Comment by jmclnx 2 days ago
>If Ofcom doesn't think this will be enough to prevent significant harm, it can even ask that ISPs be ordered to block UK access.
Well again I guess the UK never heard of VPNs, but they are trying to ban them still, it is like these pols have no clue how the internet works. They never learn these actions are like playing wack-a-mole.
> it doesn't believe VPNs should be outlawed
That still leaves space for a lot of unpleasant, but plausible, alternatives:
* Banning under-18s from using VPNs; enforced by ordering Visa+Mastercard to deny UK-originating payments to VPN operators that don't verify their users' identity.
* Introducing a "VPN license"; initially only granted to large corporate users. All encrypted VPN traffic will be required to periodically broadcast their VPN license-number in cleartext so that ISP-based traffic monitoring will let it pass, otherwise the connection will be reset.
I’m curious about what the plan is to differentiate between legitimate business use and personal use of any kind. Age verification obviously won’t work for self-hosted, so does age verification then get pushed to VPS providers? And at that point, so what? I’m already paying with legitimate bank details for legitimate personal use.
do you think the public at large knows what VPS are? How to set up a VPN? the public at large barely understands the concept of files nowadays, if it's not app they're lost
banning selling VPN and VPN apps will solve 90% of the problem and that's enough
>do you think the public at large knows what VPS are? How to set up a VPN?
Do you think the general public NEEDS to know those things right now? Because that's what actually mostly drives what people put in the time to learn. This smug elitist "everyone is dumb except me the tech wizard" sort of comment shows up every such thread and it's deeply irksome. Most people are plenty intelligent and can easily learn things as trivial as setting up a VPN. For most that would just amount to "sign up for one of many turnkey services, install this app, scan this QR code" or even more commonly "ask one of the kids or techie person in circle of friends/neighbors to take care of it". All sorts of people working in a vast array of businesses use VPNs all the frickin' time, it's no big deal.
But there are endless such things in our lives and only so much time, so most people very reasonably triage and only put effort into things they enjoy personally or things they are forced to care about due to being important. Up until now, most people haven't needed to care in their personal lives, because they're satisfied enough with the fairly open internet experience we've had. If that changes, and it matters to them, the tools exist to easily deal with it and people will easily learn it.
The public at large has no idea what IPTV was or how to set it up. Now Barry down the street is watching his footy through it all weekend cause his mate knows someone selling a box for 20 quid, and Barry does know how to plug in a USB cable.
The public doesn't need to know how it works behind the scenes to use it. It just needs to be packaged in a way so that they don't need to know. Which it will.
people using VPNs to circumvent banned or restricted content
It doesn't matter if naive blocking means can be trivially circumvented. This creates a chilling effect, less technically proficient people will just move to other sites. When circumvention becomes an offence, now government has one more point of leverage over you - they manufacture law under which almost everyone is guilty.
They need bridges.
I think the question we should be asking is "What about SSHing into a VPS?" and "What about seedboxes".
You can disguise a VPS as any server outside of your country, it could serve up an HTTPS page and no one snooping the connection would be any wiser.
Related: https://snowflake.torproject.org/
Help run a Snowflake proxy! You can do it from your browser.
VPNs are next: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn438z3ejxyo