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.
This kinda proves that it was never about the children. How many children have know how and the means to buy a VPN subscription?
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
Where there is a will there is a way, I guess.
Still, a possible ban on VPNs affects way bigger group of business and adult users than the number of tech savvy kids.
Where should the line be drawn? How much rights should everyone have to give up so that little techie Billy can’t hack his way to see some titties?
Still an important part. Free VPNs that spy on you are a thing, but work
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One of the rare ones
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…
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.
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.
Best of luck with that, idiots. How are you planning to tell the difference between my personal VPN and my work VPN?
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?
VPN ban risks pushback from their billionaire masters. Multinational corporations don’t want to deal with anything that could hurt profits.
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.
yes everything will be banned and binned. better dust off that carrier pigeon
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
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.
What about the VPN I have to my home?
They wouldn’t consider such rational things
This ends with just another war on encryption.
When encryption is legal, they can’t know what is going on between two points. They going to make is so we can only have encryption to nodes they trust?
It is dangerously technologically illiterate to wage war on encryption.
Jokes on you, e2e encryption is already banned in some cases in the uk afaik. Hence apple dropping some cloud services
Easy enough to do when it’s mega corps. They don’t really care about anything but money. If everyone had self hosted services with e2e, be far harder. Encryption is everywhere now.
So they will go after the end points. Which again, is a battle they can’t win. All very Cory Doctorow’s “Unauthorized Bread”.
If you care about this stuff:
UK: https://action.openrightsgroup.org/make-one-donation US: https://www.eff.org/pages/donate-eff EU: https://my.fsfe.org/donate
There will be others too, those are just in my head’s cache.
Some how we need to get governments to listen to us serfs instead mega corps and authoritarian police/spooks.
The world they want is not only terrible for digital and political freedom, but competition, thus functioning markets. It’s terrible for making developers and makers instead of dumb consumers, which in turn, is terrible for technology and progress.
If I was black hatter I would be looking at these people like they just dropped a golden goose.
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!!
100% Brexit quickly shut up similar movements when people saw how badly it went
Alberta seems to have missed that memo.
Damn Alberta; always trying to leave the EU.
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.
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.
I’m uninformed. What’s the reason for the porn ID thing? Is it just porn or more?
Christian evangelists at the root of it all. 'nuff said.
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.
Must protect the children
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.
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 also general censorship they are applying it to some political content as well.
If data is collected that can be used for blackmail, it will eventially be used for that purpose.
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…
go back?
Just needs a Union Jack on his hat and the wrapping paper and “UK” in place of “US” on the box.
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.
People are “at risk”… of what? What a terrible article to not even clarify what the risk is. Because it sounds to me like the government is who put those people at risk by making them go look for solutions to a draconian policy.
Can’t wait for the next election to kick out the Tories so can roll back all their draconian bills.
The linked story has been updated. The headline now reads:
Labour rules out VPN ban in UK but issues warning to UK households
Labour won’t ban the use of Virtual Private Networks
And the story begins:
Labour has ruled out a possible VPN ban after reports thousands of UK households were at risk following the Online Safety Act kicking in under the government. Labour Party Tech Secretary Peter Kyle has revealed that the Government is “not considering a VPN ban” - after reports in Guido Fawkes suggested it was possible.
after reports in Guido Fawkes suggested it was possible.
That’s the only source? A far-right conspiracy website?
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.
Come on UK, just skip all the boring parts and make unremovable collars for everyone fitted with GPS, cameras and miniature bombs that can be remotely detonated. After all, that’s the only way to make sure nobody is doing bad, very bad illegal stuff and to PROTECT THE CHILDREN, isn’t it? Fucking hell, these fucks really are trying to create a bloody dystopia…
They think 1984 is a manual.
Oh, wait, no, that was about the evil communists.
Enterprises will love that. A perfect excuse to end wfh. However, this will cripple business travelers. I’m sure there’ll be some exception for corporations where they can exercise maximum control over their employees while still being allowed to generate capital.
Hey UK: suck it.
