UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill

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.
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.
Their next strategy will be to keep a list of websites that are “government approved”, I'm afraid. Long live the Great UK Firewall!!
go back?

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
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/?
https://redlib.baczek.me/r/teenagers/comments/1m7bp6b/turns_out_its_comically_easy_to_bypass_reddits/?
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............
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?
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.

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.

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.

Best of luck with that, idiots. How are you planning to tell the difference between my personal VPN and my work VPN?

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.
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
They wouldn't consider such rational things
What about the VPN I have to my home?

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.
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….

That sounds a bit like fear mongering from Reform: a VPN is safety 101 when using public networks, and most businesses make use of VPNs to secure their data. They are also a key component if WFH (you use the company VPN).

If Labour are stupid enough to go after VPN usage, I suspect it would guarantee their loss at the next election.

Eh, I dunno. The vast majority have no idea what a VPN is. If a VPN ban benefits Rupert fucking Murdoch then the tabloids will wang on about how they're used by paedophiles and people smugglers and that'll be that.
It has always been the main aim of legislation like this to nobble VPNs, they just needed the "child" "violent pornography" etc. excuse to do so. UK government already monitors all of the internet traffic for the UK, except for MPs who are exempt, VPNs are a blocker for this.
Obviously, not even the UK government would expect a private VPN ban (work VPNs would likely need an Ofcom license) to stop everybody from using a VPN or suitable alternative, its not the aim. The aim is to stop the majority from doing so and criminalize the minority who do still bypass the block as it gives them the power to seize equipment, ask for your logins (its illegal punishable with jail time to not supply this in the UK), request ISP logs etc. to deep dive into your life.
- Work VPN doesn't look any different a porn VPN to the people tapping the line.

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"
- That's a problem is for ISPs and content providers to figure out. I don't see why the government has to care other than laying out the ground rules - you must offer and implement a parental filter for people who want it for free as part of your service. If ISPs have to do deep packet inspection and proxy certs for protected devices / accounts then that's what they'll have to do.
  As far as the government is concerned it's not their problem. They've said what should happen and providing the choice without being assholes to people over 18 who are exercising their rights to use the internet as they see fit.
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.
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.
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).
Exactly. This was turned on on my professional phone so that was always an option.

Damn. Labor really wants to lose that election to Farage. Good luck to Corbyn and Sultana, I guess.

Farage: Gets elected.
Everyone: At least you'll abolish the OSA!
Farage: Nah, I said that because it would make me popular. Amma use the OSA to ban things I consider "woke".
- Most authoritarian option there is.

"It has come to our attention that we haven't fascismed hard enough, nor in sufficient detail"

Maybe if they see significant issues with the populace adhereing to this law they should identify the solution of revoking the unpopular law.

It's the populace that is wrong, not the lawmakers /s
See: the 18th and 21st Amendments in the US (Prohibition).

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.

I’d email my MP to ask why this Labour Government is using the BBC to promote Reform talking points and implementing brain dead Reform policies, but I don’t expect anything other than the blandest party line response.

All this pandering to Reform voters is completely useless, people will still vote for the original rather than a shitty knockoff. Despicable behaviour from Labour.
- This is REALLY familiar...

"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.

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.

https://use-their-id.com/

Holy shit that is brilliant...

If this comes to anything I'm moving to somewhere in the EU and pursuing citizenship there. This is clearly not about protecting the children anymore (not that it ever was).

EU is about to do the exact same thing. Norway is the place to be. That's where I went - at least according to my ip address.
- Huh. I’m also “moving” soon. Any reason for Norway over Switzerland?
- Norway is part of the Nine Eyes…

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.
- Parents should monitor what their kids are doing not the government
  While I agree wholeheartedly with this, it's often not that easy.
  Back in the days of 28.8 modems my parents found my little bro's downloaded porn stash. It was in a Zip disk in his underwear drawer. They then locked down both of our AOL accounts so we couldn't see that stuff.
  I thought this was bullshit because I kept my Zip disk full of porn next to all the other ones and labeled it "Homework." Why should I get punished if I didn't get caught?
  So I downloaded a keylogger, stole my dad's password, and unlocked my account and continued to download porn.
  However, I don't think government regulation would have worked in my case.

apparently having a functioning brain isn't a requirement of being an mp

but of course we knew that when she did this in 2019:

On 16 July 2019, Champion stated: "If my party comes out as a remain party rather than trying to find a deal or >rather than trying to exit, I can't support that, it goes against democracy". She said she would rather support a "no-deal Brexit" than remain in the EU, as she believed Labour had to deliver the result of the 2016 referendum.

