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UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs

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Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs

#31

Post by embedding-shape »

aranw wrote: post #29
jimnotgym wrote: post #9

Just for clarification. House of Lords amendments do not have to be accepted by the House of Commons and may not make it into law. If you do not agree with an amendment then write to your MP, write to the ministers concerned. If you do not tell them your concerns they will not know. You can ask for an appointment with your MP. You can ask for an appointment with ministers. Better still you can form an advocacy group…

I've written to my MP several times about this. Each response just repeats the same talking points about safety whilst completely missing the underlying technical issues and consequences.

I've been met with that kind of stone walling before too, you know what eventually worked to actually turn the position of a local councilwoman? Going to her office and demand to speak with her, then sitting down, listening and having a conversation with her. Turns out that most of the emails "she" wrote to me was written by an assistant "to save her time" and she weren't aware of the points I was trying to bring up. Granted, this was like one and half decade ago, but if I was met with something similar today I'd try the same thing.

People tend to be a lot more reasonable in person, and also if you listen to them first.

Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs

#32

Post by chatmasta »

thefz wrote: post #11

What if I rent a cheap VPS overseas and wireguard my traffic to that?

It’s a lot more difficult to do this anonymously than it is to use a VPN. You almost certainly need to provide payment information and often also identity verification.

Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs

#33

Post by jacquesm »

unglaublich wrote: post #25

What societal "harm" is the UK actually trying to reduce with this age verification? It almost feels like the amount of effort they're putting into this is out of balance with the actual harm.

Nothing, the point is that they have a couple of fig leaf reasons while doing what they want to do anyway.

Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs

#34

Post by pjc50 »

Same article also says the bill includes a ban on social media for users under 16, like Australia. Pretty dramatic change.

Meanwhile the government and official accounts continue to use X even as they're trying to ban it. Mixed messaging.

Lead proponent of the VPN ban: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nash,_Baron_Nash; he's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Policy_Studies again, the dead hand of Thatcherism.

Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs

#35

Post by embedding-shape »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #28

What I find particularly tragic about all of this legislation (the OSA and now this) is that there are obviously technical people in the room that would advise against this clusterfuck of a direction and they are being ignored by politicians who think the internet is something they can aggressively control. This will continue to push people towards providers who operate outside UK jurisdiction or providers that care…

> by politicians who think the internet is something they can aggressively control

You seem to believe they're wrong. Since they're the ones who come up with the laws of the land, I think it's important to realize that they can and do aggressively control access to the internet in their country. It sucks, but it's the reality.

Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs

#36

Post by pjc50 »

unglaublich wrote: post #25

What societal "harm" is the UK actually trying to reduce with this age verification? It almost feels like the amount of effort they're putting into this is out of balance with the actual harm.

The stated harms are "adult content", and social media in general (same bill includes a ban on under-16s)

Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs

#37

Post by fartfeatures »

wlkr wrote: post #24

I'm very interested to see how some VPN providers react to this. For a zero logs VPN provider, if such a thing can really exist, how big of a problem is this? Presumably many customers pay with a debit/credit card already so there's some PII on file? Usage remains the same? Surely savvy people can just use their existing VPN to buy a VPN from outside the UK. Of course, we're sliding quite rapidly down that slippery s…

There are already solutions that do the double VPN thing for you. For example https://obscura.net

Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs

#38

Post by valleyer »

pjc50 wrote: post #34

Same article also says the bill includes a ban on social media for users under 16, like Australia. Pretty dramatic change. Meanwhile the government and official accounts continue to use X even as they're trying to ban it. Mixed messaging. Lead proponent of the VPN ban: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nash,_Baron_Nash ; he's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Policy_Studies again, the dead hand of Thatcherism…

It drives me nuts that local governments in the US continue to use Twitter/X to disseminate communications, despite having perfectly good web sites of their own.

Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs

#39

Post by embedding-shape »

chatmasta wrote: post #32
thefz wrote: post #11

What if I rent a cheap VPS overseas and wireguard my traffic to that?

It’s a lot more difficult to do this anonymously than it is to use a VPN. You almost certainly need to provide payment information and often also identity verification.

Probably about the same, there is a lot of VPS providers out there, and not a small amount accepts basically an email + cryptocurrencies without any further verification than that. And that's just on the clearweb, going beyond that you start having even more options.

Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs

#40

Post by FrostViper8 »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #28

What I find particularly tragic about all of this legislation (the OSA and now this) is that there are obviously technical people in the room that would advise against this clusterfuck of a direction and they are being ignored by politicians who think the internet is something they can aggressively control. This will continue to push people towards providers who operate outside UK jurisdiction or providers that care…

> Even better, they could have created a non-governmental agency to exchange tokens and urls to prevent the privacy issue of the government knowing which sites people are visiting.

The privacy issue would still exist. They can tie your online activity directly to these tokens.

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