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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

#891

Post by vidarh »

wonderwonder wrote: post #870
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.

This is absolutely going to lead to the black mail of people in both the private and public sector. Ruling parties are going to have access to this information and will use it to force votes. Intelligence agencies will do the same. On top of that its only a matter of time before you get a Tea app style leak where this data was simply not secured. Forcing people to identify themselves before engaging in their sexual p…

Not just blackmail, but also harvesting of ID.

They are normalising people being asked by potentially shady sites to subject to identification procedures, after all.

If I was inclined to sell such information illegally, I'd set up a bunch of honeypots and "verify" users and just hoard the data to sell.

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

#892

Post by reliabilityguy »

wongarsu wrote: post #837
reliabilityguy wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Leaks of what? The tea app are morons — they literally stored the data! Why did they do it? Why not to delete immediately after verification?

Anyway, there are two questions here:

1. Do we need to verify the age of internet users?

2. How can we do it without sacrificing privacy of everyone involved?

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

#893

Post by BoxOfRain »

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…

Interestingly while it'd be daft to call them Christian Nationalist the Labour Party does owe a lot of its early philosophy to various religious groups descended from the English Dissenters. This is also true for many groups that'd fall under the Christian Nationalist label in the US, even though their politics are very different.

Of course this just shows the English Dissenters ended up being quite influential on both the left and right over the course of Anglophone history.

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

#894

Post by reliabilityguy »

TZubiri wrote: post #862
reliabilityguy wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The only property of the implementation necessary for sextortion to happen is that it will be imperfect, at least once. Which is guaranteed.

It seems to me that your argument is: if the system can make mistakes, it should not exist.

However, no systems are fault free. Whether we are talking about computing systems, mechanical systems, or societal ones.

Sometimes police can arrest an innocent person before they realize the mistake and release them.

Should we stop policing completely? Or maybe the right question to ask is “how do we minimize the chance for police to make mistakes?”. Note, these are two separate issues:

1. Do we need the police at all?

2. How do we make police to not arrest innocent people all the time?

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

#895

Post by saulpw »

kristianc wrote: post #852
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…

> Of course, this is all rife for abuse. Of course, there are immense downsides. Yet the downsides of leaving an endless stream of propaganda, disinformation spewed at everyone including our youth, unchecked, is far far greater. Or we could, you know, trust people to exercise their critical faculties without the intervention of overbearing Civil Servants, Cabinet Office officials or the guiding hand of the BBC. Radic…

We tried that, and it turns out you can't trust people to exercise their critical faculties. Haven't you been paying attention?

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

#896

Post by CaptainFever »

cooper_ganglia wrote: post #888
lemoncookiechip wrote: post #752

I've posted this before: We shouldn't need Age Verification checks for adults in the first place. Create a better, standardized, open-source parental control tool that is installed by default on all types of device that can connect to the web. The internet aspect of the parental control should be a "Per Whitelist" system rather than Blacklisting. The parents should be the ones to decide which domains are Whitelisted…

> Also, I'm for teenagers (not little children) having access to pornography. Anyone who supports literal children of any age viewing pornography needs their hard drives checked immediately .

Then you deserve all the censorship that comes your way. Treat others like you wish to be treated.

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

#897

Post by donmcronald »

TZubiri wrote: post #855

Here's a consequence few consider: Malicious actors are now harder to distinguish than legitimate actors, since they both will use VPNs. This is because in essence what VPNs are used for is always to evade the law, regardless of whether it is a law with high approval, like CASM, malware, spamming, drug trade; or laws with high approval for breaking them, like pornography age verification laws, or Intellectual Propert…

The next law will make it illegal to accept traffic from VPNs. They’re letting VPNs exist for now so people think they have a simple bypass. They’ll close that off as soon as the onerous laws pass.

It’s already done a bit voluntarily. Try to use a VPN and pay for something with a prepaid credit card. Try to make a Steam account. Etc.

Get ready for a verified ID that’s required to access anything online because that’s the end goal.

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

#898

Post by wonderwonder »

vidarh wrote: post #891
wonderwonder wrote: post #870

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely going to lead to the black mail of people in both the private and public sector. Ruling parties are going to have access to this information and will use it to force votes. Intelligence agencies will do the same. On top of that its only a matter of time before you get a Tea app style leak where this data was simply not secured. Forcing people to identify themselves before engaging in their sexual p…

Not just blackmail, but also harvesting of ID. They are normalising people being asked by potentially shady sites to subject to identification procedures, after all. If I was inclined to sell such information illegally, I'd set up a bunch of honeypots and "verify" users and just hoard the data to sell.

plus once they have your id, what is to stop them from just using it for themselves whenever they want to join a site? It allows them to access all manner of heinous things using your name and likeness. If a crime occurs how much money is it going to cost to clear your name if you are even able to?

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

#899

Post by swinglock »

benreesman wrote: post #831

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 thi…

They will block your tunnel. If you attempt to hide it you will be jailed once found out. Working encryption will be illegal.

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

#900

Post by rhubarbtree »

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…

> I think the "true motives" are what the law says.

Oh yeah? How's that anti-terrorist legislation working out?

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