Lol what is going on over there. The UK is becoming more dystopian by the day.

Not even China can ban VPN entirely, because businesses use it as a security measure.

U got a loicense fo dat VPN, lad? Show me dem poipers!
The solution is very simple, just require a license /s
- That is very likely what they will do, I'm certain of it. Probably worse than that. I bet they will allow VPNs to licensed users (businesses), they will require specific protocols where they are able to backdoor in and snoop if they want to.
  This isn't a good road we're going down right now.

But they can't seem to muster up the "political" will to tax the rich

Show me a ban that didn’t came with 10x problems. People have their needs even the filthy ones. Especially the filthy ones. Hence will find a way to fulfill it. If there’s no legal way to do so the demand will create an alternative market for it to match the demand…more trouble on the way if that’s the lane the UK choose

We all know that prohibition in the US was a rousing success!
- And the war on drugs was extremely effective and didn't cause any bad things at all!
let people live life is more than just good for individuals… it’s just safer for everyone
focusing on harm reduction rather than abstinence and bans
I'd tentatively say, casually available heroin, morphine and laudanum/opium.
It obviously caused problems and pushed the market underground but it seems to have worked out.
I'm not aware of any studies in to this though, so it's only conjecture/guesswork.
I'll also clearly state I'm not putting them on the same level as this current dystopian bullshittery.
- It obviously caused problems and pushed the market underground but it seems to have worked out.
  "Worked out" is people dieing from tainted drugs of a unknown potency? Youre a fucking monster.

Labour are not governing for the people, and they are not the Labour party anymore.

They're Labouring very hard for the corporations.
- If they ban VPN's that's going to hit corporations harder than the average person.

"Hey! Stop using well known workarounds to my idiot demands! Surely this is brand new technology that no one could have known about!"

Next up, zeros and/or ones

That's good. Everyone can read base 1.
- I dunno, some people get confused beyond 11111.

Most conventional VPNs, e.g. OpenVPN, WireGuard, AnyConnect, PPTP/L2TP, IKEv2/IPsec, etc., actually don't work in China. Technology-wise GFW is quite sophisticated and conventional VPNs are not designed for censorship circumvention anyway.
You'll have to use things like Shadowsocks or V2Ray, which is out of the reach of most people.
- The Great Firewall doesn't block by protocol. If you set up your own OpenVPN server, you can still connect to it. I've done this many times in my trips to China, and it's worked fine. That being said, they still do seem to throttle connections to international servers, though this happens to all servers, even those that are not blocked. There are many clandestine VPN operators in China who spin up their own VPN servers and sell the service. They are mostly OpenVPN-based.
  My university used Cisco AnyConnect, and I was able to successfully connect to the university VPN servers as well.
  The limited experimentation I have conducted seems to indicate that the Great Firewall blocks by IP and not by protocol.
The more you try to stop them, the better their business gets, heh.

"Stop defending yourself, and let me hit you" vibes.

Do not retaliate and you will be rewarded

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.

Probably force an insecure or outdated protocol and market it as “top of the line”.
They just can't stand not being able to control people.
Take China for example. There is a common misconception that all VPNs are illegal in China. That's not fully true. In China, VPNs are legal and must obtain a licence from the Ministry of Public Security, like all other online businesses. This also means that they have to agree to monitoring and censorship from the Government, so you can't use legal VPN services to bypass the firewall in China.

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?
  Edit: it's hypothetical
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.

"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

Nanny state

You're literally being Jimmy Salvile right now
~ Guy who posed for photo ops with Salvile twenty years ago
- Omg my brother amd I went to see Rolf Harris when we were kids and he invited my brother onto the stage. So woerd to think of now 😕

(NOTE: Any links to politician tweets in this comment are from Nitter mirrors, not direct links to Elon Musk's nazi bar.)

The Technology Secretary, Peter Kyle, pretty much called Nigel Farage a paedophile in a news network interview earlier today because he opposed the Online Safety Act, by saying he's on the side of sex offenders like Jimmy Savile.

He then went to Twitter and doubled-down on this stance:

If you want to overturn the Online Safety Act you are on the side of predators. It is as simple as that.

