This is the UK. You need a licence for a TV
Give it a bit of time and you’ll need a license to use a VPN. Without a license, your ISP can snitch in you. Unless you use starlink.
sorghum@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
djdarren@piefed.social 1 week ago
You need a TV licence because that’s the funding model for the BBC (and wider broadcasting infrastructure), not because the government want to keep tabs on who has a TV.
sorghum@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
You don’t think they are using that data to see who doesn’t have a licence to go sniffing around for violators?
Besides £174.50/year is ridiculous ($241.06). I’ve watched the BBC, it ain’t worth that much.
djdarren@piefed.social 1 week ago
Given how you translated the cost into $, am I correct in assuming that you’re not British?
Because I am, and honestly, £14.50 a month for what the BBC actually offers is, if anything, not enough. Because it’s not just TV.
The income from the licence fee covers TV, radio, broadcasting infrastructure, and R&D into said infrastructure. It also covers a broad range of community initiatives (several orchestras receive much of their funding from the BBC). And let’s not forget the iPlayer. It may have since been surpassed in utility by some of the other streaming companies, but it was one of the first to offer that kind of service, and for a long time, pretty much the gold standard.
On top of that is the intangible benefits of having a state broadcaster that is, according to the rules by which it is bound, absolutely not allowed to run advertising for commercial products. Other broadcasters in the UK are held up in comparison to the BBC, which means that they have yet to fall to the diabolical levels that commercial broadcasters in places like the US have. If they did, people would switch off.
BBC News can piss up a rope though. Sometimes stories don’t need balance.
Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Your ISP could snitch on you for tons of ‘illegal’ traffic, but they don’t because that would require deep packed inspection on an absurd amount of traffic and they gain nothing for it. Instead they pass on notices when they receive them from third parties, and take enforcement actions (like cutting off their service to you) only when they’re directed to. They want your momey after all.
Torrenting for example; only gets flagged when copyright holders join torrent trackers, then send letters to ISPs that control the IPs found in those groups. That’s not the ISP hunting you down, they’re just passing on a legal notice they’ve been given and thus are obligated to pass it to you.
From and ISPs perspective; a VPN connection doesn’t look any different than any other TLS connection, ie https. There’s nothing for them to snitch because a) they can’t tell the difference without significant investment to capture and perform deep analysis on traffic at an absurd scale and b) they have no desire to even look and then snitch on customers, that just costs them paying customers.
The ONLY reason this can be enforced at all, is because comercial VPN companies want to advertise and sell their services to customers; so lawmakers can directly view and monitor those services.
Lawmakers have no way of even knowing about, let alone inspecting an individuals private VPN that’s either running from private systems or from a foreign VPS.
All that’s not even touching things like SSH tunneling - in a sense, creating a VPN from an SSH connection; one of the most ubiquitous protocols for controlling server infrastructure around the globe. Even if traffic was inspected to find SSH connections, you CAN’T block this or you disrupt IT infrastructure at such an alarming scale there’d be riots.