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.
Turning into China, aren’t we?
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.
Can’t wait for the next election to kick out the Tories so can roll back all their draconian bills.
Reddit already tried to block VPN users.
Expect the corpos to bend the knee.
Next up, zeros and/or ones
That’s good. Everyone can read base 1.
I dunno, some people get confused beyond 11111.
there are 10 types of people in this world those who understand binary and those who dont
And those who didn’t expect this joke to be interpreted as base 3.
Best of luck with that, idiots. How are you planning to tell the difference between my personal VPN and my work VPN?
They wouldn’t consider such rational things
Well we just fire you, and the one you’re still using then must be your personal one!
He means, how is the government supposed to tell the difference between personal and work vpns.
he just answered your question. maybe read it again
What about the VPN I have to my home?
Either just banning remote work or more realistically you’ll need a permit for running a vpn server. Permit pricing starting at 100k a year
How many small businesses can afford such permit? Hell, I’d argue that even bigger companies will have a problem paying for that.
Also, what if I just connect to a vps overseas and set my exit point there? Will they ban vps too? This is gonna be so much fun to see from the outside
How many small businesses can afford such permit? Hell, I’d argue that even bigger companies will have a problem paying for that.
Feature, not a bug.
They want people back in offices to help landlords and property prices. This way they can say that remote work is not banned and it’s just companies choosing not to buy a permit and offer it.
I work from office and i regularly use a vpn at work to connect remotely to devices that are not physically with me. Not to talk about companies that provide remote assistance and use them to connect to their customers devices.
Remote work is just a byproduct of vpns, but not the real reason why you use them at work.
You think given how well thought through this online safety act has been that they’ll understand that would be an issue and legislate accordingly?
Absolutely not, of course. I’m just hoping they try to enforce this so a shitstorm of proportions only seen in the brexit will ensue.
One thing we must acknowledge to these idiots is how much effort they put on showing the world the consequences of extremely stupid acts so the rest don’t have to do it.
how much effort they put on showing the world the consequences of extremely stupid acts so the rest don’t have to do it.
Kinda sucks to be the world’s policy alpha tester though.
VPN ban risks pushback from their billionaire masters. Multinational corporations don’t want to deal with anything that could hurt profits.
yes everything will be banned and binned. better dust off that carrier pigeon
Next step: ban on remote work.
It’s not just remote work. All our manufacturing sites use to VPN connections data centres. It would cripple manufacturing on an epic scale if they were instabanned.
Ah, fascism on the rise.
Bye bye UK economy. How do you expect businesses to work without VPNs?
Ban remote working, vpn now only allowed from business addresses as registered with companies house.
VPN in businesses is mostly to secure internal use infrastructure against external threats. Use for remote working is an afterthought.
Oh that makes it easier for the government.
Maybe that the end goal, force people back into the office by banning vpn
Like i said, that won’t work, because VPN has more important uses than mere homoffice.
My guess they will block VPN services IP addresses like proton, shouldn’t affect business VPN.
But what if I work for Proton and I am in the UK?
Your company will be forced to make you redundant.
dust off that resume
Oh, that would be hilarious to watch.
I could definitely see myself setting up a Wireguard VPN only allowing connections to a bunch of porn sites here on my home fiber in Sweden. Should make a nice little side profit.
Isn’t this currently what Russia is trying to do with their internet?
It’s something russia has been doing for a decade and got pretty good at.
A long term blanket vpn ban is not compatible with a modern digital infrastructure, but with certain protocols (openvpn, wireguard) they can detect their usage and filter them out when necessary.
It does require a lot of expensive DPI (deep packet inspection) hardware I’m not sure UK has, so building a Great Firewall of Britain (Hadrian’s Firewall?) will take some time.
Just to add that Hadrian’s Firewall used to exist/does exist, I think. It was located in BT’s main POP in Newcastle.
All good names are taken :<
the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems
The government: Parents have you tried being a parent to your children?
Parents: Oh lord no that’s too difficult can’t you just, I don’t know lol, ban it or something?
In my English textbook, ca. 2007 there was a comic of a child in a cage hanging outside the house. The father told the neighbor something like “This way they get out of the house, but stay off the streets.”
I think that hit quite well, what many consider parenting in the UK.
Those child cages were real. They would attach to a window similar to AC units today.
This government literally can’t afford to fuck about wasting money yet here they are. Proving they are imposters failing the country.
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.
Their next strategy will be to keep a list of websites that are “government approved”, I’m afraid. Long live the Great UK Firewall!!
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.
UK Bureaucracy is just one giant guinea pig
He tries his best…
I’m uninformed. What’s the reason for the porn ID thing? Is it just porn or more?
It also general censorship they are applying it to some political content as well.
Must protect the children
It’s probably true that a few anti-porn people exist somewhere in the world. It’s certainly true that fascists love adding in new tools to keep the general population from using the internet freely.
So the answer to your question is yes, and yes.
It’s never about the children, it’s an excuse for surveillance capitalism.
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.
You know the old saying… The politicians don’t want children to be able to recognize a cunt.
If data is collected that can be used for blackmail, it will eventially be used for that purpose.
Christian evangelists at the root of it all. 'nuff said.
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.
Trumpism is still in progress, maybe…
It should have died when he tried to coup the US government after he lost the 2020 election.
Alberta seems to have missed that memo.
Damn Alberta; always trying to leave the EU.
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.
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.
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.
go back?
Tfw Big Brother is charmless potato named Keir Starmer.
Freenet, I2P and Tor will be the new refuge
I think it’s Hyphanet now.
Geeze I hope I don’t…slap tailscale on a vps
