are going to get the "freedom" network as it was before is through mesh-networks or similar technologies. Which maybe so far are very slow and cumbersome, but they will have to evolve. I know it is not very fashionable here in HN, but the only see that capable of happening is implementing some kind of "incentive mechanism" that incenvitives people to let data pass through their node in the mesh network; aaaand cryptocurrencies offer an possible solution for that.
I remember around 2010 there were cities with several small new ISPs providing fast home and mobile Internet for cheap and with very good coverage. Infrastructure costs were probably very low. Order of magnitude I guess compared to 4G, cable or fiber.
You could find phones supporting it (HTC was one of the maker) and it seemed to be the perfect solution for most users. I am not sure if those small ISPs already had a roaming system in place but it would have made a lot of sense.
Anyway, when Intel finally gave up I thought there are probably strong forces wanting to keep access to the Internet in a few hands, expensive and centralised.
The Internet is just a commercialised ARPANet. ARPANet was designed to survive bombs taking out a fair percentage of it's nodes. The Internet still has that robust resistance to damage. You can see it in action when anchors cut ocean cables - barely anyone notices. And as the old saying goes, the internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.
However, the commercial enterprises built on top of the internet love centralisation. CloudFlare is an interesting case in point. They have been champions of an uncensored internet for as long as I can remember, which is one of the reasons they grew to their current size. That growth was always going to compromise that core principle, because once a significant amount of traffic passed through them they would become an attractive target for groups wanting to inflict their views of what's proper viewing for the rest of the world.
But while CloudFlare can't exist without the internet, the internet will continue on without CloudFlare. So while the self appointed gatekeepers have indeed blocked the large hole in the sponge that is CloudFlare, underneath the sponge is still a sponge. Information people find interesting will just take other routes.
Or to put it another way, if they think they have stopped or even appreciably slowed down teenage boys from accessing porn, they are kidding themselves.
The real problem with the internet, as I see it, is centralization. This is a product of monopoly, which is the core feature of copyright. A truly better internet would replace the authoritative structure of copyright with a truly decentralized model.
As far as I can tell, the only hard problem left in decentralized networking is moderation. No one wants to browse an unmoderated internet. The problem is that moderation is structured as an authoritative hierarchy, so it's not compatible with true decentralization.
I propose we replace moderation with curation. Every user can intentionally choose the subset of internet they want to interact with, defined by attestations from other users, all backed with a web of trust. This way everyone is the highest authority, and users can help each other avoid content they are disinterested in.
https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun
However at some point I will have a machine setup in a foreign country as a jump box.
They stream them on streaming websites.
Im just confused - can somebody explain me this?
The shocking part of this isn't that they aren't participating in that form of crime in the UK, it's that they're somehow able to participate in it in the rest of the world.
And I say this as someone who thinks that copyright laws are largely unjust, preventing people from engaging with their own culture, but that doesn't make them not the law.
I understood from the article that it was for users in the UK, not for hosts in the UK.
Personally, it's always sad when a company agrees to censor on their own merit when they don't have legal obligation to.
> This is geo-blocking, by definition.
Do you also refer to steam games that only sell in some regions as "geo-blocking"? I don't. Steam doesn't (they call them region restrictions). There's no blocking going on, merely declining to offer something in the first place. Cloudflare is the host here, they aren't blocking anything, they just aren't providing the pirate site in the first place.
> when they don't have legal obligation to.
While I know relatively little about UK law I'm extremely skeptical of the idea that cloudflare does not have a legal obligation to not knowingly host websites committing copyright infringement.
And you can buy VPS using crypto.
I think a better Orwell reference for this isn't 1984 though but rather https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel.... This is the essay that was originally meant as a preface to Animal Farm - and, ironically, was itself censored (by publishers).
Anyway, few examples of many:
>A teenager who posted rap lyrics which included racist language on Instagram has been found guilty of sending a grossly offensive message.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921
>A man has been accused of sending a "grossly offensive" tweet in which he claimed "the only good Brit soldier is a deed one" the day after fundraising hero Captain Sir Tom Moore died.
https://news.sky.com/story/man-accused-of-sending-grossly-of...
>UK police arrest veteran because anti-LGBTQ post 'caused anxiety'
https://www.foxnews.com/world/uk-police-british-army-veteran...
