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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

#831

Post by benreesman »

This seems like a hard fight to win against determined network engineers without OFAC-level co-encorcement around spending money abroad.

I rent servers in Hong Kong, Switzerland, Tokyo, and many other places, and route tunnels among them all, and this is just mundane aboveboard stuff, many of the providers happily accept PayPal and crypto as well as CC and wire. I haven't even tried to design a system for evading this sort of thing, I can only imagine the ceiling is pretty high: QUIC and shit are increasingly the default.

I oppose this on principle, very much oppose it. I'm merely noting that until they're willing to start licensing the right to spend money abroad, they're going to have a tough time outlawing VPNs with any effect.

Maybe this pushes everyone to switch to Tor all at once: fucking with people's porno is a pretty quick way to move things around in the App Store ranking.

It would serve em right if this backfired massively by getting everyone to go cypherpunk by default.

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

#832

Post by bgwalter »

b112 wrote: post #805
palmfacehn wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree with the "Christian Nationalist" characterization. https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2025/07/29/nigel-farage-taki... >"Nigel Farage ‘on the side of predators’ with Online Safety Act criticism, says Labour" Is the UK's Labour Party now Christian Nationalist? The end goal here is digital ID and censorship. Compare this to the perennial efforts for encryption backdoors. If there is a characterization th…

The elephant in the room, is 'foreign actor'. All of our platforms are inundated by an overwhelming amount of well crafted, targeted (specific per person) campaigns of disinformation by foreign actors. China, Russia, Iran, and others cannot even remotely hope to stand against the West. Yet if you cannot stand against your adversary, you must weaken them. You promote infighting. You take minor issues which can be coop…

The opposition in the West does not come from foreign propaganda but from sky-high house prices, sky-high education and health insurance costs and dropping living standards.

All of which is the fault of the establishment parties and not of foreign actors.

Even Trump now continues or, in the Middle East, exceeds the existing long term neocon policies. So the foreign online propaganda, which does exist, is completely overrated.

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

#833

Post by pc86 »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #795
reedf1 wrote: post #759

Phishing for material for sextortion has never been more trivial. The implementation of this is going to lead to mass fraud. Walk into parliament, ask who is willing to go to jail in defense of the act if and when the first lot of randy pensioners are bankrupted, or kid commits suicide out of shame - and if no one raises their hand, repeal it.

It seems that your argument is more about the way the verification is implemented and not about the idea of verification by itself.

The idea that you should verify your legal identity to load a website is reprehensible and not something that should be treated seriously. It should be ridiculed like the authoritarian nonsense it is.

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

#834

Post by wongarsu »

fedeb95 wrote: post #797

Until you really restrict the net, it's just a matter of building new software that can't be the target of those laws by design. If you restrict the net, there's no inter-net.

Especially since different countries/cultures have very different sentiments on most topics. For example Western Europe and the US mostly agree that minors should be protected against alcohol, drugs, pornography and excessive violence, but the thresholds are wildly different.

Europeans like to joke about the Americans being fine with gratouitious violence in kids movies as long as there's no blood, but a single female nipple immediately makes it R rated. Now consider that even France and England have different nuances on what is considered acceptable. If you extend beyond Western culture it becomes even more diverse. In some of the more religious Muslim countries a women shaking her full head of hair might be seen as erotic content. A lot of Japanese anime skirts very close to sexualizing children (from a Western perspective).

If every country became serious about enforcing age verification for their value system you could post barely any image or video content without marking it as age restricted for some jurisdiction. And the lines wouldn't neatly follow communities but you really would need a judgement for each piece of content. That's obviously not going to happen, so you will always have people from one place visiting communities in places that are more lax on one specific measure they are interested in.

And that's assuming all software and platform operators want to follow the restrictions, despite the obvious profit motive of not doing so. Restricting the supply isn't completely useless, but also provides huge incentives for those able to meet demand

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

#835

Post by palmfacehn »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #818
JohnFen wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the commenter said "in the US".

I guess I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that Americans who want age verification laws have some entirely different motivation than people in other countries who want age verification laws.

I'm more interested in the motives of those who would utilize the fear of pron or other taboos to advance this agenda. The coalitions reacting with fear are less interesting.

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

#837

Post by wongarsu »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #795
reedf1 wrote: post #759

Phishing for material for sextortion has never been more trivial. The implementation of this is going to lead to mass fraud. Walk into parliament, ask who is willing to go to jail in defense of the act if and when the first lot of randy pensioners are bankrupted, or kid commits suicide out of shame - and if no one raises their hand, repeal it.

It seems that your argument is more about the way the verification is implemented and not about the idea of verification by itself.

Yes, in a perfect world the downsides are limited. But in the world we live in I predict a lot more leaks similar to the Tea app hack (which contained a lot of passports, linked to some quite private data from chats like medical documents)

The biggest hope I see is that the EU also wants to implement age restrictions, but with a lot more effort to get it right and make it compatible with a strong desire for privacy. Maybe that will make "proper" implementations easy and common enough that many of the downsides will be mitigated

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

#838

Post by rdudek »

pc86 wrote: post #820
isaacremuant wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screw anonymous attestation. We don't need to be controlled at every frigging second by people who are time and time again proven to be corrupt and working for their own interests. *Oh, I just received this thousands in gifts but it doesn't affect my decisions". The only thing to do is denounce every bit of bullshit and not try and "find a way to make it work". Just stand for freedom for once instead of bending the k…

The UK is an increasingly authoritarian nightmare. The US should start a refugee program for UK citizens who understand what freedom actually means and want to live in a free country again.

What makes you think it's any better here in the US? There is a worldwide rise toward nationalism/authoritarianism.

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

#839

Post by DaSHacka »

msie wrote: post #701
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…

Who said good riddance? Maybe they thought good riddance to racist privileged white people.

> Who said good riddance?

Sounds like you...

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

#840

Post by wongarsu »

ethagnawl wrote: post #807
izzydata wrote: post #772

It sounds like it is time to create a new internet and not invite these people. I wonder how difficult it would be to create an entirely new internet infrastructure that doesn't rely on anything that currently exists and doesn't or can't connect to the existing network.

It'd seem that local mesh nets with some sort of satellite relay/backbone would facilitate this. That's just moving the goalposts to a certain extent, though. If a system like this came to be and they weren't happy about it, you'd have to figure out a covert way to get satellites up and keep them there.

If wifi meshnets were actually popular and not just some enthusiast thing that's mostly used for better free wifi you could reasonable route around network-side blocks. Most of the content might move through some kind of high-capacity backbone, but anything blocked on the backbone could still find its way through the mesh. At least in places with high enough population density that linking across cities and villages with just wifi or other low-cost methods is viable (Germany and surroundings come to mind as the obvious example)
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