5 stories
Dame Melanie Dawes told a Commons committee Ofcom would have to "accept that we won't be able to recover that money" if foreign courts block enforcement. The source is 4chan's own lawyer, so read it as an advocate's account.
A thread commenter adds the footnote: 4chan lost its suit on sovereign immunity, and the court's remarks were obiter dicta.
The top HN threads: facts from the discussions, both sides, insider voices. Email, Telegram, or RSS.
The essay reframes 'protect the children' as plumbing for prosecution: law enforcement needs what-happened plus who-did-it, and identity-bound accounts automate the second half. Its advice is sparse — refuse to verify; if forced, pay an age service in Monero.
The harshest pushback was tactical, not ideological. A high-karma engineer called the crypto answer an unscalable dodge: the only fix is calling your representatives, and 'the only group competent enough to oppose identity verification has its head in the sand.'
A Discord breach exposed government ID images, names and emails for 68,000 Australians just weeks before the country's under-16 social-media ban took effect in December 2025. Then Australia's own research found roughly seven in ten kids still on social media months later.
On the thread, a Google cryptographer argued the privacy loss is avoidable: anonymous credentials can prove you're over 18 without the verifier ever learning who you are, or correlating your visits. The counter from another corner: identifying yourself online is long overdue.
Having age-gated social media through the Online Safety Act, ministers are now studying VPNs as the next enforcement gap. The article carrying the story turned out to be a clickbait aggregation a reader debunked on the spot.
A security researcher's counter cut deeper than the tech: the Great Firewall of China is technically beatable and has still achieved exactly what it set out to do.
Britain is moving toward an age threshold of 16 for social media, built on the Online Safety Act that already lets Ofcom fine platforms. Australia switched on its own under-16 ban in December 2025, so the UK has a live precedent to copy.
The catch is mechanical: 'highly effective age assurance' means face-scan estimation or photo-ID at sign-up. As one games-industry engineer put it, the IDs don't go to the government, they go to verification vendors like Persona and Yoti, who then confirm to Meta and ByteDance exactly who you are.