This of course generated a lot of fury among the site's users.

For context, the Online Safety Act has been used to censor and age-gate anything and everything deemed "illegal content" under Ofcom guidelines. Any social media platforms must comply, else risk getting fined up to 10% of your annual global revenue. This is so broadly worded that it includes anything related to illegal immigration and people-smuggling (literally quoted in the GOV.UK page I linked.)

Twitter had genuinely been forced to censor all coverage around anti-asylum seeker protests behind age verification requirements, which has riled up a lot of right-wing politicians here. The reason for these protests is that the previous (Conservative) government had been paying exorbitant amounts of money to house asylum seekers in hotels, effectively lining the pockets of hotel chain executives - all while we deal with a massive housing and cost of living crisis.

This was meant to be a measure to give asylum seekers temporary accommodation which was put in place at the start of COVID, but has been government policy since 2020 with no end in sight.

Labour have also done jack-shit to resolve our skyrocketed (legal) immigration levels since they got into power, except for scrapping the Rwanda Deal which would have deported any illegal migrants to a third country for processing (which as the name obviously suggests, is the East African state of Rwanda.)

Zia Yusuf (head of Reform's DOGE division, yes they're ripping off Trump and Elon Musk) had this to say about the OSA on Twitter:

Britain is now a country which you can enter illegally without ID, but need photo ID to watch a protest against people entering without ID.

Let that sink in.

Labour have fucked up so catastrophically hard with how they've handled this legislation, that they've straight-up generated bipartisan sympathy for the leaders of a right-wing populist party - who are the only political force that have vowed to repeal the legislation because it is being used for mass surveillance and censorship.

Also, if you're thinking of voting Reform UK in 2029 (and it has honestly crossed my mind because age verification checks are a major sticking point for me), then you should take the pledges from Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf with a grain of salt. Richard Tice (the party's deputy leader) openly tweeted support for pushing through mandatory ID checks on social media four years ago.

If Labour don't get rid of Keir Starmer, do a full cabinet reshuffle and reverse course, we are going to see a Reform landslide in the next election...

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

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.
- 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.

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.

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?

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.
- 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).
- 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
- Oh man, they're going to come visit everyone that didn't do the "optional" affirmation thing at his coronation, aren't they?
- 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".
- 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.
- Tempora already snoops on traffic.
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…
There will always be a way to bypass laws that do not serve the people.

There are ways around this even if they do ban vpn. Its a hopeless battle being fought by the ignorant.

I mean anyone can rent a server in Europe and install OpenVPN themselves. Hell, it doesn't even need to open OpenVPN, Wireguard works just as well and is basically undetectable.
Eat shit, UK government, for real. Idiots think that by speaking the same language as US fascists they can have similarly dumb ideas.
- It would have been my go to. But they can detect openvpn and other protocols. I would just use a ssh tunnel with squid proxy. The squid wont cache ssh traffic unless you run your own cert and set up the squid that way. It will however seamlessly allow you to connect through a ssh tunnel with one port forward.
- wireguard is not undetectable, even wireshark has a simple way to identify it, but there are more accurate ways
- To be honest, I've found WireGuard's performance is harmed more by replay attacks than OpenVPN. Least that is what I put it down to when I tried them both from a VPN provider that offered both.
  Edit: missed the a in replay.
They will use it as an excuse to give themselves more power and to take more civil liberties from you.

Freenet, I2P and Tor will be the new refuge

I think it's Hyphanet now.

Ah, fascism on the rise.

Yeah, businesses will not accept this. Remote work and remote connections rely on VPN for ALL KINDS OF SHIT. If you must adhere to some kinds of government compliance, it is even MANDATED BY THE FUCKING GOVERNMENT. Explain to me how the hell that is going to just poof and not cause all kinds of problems.

Individual customer VPN providers get banned, corporate VPN providers not banned. It's quite simple really.
Or are you expecting the average Joe to spin up his own VPN server?
- And how do you expect that to work on a technical level?
You don't get it. They will just force VPNs to black list sites. Business users will happily do it because they don't care about porn anyway. Any VPN which doesn't enforce UK laws will be blocked at the ISP level.
- I just don't believe that method will be as successful as you may think.

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.

Labour has already spoken out and said they will make no attempts to ban VPNs.