They couldn’t switch off VPNs for businesses. I work in a hospital and we use VPNs to create secure tunnels to other third party health care companies as well as NHS adjacent health services amongst other things. This is to protect patient sensitive data amongst other things. This would cripple our service and go against NHS england and government requirements for the secure transfer and sharing of data.
This would have to be public VPNs only. Despite the fact that it would be complete bullshit either way.
Exactly. The best they could hope to do would be to create an exemption for businesses in which case I open my own fapping business.
and now you have to pay lost of business taxes even if you don’t have any income
I shall pay my debt in crusty socks.
Unless things have changed massively in the UK in the last 5 years or so, in my actual experience you don’t unless you make a profit.
The yearly baseline costs of opening and operating a Limited company in the UK are pretty low (less than £100 if I remember it correctly).
Well, you could just go back to sending stuff by fax machine forever, but then instead of even using the fax machine to sync patient data just make the patients fill out their own entire medical history from scratch every time they go to a different doctor and take their word for it.
This is to protect patient sensitive data amongst other things.
Its 2025, we no longer need such silly things. Don’t worry, its for the greater good.
Ive got a few UK coworkers that will be out of the job if anything disables VPNs. They voted for that mess now they can sleep in their 1/3 salary local jobs too.
A VPN is just a proxy. I don’t see how this would be enforced.
An encrypted proxy. Thats a pretty hefty distinction.
The UK is the testing grounds. After they figure it out, they’ll be rolling it out everywhere else.
I don’t think it’s that centralized. Just some elite somewhere pushes through what elites everywhere would want, and they try to do the same around it.
Like spread of a disease.
I think the way to fight it is similar. Unions, customer associations, parties (not for election, but for having as many people as possible for mutual aid and actions ; it might even be counterproductive to get into government, since that breeds expectations which are not delivered upon, which hurts the party ; better to do volunteer projects without using state power as much as possible).
Yeah, I don’t think it is, but it’s the end result that concerns me.
Couldn’t people just hire a VPS in another country and VPN with that using Wireguard etc, or even use RDP etc to it? Is it even a VPN if you’re remotely operating a computer in another country?
Refer to other comment. They don’t see “VPN traffic”, they see encrypted tunnels between two ports to some offshore vps. At best, they see a header saying “openvpn”. The article is alluding to the country effectively wanting to crack down on encrypted tunnels (because you cannot discriminate VPNs from them). At best, maybe they’re just christofascist idiots.
At best, they see a TLS handshake that gets upgraded to an encrypted websocket which hides VPN traffic…
And make sure to keep videos running 24/7 through said VPN so they don’t know when the packets are interesting vs just YouTube or something
There will always be a way to bypass laws that do not serve the people.
WireGuard would be illegal. ISPs would monitor for encrypted traffic streams. All remote workers must now come back to the office. ofcom can see any and all traffic. Your loyalty to the king shall be examined. You choices of media will be scrutinized. The threat of losing your children will be used to force compliance. Welcome to the machine.
Can we develop a new VPN protocol where the encrypted traffic is disguised as a 24 hour continuous stream of Never Gonna Give You Up
RickGuard
Oh man, they’re going to come visit everyone that didn’t do the “optional” affirmation thing at his coronation, aren’t they?
Pretty much every single website uses HTTPS these days which means all traffic is encrypted anyway. Instead of a VPN you could use an encrypted proxy that connects over HTTPS. I doubt the UK is just going to completely cut itself off from the rest of the world’s internet (because all it takes is one path out).
I remember in Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (Great read, Free e-book here.) they had an insider at the ISP who just encrypted all the traffic that came through, so it just became the “new normal”.
Tempora already snoops on traffic.
Work based VPNs would likely have to obtain a license from Ofcom, it would be highly unlikely to block them completely. Probably be requesting a back door into the work VPNs at the same time just like they have for other encryption, lol.
I have a Digital Ocean droplet in Amsterdam, runs OpenVPN server. $6/mo., no one sees my activity, haven’t logged into it in years.
Netherlands is part of the Nine eyes. They know exactly what your activities are.
Whether they choose to chase you down is a different issue.
