Prominent backbench MP Sarah Champion launched a campaign against VPNs previously, saying: “My new clause 54 would require the Secretary of State to publish, within six months of the Bill’s passage, a report on the effect of VPN use on Ofcom’s ability to enforce the requirements under clause 112.
"If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems.” And the Labour Party said there were “gaps” in the bill that needed to be amended.
If they outlaw VPNs then all internet-connected businesses will flee and everyone will just move to the dark net. Then you’ve got a whole other problem.
These ancient tyrants are in over their heads.
Selfishly, I think this is great for I2P/Snowflake/Tor. The incoming legitimate traffic helps to protect its most vulnerable users.
Honest question but what makes you think that would happen? Do most businesses use VPNs?
VPNs are one of the core security measures of all large companies.
VPNs aren’t just a “hide your IP” tool, they’re a way of giving someone access to an organisation’s internal network. Sensitive servers such as databases, wikis, scheduling tools etc don’t have publicly exposed IPs, they only have connections that are accessible from inside that VPN. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_(computing)
Not only that, but they are crucial for network security. VPNs allow all network traffic (with a few necessary exceptions) to be routed through the company’s network and benefit from its security measures, mainly monitoring traffic for suspicious and malicious behaviour. Without it, finding compromised PCs is much harder and enforcing company policies regarding web use would be impossible outside the office.
I have never worked for a company that didn’t utilize VPNs.
Damn near every business uses VPN technology. They literally cannot exist in the modern world without it. It would be incredibly expensive and impractical to do without.
I have no less than 7 VPNs installed on my work laptop, and I work for one single company.
I work in consulting. I have a VPN for my company and also for each client
The UK has long championed writing legislative checks that their emaciated state infrastructure can’t cash.
If they do outlaw it will likely be banned solely for non-business use for this reason alone.
If only I could start my own business….
become a sole trader with no assets, no expenses but still a business. Sorted!
Just to fast-forward this dumb cat-and-mouse thing, the next step is people go back to torrenting their porn and deeper down the rabbit hole of garbage “free” websites skirting the rules.
As always, the UK is useful on the international stage because sometimes you need to be able to point at some idiot trying dumb stuff to explain to people why dumb stuff is dumb.
100% Brexit quickly shut up similar movements when people saw how badly it went
Now if only Trumpism would have shut down extremist right wing idiology globally.
Alberta seems to have missed that memo.
Damn Alberta; always trying to leave the EU.
It does feel that way. UK bureaucracy is just one giant guinea pig stunting it’s own commonwealth.
Next someone will try enforcing paper umbrellas as a solution for climate action. We’ll all say, “That won’t work”. They’ll still do it; it won’t work. We’ll say, “We told you so”, and it won’t get reversed because they’re already aiming at the next foot to shoot.
There has to be a logical next step for the information age. Old school government is not fucking working, and we can all see it.
The fact that there aren’t large scale riots already is astounding.
I’m uninformed. What’s the reason for the porn ID thing? Is it just porn or more?
Surveillance due to paranoia due to all the shady shit they’re doing.
Neoliberal political class implementing fascist surveillance capitalism laws — masquerading as child protection — because they are owned by a fascist oligarchy.
It’s never about the children, it’s an excuse for surveillance capitalism.
You know the old saying… The politicians don’t want children to be able to recognize a cunt.
Must protect the children
Christian evangelists at the root of it all. 'nuff said.
It also general censorship they are applying it to some political content as well.
Then, we move to the socks proxy, or tor, or other options I haven’t even considered yet.
I am pretty sure they would consider tor as using a VPN.
Probably they would demand ISPs to run lists of known VPN addresses and if you connect to them, they will forward the information to the anti-terrorism unit and you will get SWATed.
If Russia, China, and Iran cannot stop tor usage, there’s no way the UK can do it.
I believe China can stop any kind of access at any time, they just choose to allow a certain percentage of folks to get through above a certain bar of sophistication and need.