I doubt their corpo overlords would allow a VPN ban considering the amount of companies that use them.
- It would be trivial for them to write it so it bans it for citizen use but is allowed for corporate and government use. The people have no rights anymore
This makes me feel like they were in a bind here. The so called "online safety bill" was a tory concoction that took years to pass through the courts because of how invasive it is and how anyone could easily bypass it.
If labour want to stop it, they'll be accused of not wanting to protect children.
Whatever anyone thinks of labour, I'd ask people to ask themselves, if you were in that position, what option do they have other than to let it play out as the spectacular failure it was always going to be and making sure everyone knows who's fault that was afterwards?
- No. They could put it into a review and quietly shitcan this. It's not particularly popular. They just want to say they're protecting kids.
  They're spineless and Keir is an authoritarian.

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.
- no not TOr, there are better proxies than what you are thinking, no not tor browsers.
The Russians also have some pretty good tools.

To me it looks like every government in the world is pro-surveillance and anti-privacy; they're just all at different stages of depth into those ideologies done in practice. Privacy and anti-surveillance against foreign governments and corporations, pro for domestic. And I continue decade after decade to say that you should fear your domestic government far more than any foreign unless you're a country that may have US and allies bombing/droning and paratrooping your country. Countries with a modern enough military mostly have to worry about their own government rather than foreign governments

To me it looks like every government in the world is pro-surveillance and anti-privacy; they're just all at different stages of depth into those ideologies done in practice.
Because they are all fuckin crooked and all want to keep their power.

Just adopt a CCP style social credit system already. Why all of this pussyfooting around being a totalitarian, censorship focused, surveillance state? Just do it. Give the good people of UK a solid reason to be a little bit more French again.

There has been a widespread misconception that China operates a nationwide and unitary social credit "score" based on individuals' behavior, leading to punishments if the score is too low. Media reports in the West have sometimes exaggerated or inaccurately described this concept.[4][5][6] In 2019, the central government voiced dissatisfaction with pilot cities experimenting with social credit scores. It issued guidelines clarifying that citizens could not be punished for having low scores and that punishments should only be limited to legally defined crimes and civil infractions. As a result, pilot cities either discontinued their point-based systems or restricted them to voluntary participation with no major consequences for having low scores.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
- This is, if true and accurate, delightful news! And has improved an otherwise troublesome day.
- What about all the people blocked from air travel due to low Social Credit? Are you saying that never happened?

The UK government doth protest too much about protecting the kids. It’s obvious that this whole thing is just an attempt to increase the surveillance of the UK population.

The Collective Shout Out must feel envious of such power... Think about all what they could ban, you know, for you and your children protection of course.

Labour was supposed to destroy the Tories, not join them!

Will the next step be banning VPS then? Because that's what will happen: if you ban VPNs (good luck with that lol), people will just connect to a VPS in a less stupid country and exit from there.

I hope they start looking at TOR too, that should be really fun.

Well, if you connect to your own VPS, you're still "illegally" using a VPN if they ban them. Yeah, you enter a world of how they will enforce it. But, it's not dodging the law to make your own VPN on a VPS.
- Sure, but how do you confirm that I'm using it as a vpn and not as a real server to run my own apps (for example a cloud storage or a media server)?
  Oh right, you just ban VPS as a whole too, because why not, right?
  And next thing, since we are at it, we should ban encrypted traffic because who knows what are you doing with your encrypted communications! Fuck HTTPS! Think of the children!!!
  And the worst thing is that I can completely see them doing it.

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.

Freedom from EU regulation. 😋

I mean, in terms of the age restriction rules, we might get it first. But the EU is setting up for a very similar set of rules, the USA is also working on their own version. France came before us. Australia are also running I think (now, soon? Not too sure). As to whether similar talk (and it's just talk right now) around banning VPNs will happen elsewhere too. Well, if they pull it off here too without too much of a problem, yes it will likely be rolled out elsewhere.
It's not isolated in any way and the fact it seems to be very suddenly a thing every country wants to do should make it even more concerning.

this is obviously such a dumpster fire that I can't help but wonder, "When will they realize how dumb this is and back out of it?"

then i remember that Brexit happened

fuckin stubbornness is a national identity for you blokes innit

We didn't have a referendum on this though, and if we had done I don't think it would have passed
- Same was said during Brexit.
Don't forget the raging alcoholism

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.

Reddit already tried to block VPN users.

Expect the corpos to bend the knee.

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.

That sounds awful lot like dictatorship...

