You’ll need to have some plausible amount of non-ssh traffic otherwise your account will be automatically re-assigned as an Enterprise Infrastructure Account. It will be temporarily suspended while you apply for a license.
EIAs are £452.17/month (a statutory amount originally defined in The Online Safety Act’s 2027 update, subject to triple-lock inflation), licensed, and subject to inspection. There’s a four month waiting list for licensing due to backlogs at the local County Court.
The alternative is therefore to use up a strike and apply to have the account repurposed back to a Citizen User Account. CUAs must remain below a 50:1 down/up ratio and must have p90 non-https “control” traffic of 48kbps or less. They are expensive too but you get a 25% discount if you install your ISP’s mobileconfig / MDM profile though. With the profile discount the price is now only £64.99 a month.
(This assumes you run an Approved Platform capable of mobile device management. Anything else — Linux based, old versions of macOS, Windows <= 13 etc. — has to pay the full price and CUAs are limited to one Custom Access device per connection.)
You can get it down to £49.99 a month if you sign up for a 12-month trial of their home security system — cameras, door “e-locks”, that sort of thing. The devices are locked down but you can see the last 48h of events on their cloud portal. The devices have tamper detectors and the traffic is encrypted e2e but luckily that doesn’t count towards your CUA agreement’s limits on opaque traffic.
You forgot about the Internet Tunnelling Tax.
* does not apply to pensioners
Well that is ridiculous.
..but sadly within the margin of ridiculousness for our government's approach to the internet.
Good luck having the general public using SSH connections to route their traffic. You’re not a hermit (or you wouldn’t be on HN). You live in a society and what affects your peers and their behaviours also influences your life.
If a VPN ban happens, I (a US citizen) and others will happily provide your people with easy to understand plain English circumvention instructions and tools, designed for the “regular Joe”, regularly adapting to whatever the latest conditions are. Maybe SSH based, maybe a VPN over SSL, maybe Tor, most likely some combination designed to evade detection.
If your society is anti freedom of information, your society deserves a spanking.
You should look at your own society before criticising others. Your own US states are already implementing age-verification laws, your own government is attacking its own citizens and foreigners, you’re know for mass surveillance of your own citizens (the name Snowden ring a bell?) and others (which is exactly why other countries are avoiding US companies), and your government is hiding inconvenient files (Epstein) and ordering the erasure of scientific information (climate change). You’re not the bastion of freedom you believe you are, and you’re definitely not one to school others on “freedom of information”.
I have the capacity to fight for freedom of information both at home and abroad, and yes there is urgent need in both places.
My primary complaint with the UK and EU right now is that they have been attempting to restrict US freedom of information, versus say China who doesn’t make an effort overseas. Not only are the UK and EU exerting pressure against US companies to change their global policies, but especially in the case of the UK, they are attempting to change the legal framework governing the internet by claiming that sites are somehow subject to UK law unless they proactively block the UK. All this on top of long time EU/UK participation in shady “counter-misinformation” efforts that have spun up a web of state-funded NGOs who attempt to influence US policy against freedom of information. So yeah, I’m pissed at your countries in particular.