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
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: action.openrightsgroup.org/make-one-donation US: www.eff.org/pages/donate-eff EU: 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 wanting to crack down on encrypted tunnels (because you cannot discriminate VPNs from them).
At best, they see a TLS handshake that gets upgraded to an encrypted websocket which hides VPN traffic…
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
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.
Perry 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).
There will always be a way to bypass laws that do not serve the people.
This kinda proves that it was never about the children. How many children have know how and the means to buy a VPN subscription?
We’re you never a child? I formatted my family pc and reinstalled windows in 5th grade, and used a VPN to circumvent the schools online filter in 7th grade.
Children are not as stupid as you seem to think
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.
A lot more than you know, I knew how to use it since middle school.
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…
Still an important part. Free VPNs that spy on you are a thing, but work
It’s not so easy to ban VPNs. They need to setup DPI everywhere. And then people will start using DPI circumvention software.
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
Man I can’t follow UK politics. I thought Labour was a progressive party
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.
Old labour was.
They pivoted quite hard a few years ago to try and win an election.
They are just Tory Lite now.
“It has come to our attention that we haven’t fascismed hard enough, nor in sufficient detail”
The UK government doth protest too much about protecting the kids. It’s obvious that this who thing is just an attempt to increase the surveillance of the UK population.
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.
Norway is part of the Nine Eyes…
Huh. I’m also “moving” soon. Any reason for Norway over Switzerland?
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.
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.
Work VPN doesn’t look any different a porn VPN to the people tapping the line.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Why not just ban all human rights while you’re at it?
The anti-terror unit needs to fill its new vacancies first. Do you know ho many enforcers it takes to arrest a single man in a wheelchair?
Little by little!
Can’t do it all at once or the idiots populace might catch on!
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.
Freedom from EU regulation. 😋
That sounds awful lot like dictatorship…
Tfw Big Brother is charmless potato named Keir Starmer.
Geeze I hope I don’t…slap tailscale on a vps
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.
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?
Best of luck with that, idiots. How are you planning to tell the difference between my personal VPN and my work VPN?
What about the VPN I have to my home?
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
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.
Freenet, I2P and Tor will be the new refuge
Ah, fascism on the rise.
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?
Isn’t this currently what Russia is trying to do with their internet?
slaacaa@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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