So now it's not just TERF island but also nazi island.

As a Brit I'm sorry for how embarrassing our country's authorities are becoming
Every society has its pathway there. TERFs are one of the last milestones.
GB has really wanted to go fascist autocratic since Germany looked over in the 1920s and saw a like minded kin.
- Did we? Some maybe, I do recall the fascists got the shit kicked out of them on Cable Street. More of that please.

What would be defined as a VPN and even then there are other options to get access to content as if you where in a different country or ways to bypass the age restriction. A lot of companies and governments also use VPN's to get people to work on their servers, so how would the UK function.

It always baffles me that they try shit like that.

Edit: heck proper sex education is a way better solution to reduce unhealthy sex habits

Edit: heck proper sex education is a way better solution to reduce unhealthy sex habits
It's not about sex, or protecting the children.
It's about control.
- Maybe it and maybe it isn't, but kicking against it trying to change won't help because there is a certain amount of the population who believes that it isn't for control, but it is actually for sex or protecting the children or what not.
  If you want to get those people over to change their behaviour, you want to work on compromises or in this case you want to deflect them into fixing something else.
  Trust me, I have a lot of right and even some mildly right people around me and with going hard against them you will just confirm their bias.

for those in the UK and/or Other places in Europe just know it's so painfully easy to either set up your own VPN or just use something like Mullvad.

I set up my own VPN this morning for the first time on my server and it took less than 10minutes. plenty of guides online on how to do it.

Bonus points if you can route your personal VPN server through your VPN provider, the flow looks a little like this:
Client <—> Personal VPN server <—> VPN Provider

What if we all started using I2P for most stuff? The governments couldn't do anything about it.

Good idea, for sure.

It's not so easy to ban VPNs. They need to setup DPI everywhere. And then people will start using DPI circumvention software.

Man I can't follow UK politics. I thought Labour was a progressive party

Old labour was.
They pivoted quite hard a few years ago to try and win an election.
They are just Tory Lite now.
For starters, the whole "Progressive" thing is an American concept born out of the American environment (with its very deep religious moralistic strain amongst a large fraction of the population) and does not really applicable to Britain because, at least until recently, they didn't really have regressive tendencies.
Beyond that Labour hasn't been Leftwing since Tony Blair took over in the 80s and started talking about it being New Labour - they're Neoliberals and quite strongly so, so pretty rightwing.
What they did was performative Identity Politics like in the US: theatrics in the Moral space to make them seem different from the other mainstream party, rather than actually having genuine Liberal Principles.
Of late they even ditched that and seem to be trying to outfascist the Fascists.

Geeze I hope I don't...slap tailscale on a vps

Can't wait for the next election to kick out the Tories so can roll back all their draconian bills.

I don't think it's even possible to get rid of VPNs without outright banning encryption. If I set up a VPN that uses an obscure port and the traffic is encrypted, how are they going to know it's even a VPN?

Attached below is a Wireshark trace I obtained by sniffing my own network traffic.
I want to draw your attention to this part in particular:
Underneath "User Datagram Protocol", you can see the words "OpenVPN Protocol". So anyone who sniffs my traffic on the wire can see exactly the same thing that I can. While they can't read the contents of the payload, they can tell that it's OpenVPN traffic because the headers are not encrypted. So if a router wanted to block OpenVPN traffic, all they would have to do is drop this packet. It's a similar story for Wireguard packets. An attacker can read the unencrypted headers and learn
The size of the transmission
The source and destination IP addresses by reading the IP header
The source and destination ports numbers by reading the TCP or UDP headers
The underlying layers, up until the point it hits an encrypted protocol (such as OpenVPN, TLS, or SSH)
- You're using the default port though, are you not? If the source port were not 1194, a port associated with openvpn, would wireshark still identify this as openvpn traffic?
They're going to know it's VPN fairly easily because it's fairly obvious what you're doing when all or most of your traffic is encrypted and is directed at one or two addresses. Even more obvious if those one or two addresses happen to belong to known VPN or VPS providers or something.
Traffic patterns. There's always ways to tell.

Kinda hoping MPs don't read anything here. But, hopefully they omit socks/http proxies from whatever ban they impose....

Lol. Democracy.
Democracies don't care about their citizens privacy. Just the optics of getting spied on citizens.

labour really doesn't want people to access lgbtq safe spaces and resources huh?

Wireguard evil, mmkay?

China 1.5