Prominent backbench MP Sarah Champion launched a campaign against VPNs previously, saying: “My new clause 54 would require the Secretary of State to publish, within six months of the Bill’s passage, a report on the effect of VPN use on Ofcom’s ability to enforce the requirements under clause 112.
"If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems.” And the Labour Party said there were “gaps” in the bill that needed to be amended.
Funny how its always so important to ban useful and empowering things for citizens in the name of safety but someone we can’t ban business practices that cause mass extinctions, change the climate, impoverish the working class or kill enough of us to only be seen as a statistic instead of people. If they actually cared about safety, they would be banning the things that cause mass suffering and death, not VPNs. We should be opposed to these kinds of bans on the principle that it further disempowered us so we are less able to deal with the threats of all the mass suffering and death that they refuse to keep us safe from.
Yeah, businesses will not accept this. Remote work and remote connections rely on VPN for ALL KINDS OF SHIT. If you must adhere to some kinds of government compliance, it is even MANDATED BY THE FUCKING GOVERNMENT. Explain to me how the hell that is going to just poof and not cause all kinds of problems.
Individual customer VPN providers get banned, corporate VPN providers not banned. It’s quite simple really.
Or are you expecting the average Joe to spin up his own VPN server?
And how do you expect that to work on a technical level?
Lol what is going on over there. The UK is becoming more dystopian by the day.
People are “at risk”… of what? What a terrible article to not even clarify what the risk is. Because it sounds to me like the government is who put those people at risk by making them go look for solutions to a draconian policy.
To me it looks like every government in the world is pro-surveillance and anti-privacy; they’re just all at different stages of depth into those ideologies done in practice. Privacy and anti-surveillance against foreign governments and corporations, pro for domestic. And I continue decade after decade to say that you should fear your domestic government far more than any foreign unless you’re a country that may have US and allies bombing/droning and paratrooping your country. Countries with a modern enough military mostly have to worry about their own government rather than foreign governments
To me it looks like every government in the world is pro-surveillance and anti-privacy; they’re just all at different stages of depth into those ideologies done in practice.
Because they are all fuckin crooked and all want to keep their power.
If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems
Your law is the difficult problem you daft cunt
this is obviously such a dumpster fire that I can’t help but wonder, “When will they realize how dumb this is and back out of it?”
then i remember that Brexit happened
fuckin stubbornness is a national identity for you blokes innit
We didn’t have a referendum on this though, and if we had done I don’t think it would have passed
Same was said during Brexit.
We very much did have a referendum on brexit though
What I meant was during the Brexit referendum most people were saying it wouldn’t pass. In other words, if there was a referendum for this it probably WOULD pass since it’s really easy to influence people through media.
I get what you mean, for it to be comparable I think we’d need a “should there be legislation to protect kids on the Internet” referendum and then this is the implementation and everyone hates it…
Don’t forget the raging alcoholism
Even the CCP can’t stop VPNs… good luck UK
Labour has already spoken out and said they will make no attempts to ban VPNs.
The linked story has been updated. The headline now reads:
Labour rules out VPN ban in UK but issues warning to UK households
Labour won’t ban the use of Virtual Private Networks
And the story begins:
Labour has ruled out a possible VPN ban after reports thousands of UK households were at risk following the Online Safety Act kicking in under the government. Labour Party Tech Secretary Peter Kyle has revealed that the Government is “not considering a VPN ban” - after reports in Guido Fawkes suggested it was possible.
You cant ban vpns, its easy for tech people to set up a vpn server on any server on the internet and connect to it. Wireguard for example, super simple.
Oh, sweet summer child. Of course you can ban them. Lawmakers don’t always care about the technicality of things, because in most cases they don’t have to.
You can’t prevent VPN from existing, and short of a very tightly curated whitelist of services, you can’t prevent people from actually using them, sure. Unless you’re on the side of the state, the Law, and the enforcement. In which case, you can. A blanket ban on VPN usage is the perfect gateway to “we’ve seen traffic from your house toward a known VPN server, so, blam, arrest”. And it does not have to stop at known server.
Given the regular tries to outright ban encryption, this is the perfect venue to mass target encrypted communications. Depending on the wording, the mere presence of unobservable traffic could be enough for an arrest.
If what I’m saying here sound dystopian to you, just remember that not only most of this was actually tried (and aborted) time after time, but also that until quite recently, the general public actually using strong encryption was illegal in many places, including our western countries, and experiments to make state spyware mandatory are also a recurrent thing (which might take hold with the “ID verification through your phone” apps soon).
Thanks for this. I think it’s really important to point out that merely having unobservable traffic could be a trigger for this.
We can’t avoid taking these threats seriously because we think we are smarter.
We arent smarter. Actually most people here have no voice or influence outside of their computer screen.
We can use some tech, sure. But I very much challenge the idea that we are smarter as a group than other university students.
But since a lot of us have poor social skills, we compensate by thinking we are smarter or better, when we should instead train our social skills and stop thinking like that.
I agree, but I think it is a trap we can easily fall into. Especially in this case.
Yeah I agree. We have to wake up a bit. Real change happens outside of this place.
yup just did it this morning on my server because now I’m moving my stuff, yet again, away from European companies because of all this. it was painfully simple and easy. I just followed a guide I found on a linux blog and within 10minutes I had a VPN of my own up and running.
How is this even feasible? People need them for work, business, school etc. The UK is going nuts with the attempts to regulate the internet.
“Stop defending yourself, and let me hit you” vibes.
If they outlaw VPNs then all internet-connected businesses will flee and everyone will just move to the dark net. Then you’ve got a whole other problem.
These ancient tyrants are in over their heads.
“Hey! Stop using well known workarounds to my idiot demands! Surely this is brand new technology that no one could have known about!”
