Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'

birminghammail.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 400 posts

Re: VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'

#201

Post by umvi »

Symbiote wrote: post #114
crims0n wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is really disheartening to see the sentiment around privacy erode like this. Fifteen or even ten years ago this would have been unanimously and vehemently opposed, but now it is somehow up for debate?

There has been 15 more years of highly motivated psychologists tuning their social media systems to create addiction, time for those who've grown up through this to become adults, foreign interference with democracy etc. Though I think banning it for children is the wrong approach. Ban the addictive and dangerous features for everyone, adults included — no more infinite scroll, and no more feeds showing content from…

Ban infinite scroll? Sounds like a slippery slope and also hard to enforce. I don't even know how you would craft such a law.

Re: VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'

#202

Post by basisword »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #89

In Russia, they claimed that new measures to block websites are necessary to protect the children online. Of course, they immediately used these new capabilities to block opposition websites and sources critical of the government. Now, seeing many European governments tirelessly push for these new measures to protect the children , I'm pretty sure that the children are finally going to be safe online.

It's easy to blame the governments in this - and some of their decisions are idiotic - but most of the blame should go on the tech companies. The fact they think "our ToS says you have to be over 13" or a popup asking "are you over 18" is sufficient while they make billions is a disgrace. They're the reason the governments are sinking to these levels. It's not like they haven't been given every opportunity to do the sensible thing over decades.

Re: VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'

#203

Post by gspr »

joe463369 wrote: post #192
shakna wrote: post #9

Every corporate I know of, uses VPNs. Especially when workers connect from home. Is the UK government really interested in going up against the majority of their business partners...?

There is nothing in this article that suggests the UK government are planning to ban VPNs.

There is lots in the article that suggests they want to ban them for minors though. How the hell is that supposed to work without at a minimum a severe curtailment of VPNs in general?

So no, not a ban for all. A ban for minors, and a severe curtailment in general. The parent post might not be 100% accurate, but it's close.

Re: VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'

#204

Post by drdexebtjl »

pigpop wrote: post #198
Symbiote wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has been 15 more years of highly motivated psychologists tuning their social media systems to create addiction, time for those who've grown up through this to become adults, foreign interference with democracy etc. Though I think banning it for children is the wrong approach. Ban the addictive and dangerous features for everyone, adults included — no more infinite scroll, and no more feeds showing content from…

> no more feeds showing content from outside social connections So, kill all news agencies and reporters I guess? or would there be a carve out for incumbents so they can cement their market share? who controls the approval list?

News agencies don’t do personalized curation. Every reader, at least from the same city, gets exactly the same content.

Re: VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'

#205

Post by basisword »

delfinom wrote: post #115
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #89

In Russia, they claimed that new measures to block websites are necessary to protect the children online. Of course, they immediately used these new capabilities to block opposition websites and sources critical of the government. Now, seeing many European governments tirelessly push for these new measures to protect the children , I'm pretty sure that the children are finally going to be safe online.

Non-nationalist parties that have been in power in Europe for so long are shitting their pants at the growing rise of nationalist parties and are absolutely planning to censor the shit out of them. I'm not even taking a side here and what they are trying to do is obvious.

How is that happening? In the UK fringe nationalist parties are typically given as much airtime on main stream media as the governing parties. They've also setup their own 'news' stations to further spread propaganda. Any notion that they're being censored in the UK is ludicrous. They're pandered to.

Re: VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'

#206

Post by maccard »

big85 wrote: post #123

Most VPN companies won't implement age verification, because their purpose is privacy. This is really an attempt to ban VPNs. This won't be popular when 70% of the population uses VPNs.

> Most VPN companies won't implement age verification, because their purpose is privacy.

They will when it's law. Their purpose is most likely either snake oil, or bypassing geo restricctions on netflix or sports.

Re: VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'

#207

Post by basisword »

kouteiheika wrote: post #5

> the main thing that we've done is we've commissioned additional research on this because I've not been happy with the evidence. Ah, yes, the existing research doesn't agree with our biases, so let's fund new "research" that does.

Nothing new unfortunately [0]. Happy to trust the science as long as it suits them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt#Dismissal

Re: VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'

#208

Post by basisword »

4ndrewl wrote: post #70

Some context - Birmingham Mail is one of dozens of clickbait-driven publications owned by Reach plc. They're not a high quality source of news - they've more than decimated their journalism staff and replaced them with 'content' staff who are performance monitored on the number of clicks their articles generate. Content is syndicated in different accents across their range of papers from the national papers, The Mirr…

Yeah I've seen similar stories a few times this week and it's always one of the dodgy regional media sites. Shame it's getting so much traction here.

Re: VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'

#209

Post by poilcn »

bjackman wrote: post #109
iLoveOncall wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On mobile VPN isn't always effective in avoid geoblocks. Some apps are able to determine I'm in the UK and still ask for ID - reddit is one for example, if you stumble on to an adult subreddit. I've never had this issue (using Private Internet Access on iOS).

I'm a Brit living abroad, when I visit the UK I use a Tailscale network with an exit node at my home, and yeah this always seems to work for me. Going the other way around to try and watch British TV I used to find with a normal hosted VPN services could still figure out I wasn't in the country, but now I have a Tailscale exit node at my mum's place in the UK it always works fine. So I suspect it all comes down to th…

Apps can read sim card info. Its country and whether the card is currently in roaming, you can't full them that way

You would need to get your sim card out of your phone and use wifi or buy one of them foreign esim

For vpns I actually found that websites that block vpns for some reasons are worse at detecting commercial vpns than when you deploy your own on vps

---

Also I forgot about other things. When my phone for some unknown reason had its region set as GB, I had British ads in YouTube music

Re: VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'

#210

Post by dmantis »

_el3m3n7 wrote: post #190
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #89

In Russia, they claimed that new measures to block websites are necessary to protect the children online. Of course, they immediately used these new capabilities to block opposition websites and sources critical of the government. Now, seeing many European governments tirelessly push for these new measures to protect the children , I'm pretty sure that the children are finally going to be safe online.

If you are talking about the recent blockades of VPNs, the Russians made it pretty clear that they did not want western information sources inside the country. I am not sure it was ever in the guise of protecting the children

The first law about building technical and legal infrastructure to enable website blocking in Russia in 2012 was passed under the name of children protection. Everything else is an addition.

People from duma (the russian parlament) also publicly stated it would never use it for anything but children protection.

Post reply on HN