>Officers from 37 police forces made 12,183 arrests in 2023 [over offensive posts on social media], the equivalent of about 33 per day.
IPFS have content blocking already: https://badbits.dwebops.pub/
Also, don’t they have bigger problems than this as country?
Visit others like ext.to and literally the entire front page is stuff like the new Superman movie, etc. You sound like a fool if you try to argue it's mainly for legitimate purposes. (Contrast with freenet and stuff, where if you've ever used it, you'll find most of the stuff there is people's boring ass personal webpages and stuff
Cloudflare has said pirate sites as clients - they are not (and cannot) block any pirate sites that are not their clients. The remedy is for those sites to no longer be patrons of Cloudflare.
If an analogy helps anyone understand better - imagine you have a lemonade stand. You use your neighbor's yard to set up the stand for some reason (maybe since its closer to a main road, the why doesn't really matter). The city tells your neighbor that they will be fined if they continue to have a lemonade stand in their yard, so your neighbor parks their truck in front of the stand, hiding it from the street.
In that analogy, cloudflare is the neighbor and your lemonade stand is the pirate site. You aren't prevented from selling your lemonade, but you can no longer freely use your neighbor's yard unless you want to direct people around the truck ahead of time.
Trying to piece together the details, here's my undewrstanding:
- Until recently, major British residential ISPs were blocking access to torrent/pirate/porn sites for their customers ("BT, Virgin Media, Sky, TalkTalk, EE, and Plusnet account for the majority of the UK’s residential internet market")
- Cloudflare has recently been ordered by courts in the UK to block access to these torrent/pirate/porn sites
- The reason that Cloudflare is involved is because many of these sites use Cloudflare as a content delivery network. A CDN is <waves hands> basically an application-layer distributed cache that sits between end users' web browsers and the origin HTTP servers that they're trying to access.
- Cloudflare geolocates clients connecting to its CDN. It undoubtedly has many reasons to do this, besides just court-ordered geoblocking: these would include routing queries efficiently within its globally distributed datacenters, DDoS prevention, bot blocking, etc.
- Cloudflare's geolocation techniques are, unsurprisingly, more sophisticated than just determining a country based on a client's IP address.
If I've got all that right (do I???)… then the tl;dr is:
It used to be possible for UK users to circumvent the blocks of these sites simply by using any VPN to acquire a non-UK IP address. Now the order to block these sites has been imposed on Cloudflare, which plays a critical role as an intermediary in distributing their content in a scalable way. For a variety of reasons, some of which end-users probably approve of and others not, Cloudflare uses more sophisticated techniques to geolocate clients. So "just use a VPN" is not enough to circumvent the blocks anymore.
xandrius•7h ago
Now it's torrent sites and next it's going to be other things the party in charge doesn't like.
gjsman-1000•6h ago
Nowadays... I actually think it might be a lesser evil. Picture such an ID, if there were a standard for it, enrolled into your computer.
If it were properly built, your computer could provide proof of age, identity, or other verified attributes on approval. The ID could also have micro-transaction support, for allowing convenient pay-as-you-go 10 cents per article instead of paywalls, advertising, and subscriptions everywhere. Websites could just block all non-human traffic; awfully convenient in this era of growing spam, malware, AI slop, revenge porn, etc. Website operators, such as those of small forums, would have far less moderation and abuse prevention overhead.
Theoretically, it would also massively improve cybersecurity, if websites didn't actually need your credit card number and unique identity anymore. Theoretically, if it was tied to your ID, it's like Privacy.com but for every website; much lower transaction friction but much higher security.
I think that's the future at this rate. The only question is who decides how it is implemented.
63stack•6h ago
Politicians would be salivating at the idea of getting the real identities of dissenters, and religious fucks would finally have their way of banning porn and contraceptives.
gjsman-1000•6h ago
We're already seeing it piecemeal, with Cloudflare supporting skipping CAPTCHAs on verified iOS and macOS devices; mobile driver's license enrollment options on iOS; age verification rollouts for websites with no-doubt people thinking how to streamline things; etc.
I personally think we are one big cyberattack from the whole concept returning fast. One big cyberattack from governments (and people in general) saying they've had enough of the free-for-all status quo. This isn't a good place to be.
