"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."

H.L. Mencken

It is really disheartening to see the sentiment around privacy erode like this. Fifteen or even ten years ago this would have been unanimously and vehemently opposed, but now it is somehow up for debate?

The only (probably) good thing here is that one can at least try to apply Russian experience at circumventing the censorship, where it's currently way more severe, up to the point when entire companies have their workflows disrupted because remote workers can't connect through the VPN (which is blocked). Maybe that will help.

it would be great if they cared as much about the safety of kids in the streets

I also do not believe that this is primarily aimed at ptotecting children. I think the goal is to counteract the bot-farms that spread disinformation, instigate violence, and so on. Which Russia, by the way, pioneered and scaled up to make a material difference in elections in the West. It is a real problem for which no effective solution has been found.

Non-nationalist parties that have been in power in Europe for so long are shitting their pants at the growing rise of nationalist parties and are absolutely planning to censor the shit out of them.

I'm not even taking a side here and what they are trying to do is obvious.

Full context:

> Ms Kendall told Nick Ferrari: “I told MPs yesterday I'm going to come back to the House with a statement on the issue of VPNs in July. There are very strong views on both sides of this. For some people, it is about privacy, and it is the ability to use that is really held strongly by people. And for others, they say they should be banned because kids are using them to get around. And so I— the main thing that we've done is we've commissioned additional research on this because I've not been happy with the evidence."

Sounds like they realize there are two sides and no "clear winning argument" in either direction, that's why the additional research is needed. Sounds a bit more nuanced than what I expected based on your snippet.

Reminds me of the drugs tsar, Dr Nutt, saying that drugs should be legalised/decriminalised. So he got sacked.

Quite often, people in power don’t want to hear the truth, they want to hear their own words/views parroted back to them.

Obviously Labour has been "lobbied" and now have to deliver this for whoever wants this.

It's pathetic how they use sobbing families to push it through, similar tactic like before Iraq invasion.

same players behind the scenes.

Isn't it how it alwasy works?

>The UK is not shy when it comes to invading your privacy or censoring the Internet.

Definitely doesn't shy away from doing it! But one thing I find most irritating is that it seems reluctant to say it proud and loud.

Look at the situation with 4chan and Kiwifarms. They are basically asking to be blocked from the UK and they refuse to. I can't really say why the onus is put on the websites to enact blocks, but my suspicion is the government doesn't like the idea of displaying an official page stating that you are not allowed to see something because the government doesn't want you to.

On the mobile apps can check your SIMs country code. This is how bluesky knows the UK users (they used to use IP, not anymore)

Company like this exist

https://www.geocomply.com/

> On mobile a VPN isn't always effective in avoid geoblocks.

It seems like your VPN setup has a leak, or the real location is obtained otherwise through the operating system (locale setting or GPS).

I would be surprised if your locale leaked on GrapheneOS for example.

> On mobile VPN isn't always effective in avoid geoblocks. Some apps are able to determine I'm in the UK and still ask for ID - reddit is one for example, if you stumble on to an adult subreddit.

I've never had this issue (using Private Internet Access on iOS).

Or they will ask their AI to do that for them, learn very little about the networking stack in the process

I am sure a contract with Palantir to find these miscreants is just around the corner.

Israel will be making kill on this, they will unleash their free VPNs to the young people like they did to Iran. UK national security will be like Suisse cheese

It's never about the technical capability of the tool. This is a mistake technologists keep making. It's about what the average person thinks it does or uses it to do.

> when 70% of the population uses VPNs.

To be honest, unfortunately, I'm not really sure about this one.

Laws don't apply to corporations. It'll only be used to punish individuals.

A lot of corporations use crappy VPN-like MitM services like Zscaler.

It's not about a technical capability to encapsulate packets, it's about whether people use it to bypass censorship or not.

The government use VPNs. The ban will target individual use.

It would not be hard to write laws to restrict one use but not the other. They may be the same tech but the use-cases are quite different.

Better then performing a social experiment on children.

Feel like there ought to be some Sinn Fein backed point to point connection in Belfast that leverages the Good Friday Agreement to get around this.

Hadrian’s Firewall

they can forbid mullvad.

Don't forget about plans to scan phones (in this iteration).

It's actually

1. Ban something

2. People bypass the ban

3. Ban however they're bypassing the ban

4. Goto 2

This isn't something that can be defeated like this. You are right, there will be ways around this. But we also have to be honest: being able to buy "off the shelf", two click VPN solution for 5$ already puts you into "geek" category. Relatively speaking.

If they ban the commercial providers, payment processors will be the first to enforce it. And Google and Apple will throw the 1-Click solutions out of their app store for users from those countries immediately. And with that the topic is effectively dead even for most "geeks". At this point the goal is already pretty much achieved, most people are cutoff and under heavier surveillance. Next comes the group that know what a server is, how to rent one, what OpenVPN or Wireguard are. But many of the most used websites already make your life difficult if your IP is from such a range.

