Submitted 1 day ago by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/uk-households-could-face-vpn-32152789
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.
Work VPN doesn’t look any different a porn VPN to the people tapping the line.
“We will force you to do what we want”, democracy in action
“It has come to our attention that we haven’t fascismed hard enough, nor in sufficient detail”
"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
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.
Nanny state
You’re literally being Jimmy Salvile right now
~ Guy who posed for photo ops with Salvile twenty years ago
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. They best they could hope to do would be to create an exemption for businesses in which case I open my own fapping business.
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.
(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, amid a lot of fury.
For context, the Online Safety Act has been used to censor and age-gate anything and everything deemed “illegal content” under Ofcom guidelines, else risk getting fined up to 10% of your annual global revenue. This includes anything related to illegal immigration and people-smuggling. Twitter had genuinely been forced to censor all coverage around anti-asylum seeker protests behind age verification requirements.
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.
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…
i don’t trust a hair on Farage’s little head lol
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.
And there’s the other shoe dropping with VPNs now. Didn’t even take them an extra fucking year
Didn’t even take a week.
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.
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.
Why not just ban all human rights while you’re at it?
Little by little!
Can’t do it all at once or the idiots populace might catch on!
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?
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?
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
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.
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.
As an American, it always made me laugh when we made fun of China’s “Social Credit Score” when we literally have one already that determines whether we can buy houses/cars/etc lol
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?
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
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 was supposed to destroy the Tories, not join them!
There are ways around this even if they do ban vpn. Its a hopeless battle being fought by the ignorant.
They will use it as an excuse to give themselves more power and to take more civil liberties from you.
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.
wireguard is not undetectable, even wireshark has a simple way to identify it, but there are more accurate ways
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.
To be honest, I’ve found WireGuard’s performance is harmed more by reply attacks than OpenVPN. Least that is what I put it down to when I tried them both from a VPN provider that offered both.
Next up, zeros and/or ones
That’s good. Everyone can read base 1.
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.
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).
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.
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…
There will always be a way to bypass laws that do not serve the people.
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.
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
As an American, can we trade governments?
Bye bye UK economy. How do you expect businesses to work without VPNs?
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.
Ah, fascism on the rise.
Freenet, I2P and Tor will be the new refuge
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
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 😉
ThePrivacyPolicy@lemmy.ca 13 hours ago
Gonna end up with a country-wide rogue WiFi mesh network setup that’s fed from neighboring countries haha
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
It’s it possible to turn our phones into Intranet nodes and have some connect to the uncensored Internet?