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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

#871

Post by hollerith »

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.

It wouldn't be the first time: when the Parliamentarians gained control over England in the English Civil War, large number of Cavaliers fled to the American colonies.

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

#872

Post by narrator »

Veliladon wrote: post #765

This is one of the times where law is outrunning technology. Apple and Google are both working on anonymous attestation but they're pulling the trigger before it's ready. But that's not what laws like these are about. In the US at least these laws are driven by Christian Nationalists are setting up a situation where PII of porn users is able to be leaked. That's what they're counting on. They also want to have politi…

Christian nationalists have properly been identified by James Lindsay and others as the "woke right." They deserve that title because they think, like the woke left, that their needs to be some vanguard with unlimited power to "fix" society, and that the constitution, separation of powers and objective justice and meritocracy need to be done away with. Of course as soon as they gain power, all the white christian people who supported them get sent to die in a stupid war in a trench somewhere. That's the big joke with communist/fascist revolutions. Their supporters all think they will have a special place in the government after the revolution, but most of them wind up dead in a trench(Hitler) or doing hard labor in primitive conditions in the countryside(Mao), or purged (Stalin).

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

#873

Post by ToucanLoucan »

bgwalter wrote: post #832
b112 wrote: post #805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I mean, yes and. I'm sure that social media of all stripes is rife with funded propaganda. It's been proven several times. It helps them tremendously that to tear the United States and other western powers to shreds, all you have to do is point at the facts on the ground. Our governments are completely in the pocket of corporations and barely if at all represent any actual people's will, the only people's will they express interest in being directly traceable to various hate campaigns they themselves concoct (fucking with transpeople, fucking with sex workers, etc.) while the rest of the country has the copper pried out of the walls by these low-rent grifters.

I don't need China to tell me via Tiktok that my life is getting demonstrably worse. I know that. The fact that China gets to tell me and be completely honest whilst doing so isn't something they've "engineered," they're just pointing at reality.

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

#874

Post by Ensorceled »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #828
Ensorceled wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's up to the people who WANT age verification to ensure that it can't be abused rather than up to US to prevent it from being abused after the fact. Invoking the "slippery slope" fallacy when the country with the greatest military in the world is abusing public records to grab people off the street and out of court rooms is an interesting choice.

I don't follow the argument. Why isn't it up to the people who want strict privacy to ensure that it can't be abused by porn providers?

"We're passing a law that gives the porn provider industry a bunch of PII that could be abused, it's up to YOU to make sure porn provider's don't do anything unethical with that data."

How do you not follow the argument that there are problems with this?

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

#876

Post by xp84 »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #406
h3half wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone totally uninformed, are you saying that all those YouTube ads about e.g. Private Internet Access (et al), which specifically cite getting around geo restrictions in the ad copy , are BS? Which sounds like a silly question ("of course the marketing is BS") but why even bother marketing if the core value proposition of your billed-monthly service doesn't work? Seems like a waste of money since you'll at most…

> As someone totally uninformed, are you saying that all those YouTube ads about e.g. Private Internet Access (et al), which specifically cite getting around geo restrictions in the ad copy, are BS? Yep, they are all lying to you, but with a wiggle room for a workaround or to point the blame at Netflix. Once you get in, you'll notice that Netflix, Prime Video, Steam, some of YouTube, and pretty much any legitimate se…

This hasn’t been my experience at all. I use one of the big VPN services advertised on YouTube sponsorships (but not one of the ones you named) and watch Netflix Canada through it all the time. I’ve also been able to use iPlayer.

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

#877

Post by lblissett »

palmfacehn wrote: post #786
Veliladon wrote: post #765

This is one of the times where law is outrunning technology. Apple and Google are both working on anonymous attestation but they're pulling the trigger before it's ready. But that's not what laws like these are about. In the US at least these laws are driven by Christian Nationalists are setting up a situation where PII of porn users is able to be leaked. That's what they're counting on. They also want to have politi…

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…

Worth noting that this bill was introduced in 2021 and passed in 2023 under the previous Conservative governments, all of which were fairly libertarian/anti-state at least in their rhetorical positioning.

I mean arguably, Labour could have repealed it or could have decided to disown it and discourage implementation, but the terrible design of the legislation is pretty much entirely the responsibility of the last government.

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

#878

Post by captainbland »

exasperaited wrote: post #853
captainbland wrote: post #850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strictly speaking the law was passed under the conservatives, albeit in collaboration with Labour (it's bi-partisan). But I would agree that the drive is more authoritarian and it just uses moralistic arguments to shame people into siding with it. The law could mandate that retail device OSs ship with a turnkey child safe mode complete with app and extensive site whitelists and run an educational campaign on the subj…

It has broad public support. The law was passed in 2023 by the tories, and Ofcom has concluded what the tories asked them to do -- write the statutory instruments that implement the law. The Labour government would have to repeal the law (really unlikely; governments don't usually rip down their predecessors' laws because if they did no progress would occur) or set the statutory instruments aside. I think the "true m…

The problem to me is this thing is full of holes. It basically just sets up ID checks but it can only do that on accountable websites who self select to do so. It can't stop people sharing extreme content on WhatsApp groups for example which are one of the modes of communication increasing in popularity the fastest.

As it happens I am from the UK and have no particular love for the way the US handles things either. In fact one of my biggest problems is that it encourages us to send extra PII to some of the most odiously associated US companies out there.

But in general I don't think doggedly pursuing this route where children get access to the full internet sans some self-selecting sites with ID checks is the way to go. There's too much out there which is outside the realms of accountability. If everyone installs VPNs (which appears to be what's going on, especially given that far more than just pornography is being blocked this way) then guess what happens when the child borrows the shared family device?

People want a magical solution which exonerates caregivers from having to worry about this and shifts the burden elsewhere but unfortunately one doesn't exist and the online safety act certainly isn't it. Education and turnkey child proofing of devices are the only thing that will really help.

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

#879

Post by ujkhsjkdhf234 »

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.

The motivation is the same, power and control, but you need to run a slightly different playbook in different countries. In US, Republicans have been having Christianity as a front for decades.

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

#880

Post by xp84 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #326
h3half wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone totally uninformed, are you saying that all those YouTube ads about e.g. Private Internet Access (et al), which specifically cite getting around geo restrictions in the ad copy , are BS? Which sounds like a silly question ("of course the marketing is BS") but why even bother marketing if the core value proposition of your billed-monthly service doesn't work? Seems like a waste of money since you'll at most…

Streaming services don't have any incentive to ban traffic from non-residential addresses right now. But they might with enough legislative pressure.

True! They only need to make a show of trying their best, in order to appease grumpy copyright holders. I don’t think I’d pay for Netflix anymore if I could only watch the pathetic US catalog, and there are surely many others like me. And Netflix knows that.
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