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VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

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Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#581

Post by teamonkey »

badpenny wrote: post #80
willvarfar wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its because the popular press has, for a very long time, been pushing a narrative of a country under siege. It sells papers, but to keep selling papers, it has to keep steadily upping the narrative over time.

I agree, but isn't that the case in lots of other countries? I think it's a contributing factor, but there's more to it.

It is the case elsewhere, remember how close France once got to Frexit and how close the far right were to winning their most recent general election with the same claims.

But the UK has always to some extent enjoyed a fantasy of being an island under siege from mainland Europe and it something the nationalist press like to drum up.

As for its increasing poverty, the UK went all-in on neoliberalism since the ‘80s, and especially in on austerity since 2008. Entry-level wages barely grew for over 10 years. Blame the EU for that, get Brexit, more expensive goods and damage to the financial sector the country relied on. Then Covid…

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#582

Post by jmb99 »

ricardobeat wrote: post #264
kelsey98765431 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a cat a mouse game. VPN services will start to offer residential endpoints when enough websites start blocking them enough to damage the value proposition. There is no way on the current internet to verify an ip address means anything at all other than it's an ip address.

There is no way to offer “residential endpoints” at scale with sufficient bandwidth for anything other than simple browsing of text websites. As shown by the very effective Netflix strategy of blocking VPN addresses, it’s been very hard to slip through for a good four or five years now.

I have a residential fibre connection that’s 3Gbps symmetrical, unmetered. If there was something in it for me (and I was legally shielded) I would consider renting some of that out. And there’s definitely other people out there who would change that “consider” to “definitely.” It’s possible to even get a residential 8Gbps symmetrical connection here for not a ton of money; that can support a lot of video traffic.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#583

Post by thinkingtoilet »

joenot443 wrote: post #516
wnevets wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The UK is becoming increasingly authoritarian in ways that feel increasingly antagonistic to the majority of the population, regardless of political party. Taxes are rising (with tax take falling), crimes are going unchecked, just mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up, but as GDP per capita continues to stall and even fall, the pressure it puts on services is a factor for many. And we're…

I think it's always a bit of a bummer when someone takes the time to write a really well-thought out comment and someone comes in with a reddit-style quip that adds nothing to the conversation but derails it for everyone else. There are so many charitable and earnest ways to make the point you're getting at, why reach for such intellectually low hanging fruit?

It's not a "reddit style quip" to mention the UK deliberately shot themselves in the foot economically when talking about the economic situation in the UK.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#584

Post by dartharva »

password54321 wrote: post #110

Destroy cultural integrity, national identity, create a low-trust society, become more authoritarian to manage low-trust society, import more immigrants at an exponential rate while house costs rise along with unemployment. The list keeps going. This is why far-right is surging on the polls. The country has completely lost all sense.

Sad thing as that the good times are very likely never coming back, and the far-right in power will only make everything worse by bolstering even more tribalism and mistrust among the public.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#585

Post by southernplaces7 »

abxyz wrote: post #133
rubyAce wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It his law combined with all the other iffy laws in the UK which make this nefarious. This is the issue about discussing anything about how draconian the UK is. If you compare any single law in isolation, it isn't that different. However if you take how the British authorities and how they operate it, and all the other laws you start to see a more draconian picture. That is what many people, especially those that do…

I lived in the U.K. for decades and I have lived in many other countries. I’ll criticise the U.K. government and society endlessly but to describe these changes as notable or remarkable relative to most other countries is nonsense. From a U.S. internet libertarian freedom-at-all-costs perspective, sure, it’s a draconian nightmare, but for normal people from the U.K. or any other country, it’s barely a blip on their r…

>to describe these changes as notable or remarkable relative to most other countries is nonsense. From a U.S. internet libertarian freedom-at-all-costs perspective, sure, it’s a draconian nightmare, but for normal people from the U.K. or any other country, it’s barely a blip on their radar.

This is a very dangerous measure of how worryingly authoritarian or not a particular place is becoming. People's perceptions are notoriously subject to all kinds of blindness and unknowns. The perceptions of most average Germans living in the first years of the Nazi state were also of minimal concern for authoritarianism, and little more than a series of modest blimps on the radar, and where did that take them?

This is not to compare the underlying savagery of something like the Nazi state with the soft bureaucratic smarminess of the modern UK, but the underlying risks of any creeping authoritarianism are the same: a steady normalization of deviance.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#586

Post by cs02rm0 »

nixgeek wrote: post #331
cs02rm0 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK is becoming increasingly authoritarian in ways that feel increasingly antagonistic to the majority of the population, regardless of political party. Taxes are rising (with tax take falling), crimes are going unchecked, just mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up, but as GDP per capita continues to stall and even fall, the pressure it puts on services is a factor for many. And we're se…

Where do you see people leaving heading towards? What’s your emigration destination? It seems like most countries have their challenges and I’m curious where people who have inevitably done more research than me are landing, literally!

