This is exactly why VPN usage is spiking - people see these regulations coming and want to protect their privacy. I’ve been using fast vpn for windows for work and general browsing. It’s decent for basic needs and setup was straightforward, but has some annoying issues. The app occasionally crashes requiring restarts, and speeds drop noticeably during peak hours. Customer support took days to respond when I had connection problems. Works fine for bypassing geo-restrictions though. Any UK ban would be disastrous for privacy rights
UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill
Submitted 8 months ago by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/uk-households-could-face-vpn-32152789
Comments
annamiddleton@lemmy.world 3 months ago
OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
Wasn’t FastVPN caught holding user logs and selling personal data to advertisement agencies?
ColdWater@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
China 1.5
npcknapsack@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
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.
sturmblast@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yeah, businesses will not accept this. Remote work and remote connections rely on VPN for ALL KINDS OF SHIT. Some of it is even mandated BY THE FUCKING GOVERNMENT.
socsa@piefed.social 7 months ago
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.
sturmblast@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I just don’t believe that method will be as successful as you may think.
Shayeta@feddit.org 7 months ago
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?
sturmblast@lemmy.world 7 months ago
And how do you expect that to work on a technical level?
TimewornTraveler@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
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
toothpaste_ostrich@feddit.nl 7 months ago
Don’t forget the raging alcoholism
AlpacaChariot@lemmy.world 7 months ago
We didn’t have a referendum on this though, and if we had done I don’t think it would have passed
minorkeys@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Funny how its always so important to ban useful and empowering things for citizens in the name of safety but someone we can’t ban business practices that cause mass extinctions, change the climate, impoverish the working class or kill enough of us to only be seen as a statistic instead of people. If they actually cared about safety, they would be banning the things that cause mass suffering and death, not VPNs. We should be opposed to these kinds of bans on the principle that it further disempowered us so we are less able to deal with the threats of all the mass suffering and death that they refuse to keep us safe from.
commander@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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
GladiusB@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
rozodru@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
ohshit604@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Bonus points if you can route your personal VPN server through your VPN provider.
MissingGhost@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
What if we all started using I2P for most stuff? The governments couldn’t do anything about it.
swelter_spark@reddthat.com 7 months ago
Good idea, for sure.
cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
labour really doesn't want people to access lgbtq safe spaces and resources huh?
1984@lemmy.today 8 months ago
You cant ban vpns, its easy for tech people to set up a vpn server on any server on the internet and connect to it. Wireguard for example, super simple.
cley_faye@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Oh, sweet summer child. Of course you can ban them. Lawmakers don’t always care about the technicality of things, because in most cases they don’t have to.
You can’t prevent VPN from existing, and short of a very tightly curated whitelist of services, you can’t prevent people from actually using them, sure. Unless you’re on the side of the state, the Law, and the enforcement. In which case, you can. A blanket ban on VPN usage is the perfect gateway to “we’ve seen traffic from your house toward a known VPN server, so, blam, arrest”. And it does not have to stop at known server.
Given the regular tries to outright ban encryption, this is the perfect venue to mass target encrypted communications. Depending on the wording, the mere presence of unobservable traffic could be enough for an arrest.
If what I’m saying here sound dystopian to you, just remember that not only most of this was actually tried (and aborted) time after time, but also that until quite recently, the general public actually using strong encryption was illegal in many places, including our western countries, experiments to make state spyware mandatory are also a recurrent thing (which might take hold with the “ID verification through your phone” apps soon).
rozodru@lemmy.world 8 months ago
yup just did it this morning on my server because now I’m moving my stuff, yet again, away from European companies because of all this. it was painfully simple and easy. I just followed a guide I found on a linux blog and within 10minutes I had a VPN of my own up and running.
Iambus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Lol what is going on over there. The UK is becoming more dystopian by the day.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 8 months ago
They looked at their calendar and thought “Oh shit!” when they saw they were overdue to start V for Vendetta.
MITM0@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Download Tor, Whonix & Tails
inkrifle@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Labour has already spoken out and said they will make no attempts to ban VPNs.
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
I doubt their corpo overlords would allow a VPN ban considering the amount of companies that use them.
cheloxin@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
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
undergroundoverground@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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, 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?
IcyToes@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
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.
WaffleWarrior@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
I though the UK was a Western democracy. What the hell are you guys doing over there?
IcyToes@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Lol. Democracy.
Democracies don’t care about their citizens privacy. Just the optics of getting spied on citizens.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems
Your law is the difficult problem you daft cunt
Bubbey@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Even the CCP can’t stop VPNs… good luck UK
imouto@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
NateNate60@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
1984@lemmy.today 8 months ago
So companies are not using vpns?
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The more you try to stop them, the better their business gets, heh.
rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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 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.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
This shows that this bill has shit all to do with the protection of children, it’s just again the over reach of religious zealots
Can we please ban religions instead? This would ACTUALLY protect minors and just in general make the world such a better and more beautiful place.
Convert churches into museums for art and displaying the horrors of religion
HalfSalesman@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Convert churches into museums for art and displaying the horrors of religion
Not all of them have pretty art. Just turn the boring looking ones into secular club houses or even just regular housing.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
after reports in Guido Fawkes suggested it was possible.
That’s the only source? A far-right conspiracy website?
wrassleman76@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
I don’t think it’s even possible to get rid of VPNs. 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?
NateNate60@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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)
wrassleman76@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
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?
herrvogel@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
Ironfist79@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Traffic patterns. There’s always ways to tell.
kokesh@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Turning into China, aren’t we?
TheOrionArm@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
NateNate60@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
Ironfist79@lemmy.world 8 months ago
They just can’t stand not being able to control people.
ohshit604@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Probably force an insecure protocol and market it as “top of the line”.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It isn’t. And the only source in the article is that a far-right conspiracy theory site said they’re considering it.
NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 8 months ago
Can’t wait for the next election to kick out the Tories so can roll back all their draconian bills.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 8 months ago
Reddit already tried to block VPN users.
Expect the corpos to bend the knee.
Ronno@feddit.nl 8 months ago
“Stop defending yourself, and let me hit you” vibes.
notarobot@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Do not retaliate and you will be rewarded
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
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.
falynns@lemmy.world 8 months ago
“Hey! Stop using well known workarounds to my idiot demands! Surely this is brand new technology that no one could have known about!”
anitasandra@lemmy.world 3 months ago
OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
FastVPN is known to astroturf online communities to promote their bad product. Their tendency to use unethical marketing strategies raises serious concerns about the legitimacy of their VPN.