It goes on. At each step you can argue "there is still a way, as long as you got networking with other countries". Absolutely correct, but at each step the group who knows how and is willing to invest the energy shrinks. And the intended goal will likely already be achieved at the mentioned phase 1 above. The fact that some people still find ways isn't really a gotcha in this matter.

And at some point they will criminalize it. Does it matter that they are unlikely to catch you? Is it worth the risk? And if so, what if you catch strays for it from an unrelated matter. Ultimately they will simply target the devs that help build easy solution for the less tech-savy.

One big reason why you want to keep a bunch of nerds tunneling out around anyway is that you keep useful, defusing attitudes like that floating around. Aka "It's not that bad, there are still ways around it, haha, those idiots".

It is technically possible to circumvent the Great Firewall of China, but I think it's fair to say it's been successful in what it set out to achieve.

They know they'll find workarounds, they'll just arrest whoever is involved in the workarounds. Law isn't a computer firewall, it's a loaded weapon.

Oh, they're in motion already. There are other countries that tried to ban VPNs for decades now, that sparked multiple great avenues of development.

It's exciting to think I'll become a dissident like my parents, just because I don't want a slimy, rightwing, greasy friends of Epstein and other known abusers to ID and surveil me.

And then UK residents are going to discover the "power" of government which will require age verification for renting a VPS or VDS or any other kind of cloud infrastructure, tied directly to your passport/ID, because "many families are desperate for this to happen and I listen particularly to bereaved families that say the longer we delay this, the more children are put at risk".

/j or /s

P.S. by the way, is it possible for them to use Hetzner? Don't they need something like credit card?

No. It has laws that websites must follow to serve content in the UK. It’s up to the websites to do the age verification themselves, and the majority use third party ID verification services. Reddit used an American company to do it,

Damnably hard to find local ales. I had to wander for hours last time I was in London to get Fullers.

Where would you go to then? European countries, Australia and American states already have implemented or are keen to implement ID requirements/tracking for websites.

Leaving is not the hard decision. The hard decision is where to go. Do you have any suggestions?

Adblock??

They can have their cookie, I'm deleting it as soon as I close my browser.

That's because the tech industry never made any attempt. It's like you blocked all the good options, now you get the worst one because it's one you can't block.

keep voting for the labour party?

this is the first time in more than a decade that its not tories in charge, and to get there, labour also had to become conservatives

> And they keep voting for the Labor party.

The alternatives are even more power-mad, fundamentally illiberal parties (Reform, Conservatives), equally pearl-clutching ones that will likely continue on the same road as Labour (greens) and unreliable figures that will flip-flop as soon as they are in power (libdems).

What's left? Count Binface, I guess.

UK government has been talking about digital ID for a while now. The existing verification methods are too vulnerable to cheating (fake beards, fake ID, borrow dad's credit card, etc...), so the logical next step is direct government ID numbers. The goal is to link all online activity to a unique identifier to make it easier to punish dissent.

They have it easy, because law enforcement is too scared to act or is just as corrupt.

> You don’t. You can’t. So everyone gets carded.

Exactly. A little at a time. First it's adult sites, because if you need to show ID to buy alcohol, shouldn't you need ID to buy pornography? Once that's accepted, expand the sphere of control to non-adult sites too by redefining everything as 16+.

The end result will be the same. If you face a 10k liability for serving the wrong customer, you end up needing to ID your customers.

If the government isn't going to provide that service you end up with private companies verifying identity and the data security issues that entails.

If you want to shift the responsibility of protecting children away from parents, then you end up in a situation where third parties need to be able to differentiate between a child and an adult. I haven't yet seen a proposal that doesn't entail someone - government or private enterprise - getting access to identifiable information.

Of course, you could have something like a signed certificate, so the identity verifier doesn't see who you are patronizing, and the identity seeking business only gets to see your age, but it still has privacy issues.

> what if we simply said these big companies need to self police and if a child can reach their service they have to pay the child like lets say GBP 10k per instance?

All of these proposals probably sound good to people who think the Venn diagram of sites they use and sites covered by these laws are two separate circles.

They probably sound a lot less good when you realize the law covers site like YouTube. The Australian law (which they said they’re modeling this after) also includes social news sites like Reddit.

If they passed a law like this extending to VPN services then you’d have to hand over your ID to use a VPN.

Usually people realize how bad these proposals are once they realize it might impact their internet use, too.

Or perhaps we should expect parents to take some responsibility for their kids' screen use?

Because they will just withdraw from the jurisdiction rather than bother to implement that, most likely

> big companies need to self police and if a child can reach their service they have to pay the child like lets say GBP 10k per instance?

HIPAA has been super effective this way. As we all know, American companies don’t give two shits about user privacy or even security. But wave the HIPAA flag and everyone starts caring real hard and taking extremely cumbersome steps to comply with patient privacy.

Very simple: Each HIPAA violation comes with a financial penalty for the business and personal penalty for every person involved in the leak. Very effective.

> these big companies need to self police

It's not possible to prevent a person (of any age) from reaching a specific website if they are determined enough. Full stop.