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
UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill
Submitted 2 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
TimewornTraveler@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
AlpacaChariot@lemmy.world 1 month ago
We didn’t have a referendum on this though, and if we had done I don’t think it would have passed
toothpaste_ostrich@feddit.nl 1 month ago
Don’t forget the raging alcoholism
1984@lemmy.today 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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.
AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
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.
Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Oh, that would be hilarious to watch.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 1 month ago
Reddit already tried to block VPN users.
Expect the corpos to bend the knee.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 1 month ago
after reports in Guido Fawkes suggested it was possible.
That’s the only source? A far-right conspiracy website?
RejZoR@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
That sounds awful lot like dictatorship…
TheBat@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Tfw Big Brother is charmless potato named Keir Starmer.
febra@lemmy.world 2 months ago
So now it’s not just TERF island but also nazi island.
frenchfryenjoyer@lemmings.world 1 month ago
As a Brit I’m sorry for how embarrassing our country’s authorities are becoming
MangioneDontMiss@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
As an American, can we trade governments?
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
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.
BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 1 month ago
Did we? Some maybe, I do recall the fascists got the shit kicked out of them on Cable Street. More of that please.
rozodru@lemmy.world 1 month 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 1 month ago
Bonus points if you can route your personal VPN server through your VPN provider.
badbytes@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Banning VPNs is quite a serious move.
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 2 months ago
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.
0x0@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
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.Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 2 months ago
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.
MissingGhost@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
What if we all started using I2P for most stuff? The governments couldn’t do anything about it.
swelter_spark@reddthat.com 1 month ago
Good idea, for sure.
hisao@ani.social 2 months ago
It’s not so easy to ban VPNs. They need to setup DPI everywhere. And then people will start using DPI circumvention software.
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 2 months ago
Man I can’t follow UK politics. I thought Labour was a progressive party
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
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.
towerful@programming.dev 2 months ago
Old labour was.
They pivoted quite hard a few years ago to try and win an election.
They are just Tory Lite now.
sirico@feddit.uk 2 months ago
Geeze I hope I don’t…slap tailscale on a vps
NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 1 month ago
Can’t wait for the next election to kick out the Tories so can roll back all their draconian bills.
wrassleman76@lemmy.ca 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month ago
Traffic patterns. There’s always ways to tell.
MangioneDontMiss@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
China Laughs Communistically
MITM0@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Download Tor, Whonix & Tails
WaffleWarrior@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
I though the UK was a Western democracy. What the hell are you guys doing over there?
IcyToes@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Lol. Democracy.
Democracies don’t care about their citizens privacy. Just the optics of getting spied on citizens.
kokesh@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Turning into China, aren’t we?
cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
labour really doesn't want people to access lgbtq safe spaces and resources huh?
ftbd@feddit.org 2 months ago
Wireguard evil, mmkay?
ColdWater@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
China 1.5
npcknapsack@lemmy.ca 1 month 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.