63stack•50m ago
What is this "one big cyberattack away" that you are talking about? Large sites get hacked all the time, and _nobody_ in power gives a single flying fuck. There are zero people held responsible for storing passwords in plaintext, or the admin password set to "123456" or passwords left as the default.
Seriously, what are you talking about?
dingnuts•6h ago
no, fuck this idea so hard. if this is inevitable, our duty is to build technology that defeats it
gjsman-1000•6h ago
dingnuts•6h ago
this is supposed to be HACKER news, not fucking bootlicker news
gjsman-1000•6h ago
There are real problems that haven't been fixed; the driver's license concept correctly implemented might be better than continuing down this path. I view it as we can make a good standard; or let a bad standard be dictated.
dingnuts•5h ago
Obviously. Why do YOU think I'm angry-posting about it on the orange shithole site with the username "dingnuts" ?
ipaddr•5h ago
That doesn't stop cloudflares marketshare takeover. It doesn't stop CAPTCHA which will filter out bots using these ids. It provides an easy method for hackers to use. It filters out the curious kids.
In the end it solves nothing and creates more problems.
int_19h•5h ago
hombre_fatal•4h ago
Clicking through some captchas and installing an adblocker just isn't the hard life you're trying to claim it is.
immibis•1h ago
In an internet driver's license system, remember that your computer would have to be locked down, and only able to access government-approved websites using government-approved clients - something like they have in China, or like using an iPhone but worse.
Once the ability for any site to verify your identity was set up, all sites would have to verify your identity, or lose their own verification, under one of many standard excuses like protecting the children.
derektank•6h ago
pjc50•6h ago
perching_aix•6h ago
secstate•5h ago
The answer, therefore, is not bitching on the internet about all the wet blankets who only see negative outcomes, but acknowledging that everything we know needs to end eventually including ourselves, and balancing optimism for the short term with cynicism for the long term. And thus discovering that a healthy cynicism for the future predictions is probably appropriate, unless you truly want to live forever and have infinite energy for everything. But that's a god.
perching_aix•5h ago
From my perspective, negative expectations do have a higher chance of turning out real, but because negative expectations most often are just code for human misalignment. We have some philosophical, instinctual, or aesthetic (etc.) preferences, but then reality is always going to be broader than that. So you're bound to hit things that are in misalignment. It takes active effort to cultivate the world to be whatever particular way. But this is also why I find simple pleas to cynicism particularly hollow. It comes off as resignation, exactly where the opposite is what would be most required.
secstate•4h ago
ajsnigrutin•4h ago
perching_aix•2h ago
exe34•3h ago
johnisgood•6h ago
Aloisius•4h ago
Second, if a porn website, social media, video game or whatever other thing regulators want to discourage people visiting kicks you off into an age verification takes requires you to some system/site, even an independent one, that requires you upload your ID, a fair number of people will simply refuse simply due to lack of understanding in how it works and trust that it actually is anonymous.
Third, every implementation I've seen doesn't work for some/all non-citizens/tourists.
And finally and more importantly, the ease at bypassing those systems means it's unlikely to stop anyone underage and ultimately is no better than existing parental control software, so all one is doing is restricting speech for adults.
jlokier•4h ago
- [2025-04-29] https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id...
- [2025-07-03] https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/opening-up-ze...
- [2025-06-11] https://zeroknowledge.fm/podcast/363/
GuinansEyebrows•6h ago
mourn the loss of the internet we knew and be ready to sacrifice ease of use to return to lower-tech/still-underground options.
strken•6h ago
xandrius•6h ago
int_19h•5h ago
rendx•6h ago
thmsths•6h ago
Sophira•6h ago
BobaFloutist•5h ago
Of course, it doesn't eliminate my legal responsibility to carry my driver's license while driving, and while the printed piece of plastic lasts five years and my passport booklet is legal I.D. for 10 years at a time, the mobile driver's license needs to be updated every 30 days.
heavensteeth•6h ago
Similarly, I struggle to believe they're not providing much of the data they collect to the CIA.
anon191928•6h ago
jasonlotito•6h ago
...because this is far from the first time this has happened with Cloudflare.
kragen•7m ago