Don’t the people in those countries use a proxy to access tor first? probably that means cycling through the proxies regularly as they become known. I have no doubt that it is impossible to prevent truly tech savvy people from access. Also Russia, Iran and China all run state sanctioned hackers, so the governments have a vested interest in allowing these groups to obscure where they are coming from.
But i am not sure how much that transpires to a broader public.
That’s what things like snowflake and bridges are for. Because, at least with snowflake, it just looks like a webRTC phone call. But it’s actually tor traffic. And snowflake proxies are ephemeral, since you can just run them in your browser and help anyone connect.
Their next strategy will be to keep a list of websites that are “government approved”, I’m afraid. Long live the Great UK Firewall!!
But they can’t seem to muster up the “political” will to tax the rich
“Hey! Stop using well known workarounds to my idiot demands! Surely this is brand new technology that no one could have known about!”
“Stop defending yourself, and let me hit you” vibes.
They can come and pry TOR from my cold dead hands lmfao
this law can eat shit. i ain’t gonna dox myself and feed my personal info to companies. maybe they should take this as a hint that most people care about their privacy
if you don’t want kids seeing NSFW stuff be an actual parent and don’t raise your kids on the internet??
Yeah I’m Australia we have just decided to ban all social media for people under 16, i think it’s great honestly because screw from insta etc but I don’t think it’s the government ls job to prevent kids from using social media.
I really think it’s a way to force adults to register their id to accounts not about protecting kids.
Parents should monitor what their kids are doing not the government
I agree that it should primarily be a parents responsibility to keep kids off social media. But the big problem with social media is that a large proportion of young children don’t want to be on social media and recognise the detrimental impact it has on them, but the fear of missing out or being excluded is what keeps them on it. it then becomes a collective action problem, to get them off it you need to get a lot of their peers off it as well. There are movements where groups of parents try to do this, but reaching the critical mass necessary to do it is difficult.
Hopefully the ban keeps a large number off to reduce the pressure on kids to be on it and at the same time the parents can do their bit as well.
This kinda proves that it was never about the children. How many children have know how and the means to buy a VPN subscription?
Still an important part. Free VPNs that spy on you are a thing, but work
Were you never a child? I formatted my family pc and reinstalled windows xp in 5th grade, and used a proxy to circumvent the schools online filter in 7th grade.
Children are not as stupid as you seem to think
VPNs also accept many anonymous payment methods that happen to be easily accessible to children, like gift cards. And free VPNs exist
A lot more than you know, I knew how to use it since middle school.
And if they don’t know they will use Reddit to find out how to access the sites:
https://reddit.adminforge.de/r/teenagers/comments/tv70x0/do_yall_know_a_good_vpn/?
Don’t underestimate kids.
All it takes is one big brother/sister that knows how to access a free or paid VPN and their 5 year old little sibling and all their friends will have it also. Despite the difficulty teaching them math or history, they DO learn very quickly and are fast to figure out new things that interest them.
Do you know what’s smarter and more talented the the UK government?
14, 402, 544 kids…
I started using a VPN after my friends/classmates told me about them in my Sophomore year of HS, mostly to get around the Wifi banning us from accessing certain apps (social media). Now, like all the other dumb kids, I used whatever they recommended, which was some shitty “Free” VPN that was probably stalking my data. But by Senior year, I smartened up and learned about online privacy and got myself a Proton VPN subscription after using the free version for a bit.
So yeah, I could totally believe middle-school and up are using VPNs, cause that’s what we literally did.
Just needs a Union Jack on his hat and the wrapping paper and “UK” in place of “US” on the box.
“Safety” meanwhile these same mp’s can’t budget can’t run critical public services like bloody hospitals.
But don’t worry, your thoughts and activity are policed.
Democratic failure to prioritise and run a country at its finest on display for the world to see. The waste is astounding.
it’s both hilarious and sad how this is coming from a “please think of the children!!” perspective meanwhile gender affirming care for trans kids got banned pretty recently
We call this a waste of tax payer’s money.
