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.
Reddit already tried to block VPN users.
Expect the corpos to bend the knee.
“Stop defending yourself, and let me hit you” vibes.
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.
“Hey! Stop using well known workarounds to my idiot demands! Surely this is brand new technology that no one could have known about!”
I’m looking forward to the next UK election where the headline will be: Labour has lost the election in a landslide that left them with dozens of votes total
Every single person who didn’t think this would affect them who watches porn in any capacity is very likely highly pissed off and will continue to be for as long as this draconian bullshit is enabled.
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.
But they can’t seem to muster up the “political” will to tax the rich
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?
This online safety bill is dishonest. This has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with money.
China Laughs Communistically
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.
"If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems.”
When I was a kid, Reddit and general public Internet access weren’t things, but I sure managed to get my hands on pornography. I’m pretty confident that even entirely killing Internet access isn’t going to stop kids who want to get ahold of porn from getting ahold of it.
Kids will be out there studying for their ham radio licenses to setup wireless long range packet networks and bbs’s just to exchange porn lol
“Safety” meanwhile these same mp’s can’t budget can’t run critical public services.
But don’t worry, your thoughts and activity are policed
This bill has nothing to do with safety. Safety is just the scapegoat here.
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.
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.
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 no less than 7 VPNs installed on my work laptop, and I work for one single company.
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 never worked for a company that didn’t utilize VPNs.
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.
Selfishly, I think this is great for I2P/Snowflake/Tor. The incoming legitimate traffic helps to protect its most vulnerable users.
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….
Nanny state
You’re literally being Jimmy Salvile right now
~ Guy who posed for photo ops with Salvile twenty years ago
