Technology

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.

Lol what is going on over there. The UK is becoming more dystopian by the day.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Just to fast-forward this dumb cat-and-mouse thing, the next step is people go back to torrenting their porn and deeper down the rabbit hole of garbage "free" websites skirting the rules.

As always, the UK is useful on the international stage because sometimes you need to be able to point at some idiot trying dumb stuff to explain to people why dumb stuff is dumb.

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.

This kinda proves that it was never about the children. How many children have know how and the means to buy a VPN subscription?

"Hey! Stop using well known workarounds to my idiot demands! Surely this is brand new technology that no one could have known about!"

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.

It would have been smarter for the UK to mandate that every ISP must provide a family filter for free as part of their service. Something that is optional and can be turned on or off by the account holder but allows parents to set filters (and curfews) if they want. They could even require that ISPs require new signups to affirm if they want it on or off by default so people with families are more likely to start with it enabled.

This ends with just another war on encryption.

When encryption is legal, they can't know what is going on between two points. They going to make is so we can only have encryption to nodes they trust?

It is dangerously technologically illiterate to wage war on encryption.

But they can't seem to muster up the "political" will to tax the rich

"Safety" meanwhile these same mp's can't budget can't run critical public services like bloody hospitals.

But don't worry, your thoughts and activity are policed.

Democratic failure to prioritise and run a country at its finest on display for the world to see. The waste is astounding.

for those in the UK and/or Other places in Europe just know it's so painfully easy to either set up your own VPN or just use something like Mullvad.

I set up my own VPN this morning for the first time on my server and it took less than 10minutes. plenty of guides online on how to do it.

I love watching politicians try to understand the internet.

VPNs have loads of vanilla use cases.

It would be infinitely more productive to regulate the predatory practices of stream providers and reduce the incentive for piracy.

the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems

The government: Parents have you tried being a parent to your children?

Parents: Oh lord no that's too difficult can't you just, I don't know lol, ban it or something?

They can come and pry TOR from my cold dead hands lmfao

this law can eat shit. i ain't gonna dox myself and feed my personal info to companies. maybe they should take this as a hint that most people care about their privacy

if you don't want kids seeing NSFW stuff be an actual parent and don't raise your kids on the internet??

Damn. Labor really wants to lose that election to Farage. Good luck to Corbyn and Sultana, I guess.

Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives

Best of luck with that, idiots. How are you planning to tell the difference between my personal VPN and my work VPN?

just do what the chinese do to get around thier great wall. use proxies and anti-detect browsers, its the next step after VPN.. you might want to look around how to set these up.

Maybe if they see significant issues with the populace adhereing to this law they should identify the solution of revoking the unpopular law.

This online safety bill is dishonest. This has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with money.

after reports in Guido Fawkes suggested it was possible.

That's the only source? A far-right conspiracy website?