This bill has nothing to do with safety. Safety is just the scapegoat here.
just do what the chinese do to get around thier great wall. use proxies and anti-detect browsers, its the next step after VPN… you might want to look around how to set these up.
Proxy is a step below VPN since it doesn’t tunnelise data.
Anti-detect browsers. Do you mean Tor? It’s a decent solution, albeit the slowest one.
What people use to bypass the great Chinese firewall is VPN with VLESS protocols. Unlike usual VPN protocols, those are specifically made to bypass censorship.
It would have been smarter for the UK to mandate that every ISP must provide a family filter for free as part of their service. Something that is optional and can be turned on or off by the account holder but allows parents to set filters (and curfews) if they want. They could even require that ISPs require new signups to affirm if they want it on or off by default so people with families are more likely to start with it enabled.
The problem is that content filters don’t work all that well in the age of https everywhere. I mean, you can block the pornhub.com domain, that’s fairly straightforward … but what about reddit.com which has porn content but also legitimately non-porn content. Or closer to home: any lemmy instance.
I think it would be better if politicians stopped pearl clutching and realized that porn perhaps isn’t the worst problem in the world. Tiktok and influencer brainrot, incel and manosphere stuff, rage baiting social media, etc. are all much worse things for the psyche of young people, and they’re doing exactly jack shit about that.
They know. The “think of the children” angle is just cover to enrage the tabloid readers and to be used as a straw man against anyone criticisng the law (“you’re a pedophile”). The real purpose is “let’s enumerate the IDs of everyone who uses the internet for anything we don’t like” and “let’s censor anything we don’t like starting with LGBTQ content”
The problem is that they’re not trying to protect kids. They’re trying to be like China where every user has to identify themselves so they can be tracked across the internet.
The new Christian nationalist orders are not so patient. Even Charles X of France rolled back rights too speedily, sparking public outcry resulting in Parisian haircuts. (a bit off the top 🪟🔪)
SCOTUS used to be sneakier, carving out sections of fourth- and fifth-amendment protections, but since Dobbs the Federalist Society Six have tossed subtlety and reason to the wind and now adjudicate away rights based on vibe and conservative rhetoric grievance.
Hopefully the US and UK both will recognize why the French public was swift to act when manarchists took shears to the Napoleonic Code.
Lots of ridiculous-looking people in politics today. They could use some haircuts.
Crazy because every (isp provided) router I have used has these options. They probably aren’t 100% correct all the time, but it would be good enough for children (even though you shouldn’t rely soley on filters to replace watching your kid).
Someone should start a bussiness near the border of Republic of Ireland and get two antennas pointed at each other across the border, with the RoI side having connected to the free internet, then the UK Northern Ireland side connected to the Intra-net. You pay a “Club Membership Fee” to get access to the proxy network.
Its not a VPN, its a Nerd Techie Club, just with a free proxy service as part of the club membership 😉
Gonna end up with a country-wide rogue WiFi mesh network setup that’s fed from neighboring countries haha
It’s it possible to turn our phones into Intranet nodes and have some connect to the uncensored Internet?
Possible? Yes. Probable? No. LTE would work wonderfully for such usecase, but the firmware to it is never shared. Wifi would work theoretically, but the distance would get in a way. Bandwidth would go down all the way to a rounding error.
Could limited bandwidth perhaps be transmitted via ham radios?
IP over ham radio is a thing, so yes. Wouldn’t be very fast mind you.
I love watching politicians try to understand the internet.
VPNs have loads of vanilla use cases.
It would be infinitely more productive to regulate the predatory practices of stream providers and reduce the incentive for piracy.
This online safety bill is dishonest. This has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with money.
How is this even feasible? People need them for work, business, school etc. The UK is going nuts with the attempts to regulate the internet.
It isn’t. And the only source in the article is that a far-right conspiracy theory site said they’re considering it.
