Comment by jmclnx
1 day ago
>If Ofcom doesn't think this will be enough to prevent significant harm, it can even ask that ISPs be ordered to block UK access.
Well again I guess the UK never heard of VPNs, but they are trying to ban them still, it is like these pols have no clue how the internet works. They never learn these actions are like playing wack-a-mole.
VPNs are next: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn438z3ejxyo
So they're lagging about 3-4 years behind the Russian practices, but steadily catching up. Quite impressive!
Par for the course for European countries.
Note that the children's commissioner is only an advisor to government.
The government itself has said it doesn't believe VPNs should be outlawed - that's even stated in the article.
> it doesn't believe VPNs should be outlawed
That still leaves space for a lot of unpleasant, but plausible, alternatives:
* Banning under-18s from using VPNs; enforced by ordering Visa+Mastercard to deny UK-originating payments to VPN operators that don't verify their users' identity.
* Introducing a "VPN license"; initially only granted to large corporate users. All encrypted VPN traffic will be required to periodically broadcast their VPN license-number in cleartext so that ISP-based traffic monitoring will let it pass, otherwise the connection will be reset.
Hah, yes 'children' stealing a 'credit card' to get a VPN to watch porn. Well stop that!
I’m curious about what the plan is to differentiate between legitimate business use and personal use of any kind. Age verification obviously won’t work for self-hosted, so does age verification then get pushed to VPS providers? And at that point, so what? I’m already paying with legitimate bank details for legitimate personal use.
do you think the public at large knows what VPS are? How to set up a VPN? the public at large barely understands the concept of files nowadays, if it's not app they're lost
banning selling VPN and VPN apps will solve 90% of the problem and that's enough
11 replies →
A VPN license of course! Just need a corporation number, a list of registered employees, and mandatory logging to get one! /s
It doesn't matter if naive blocking means can be trivially circumvented. This creates a chilling effect, less technically proficient people will just move to other sites. When circumvention becomes an offence, now government has one more point of leverage over you - they manufacture law under which almost everyone is guilty.
> I guess the UK never heard of VPNs
Wanna bet that when they finally hear of them, they'll try to ban them (and mentions of VPNs, too)?
What about Onion networks?
They need bridges.
I think the question we should be asking is "What about SSHing into a VPS?" and "What about seedboxes".
You can disguise a VPS as any server outside of your country, it could serve up an HTTPS page and no one snooping the connection would be any wiser.
Related: https://snowflake.torproject.org/
Help run a Snowflake proxy! You can do it from your browser.
It feels more like a modern version of Luddites where they probably do understand very well how it works and they fear what that means for their own success.