Personally I've known people moving to Portugal, Malta, Cyprus, Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain, the US, Singapore. There's obviously a variety of factors that go into the choices people make and certainly no perfect choice.

For me, it'll be the UAE. Instinctively, some people will probably attack that choice, which is fine. I've lived in the Middle East previously, it's not perfect to say the least and I have some personal history with that, but I understand the choice I'm making. One thing people won't like is the headline tax rate, but I probably won't come out ahead there initially as cost of living is quite high - it'll cost me about USD 70k just to put three kids in school. Accommodation is also quite expensive, private healthcare also needs paying for, but at least you get what you pay for then.

Where the tax situation is appealing though is that then I'll be incentivised to earn more beyond those high living costs, where I just don't feel I am in the UK. Sun and swimming works for me too. Job adverts there are absolutely rammed with literally thousands of applicants and I'm hearing from recruiters that a lot of people from the UK and wider Europe are trying to head in the same direction. I'll be working for myself though.

I likely won't see out my days there. I'd imagine we'll retire to somewhere on the Med, my wife would prefer NZ but I don't think that works for me. The US is perhaps desirable, but it seems quite hard for a Brit to get into unless they happen to have a job with a company there. We'll have to see.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#587

Post by mulmen »

blendo wrote: post #483

I need to prove my age to buy a lottery ticket or purchase alcohol. The merchant typically doesn't save my id info. What if I could purchase a unique QR code, good for maybe a month, that I could use online to prove my age? There'd still be problems in the US with 1st amendment issues, but I'd at least remain anonymous.

Because it’s none of your or anybody else’s business what I do online. Don’t negotiate with terrorists.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#588

Post by hnfong »

ben_w wrote: post #344
areoform wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taxes are rising (with tax take falling) > just mentioning increased immigration One of these seems like the solution to the other. > as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income Having UK work experience and having talked to thousands of british folks over a decade, I find this hard to believe.…

IMO, the wheels fell off decades before I was born. The peak of the empire was around WW1, where the victory was immediately followed by Irish home rule, and Churchill(!) putting the UK military into austerity to save money, which is how it came to be that evacuating from Dunkirk involved a lot of civilian ships, amongst other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Year_Rule WW2 was a Pyrrhic victory. Not that Wes…

> it's been authoritarian, chauvinistic (both internationally with imperialism and domestically via the aristocracy), and theocratic, ever since Harold Godwinson

This. The UK was a band of feudal kingdoms that somehow managed to create an overseas empire. The empire is now gone, and the feudal kingdom is struggling to transform itself into a modern nation.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#589

Post by SoftTalker »

jmb99 wrote: post #582
ricardobeat wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way to offer “residential endpoints” at scale with sufficient bandwidth for anything other than simple browsing of text websites. As shown by the very effective Netflix strategy of blocking VPN addresses, it’s been very hard to slip through for a good four or five years now.

I have a residential fibre connection that’s 3Gbps symmetrical, unmetered. If there was something in it for me (and I was legally shielded) I would consider renting some of that out. And there’s definitely other people out there who would change that “consider” to “definitely.” It’s possible to even get a residential 8Gbps symmetrical connection here for not a ton of money; that can support a lot of video traffic.

Your terms of service with the ISP almost certainly forbid any form of reselling, or sharing the connection outside of your household.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#590

Post by bluehatbrit »

IshKebab wrote: post #555
Jigsy wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Online petitions aren't worth the paper they're written on. If people want change, they'll need to find alternative avenues. (Like civil disobedience.)

Or write to your MP. They care slightly more about that.

I've done this for so many issues in the past and not once have I had anything more than an automated reply. Often those replies then go on and reference a totally different bill that I'm voicing an opinion on. This isn't all just one MP either, I've lived in many different areas of the UK in recent years and most of them have flipped parties at some point or another.

Maybe this is the "Westminster Bubble" the journo's keep talking about. Whatever it is, MP's seem very reluctant to interact with their constituents unless they're campaigning for re-election. At that point they'll turn up on your door step in the middle of the day, expecting a half hour conversation.

How is a citizen meant to adovcate and voice their opinions when their representivies, and every candidate looking to replace them, refuses to engage?

This isn't really a specific question, or a critism on your point. It's just venting on my experience in recent years. Maybe someone else has had a more positive experience they'd be interested in sharing?

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