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.
Lol what is going on over there. The UK is becoming more dystopian by the day.
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.
You don’t get it. They will just force VPNs to black list sites. Business users will happily do it because they don’t care about porn anyway. Any VPN which doesn’t enforce UK laws will be blocked at the ISP level.
I just don’t believe that method will be as successful as you may think.
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?
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Most conventional VPNs, e.g. OpenVPN, WireGuard, AnyConnect, PPTP/L2TP, IKEv2/IPsec, etc., actually don’t work in China. Technology-wise GFW is quite sophisticated and conventional VPNs are not designed for censorship circumvention anyway.
You’ll have to use things like Shadowsocks or V2Ray, which is out of the reach of most people.
The Great Firewall doesn’t block by protocol. If you set up your own OpenVPN server, you can still connect to it. I’ve done this many times in my trips to China, and it’s worked fine. That being said, they still do seem to throttle connections to international servers, though this happens to all servers, even those that are not blocked. There are many clandestine VPN operators in China who spin up their own VPN servers and sell the service. They are mostly OpenVPN-based.
My university used Cisco AnyConnect, and I was able to successfully connect to the university VPN servers as well.
The limited experimentation I have conducted seems to indicate that the Great Firewall blocks by IP and not by protocol.
And how do they update that IP list? Manually? If you set up your own overseas server, it’s gonna be ok for a few days for sure. But they update the block list automatically so people had to e.g. use CloudFlare websocket as a jump host to avoid switching providers every other month. Of cos CF is mostly blocked these days too so it’s probably just easier to offload the work to those VPN operators you mentioned.
Universities are a different matter. They use Edu network and there used to be no censorship at all in Edu IPv6. Nowadays it’s still relatively easy for them to get exemptions for their labs and whatnot.
I don’t know how they update their IP list. My university is an American university which I believe has no ties to China, but I can’t say for sure. According to friends who use the clandestine OpenVPN services, they pay about 20 CNY a month and every month they are issued a new OVPN configuration file. Only occasionally do their servers get blocked before this, and then they have to issue new config files to everyone.
As for myself, I have been to China two times using the OpenVPN server that I deployed on a US-based VPS I rented from a German hosting provider. Each trip lasted about one month. So far, the IP has not been blocked. The government’s philosophy regarding the firewall and VPNs seems to be “make it as annoying as possible for the average uninformed layperson to bypass and go after people selling illegal VPNs, but otherwise, we don’t give a shit”. I do not sell access to my VPN to anyone else. It is strictly for my own use.
Both times I was there, the firewall didn’t apply to cellular data because they do not apply the firewall to holders of foreign SIM cards using their cellular service. I purchased a SIM from a Hong Kong carrier (SoSim) with a few gigabytes of data in both Hong Kong and mainland China for 100 HKD. The firewall doesn’t apply within Hong Kong. It worked fine, though I do note that surveillance laws meant that I had to upload my passport to activate the service. I’m not a big fan of that, so I kept the VPN connected at all times, though normally-blocked websites did indeed work on cellular data even without the VPN. I checked on my cell phone’s settings, and I know it connects to China Mobile towers when in mainland China. Note that China Mobile is owned by the Chinese state.
I also confirmed that it doesn’t apply the firewall when I have my T-Mobile (my US cell carrier) SIM in there. My carrier provides unlimited worldwide roaming at 2G speeds but I can confirm that it also connects to China Mobile towers and I could successfully access Wikipedia, a blocked site, without the VPN.
The more you try to stop them, the better their business gets, heh.
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.
Labour has already spoken out and said they will make no attempts to ban VPNs.
I doubt their corpo overlords would allow a VPN ban considering the amount of companies that use them.
It would be trivial for them to write it so it bans it for citizen use but is allowed for corporate and government use. The people have no rights anymore
This makes me feel like they were in a bind here. The so called “online safety bill” was a tory concoction that took years to pass through the courts because of how invasive it is and how anyone could easily bypass it.
If labour want to stop it, they’ll be accused of not wanting to protect children.
Whatever anyone thinks of labour, I’d ask people to ask themselves, if you were in that position, what option do they have other than to let it play out as the spectacular failure it was always going to be and making sure everyone knows who’s fault that was afterwards?
No. They could put it into a review and quietly shitcan this. It’s not particularly popular. They just want to say they’re protecting kids.
They’re spineless and Keir is an authoritarian.
“Oh, i see. You want to help paedophiles do you? Why do you hate children then, hey? Of course keef comes out to help the Jimmy Savile brigade again.”
Congratulations, you just lost the media narrative and now all but one paper is going to write about how all the things that hurt every child in the UK is your fault, for the next 3 years. The whole system is compromised and they’re passengers, only a little more engaged than we are.
Not really the narrative. Reform opposes it and Tories likely will. Only Lib Dems will complain and media ignore them anyway.
Our media are bad, but not that tabloid.
Why would the tories oppose thier own bill?
I don’t think you’re fully aware of all the factors here.
Because they’ve always railed against the nanny state. Kemi is a dreadful populist. It isn’t popular.
You’re simply making excuses for Keir and anyone that disagrees doesn’t understand. Copium.
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
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.
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.
Bonus points if you can route your personal VPN server through your VPN provider, the flow looks a little like this:
Client <—> Personal VPN server <—> VPN Provider
What if we all started using I2P for most stuff? The governments couldn’t do anything about it.
Good idea, for sure.
labour really doesn’t want people to access lgbtq safe spaces and resources huh?
China 1.5
I though the UK was a Western democracy. What the hell are you guys doing over there?
Lol. Democracy.
Democracies don’t care about their citizens privacy. Just the optics of getting spied on citizens.
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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.
100% Brexit quickly shut up similar movements when people saw how badly it went
Now if only Trumpism would have shut down extremist right wing idiology globally.
Trumpism is still in progress, maybe…
It should have died when he tried to coup the US government after he lost the 2020 election.
Alberta seems to have missed that memo.
Damn Alberta; always trying to leave the EU.
Then, we move to the socks proxy, or tor, or other options I haven’t even considered yet.
I am pretty sure they would consider tor as using a VPN.
Probably they would demand ISPs to run lists of known VPN addresses and if you connect to them, they will forward the information to the anti-terrorism unit and you will get SWATed.
If Russia, China, and Iran cannot stop tor usage, there’s no way the UK can do it.
I believe China can stop any kind of access at any time, they just choose to allow a certain percentage of folks to get through above a certain bar of sophistication and need.
Don’t the people in those countries use a proxy to access tor first? probably that means cycling through the proxies regularly as they become known. I have no doubt that it is impossible to prevent truly tech savvy people from access. Also Russia, Iran and China all run state sanctioned hackers, so the governments have a vested interest in allowing these groups to obscure where they are coming from.
But i am not sure how much that transpires to a broader public.
That’s what things like snowflake and bridges are for. Because, at least with snowflake, it just looks like a webRTC phone call. But it’s actually tor traffic. And snowflake proxies are ephemeral, since you can just run them in your browser and help anyone connect.
Their next strategy will be to keep a list of websites that are “government approved”, I’m afraid. Long live the Great UK Firewall!!
go back?
This kinda proves that it was never about the children. How many children have know how and the means to buy a VPN subscription?
Still an important part. Free VPNs that spy on you are a thing, but work
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One of the rare ones
A lot more than you know, I knew how to use it since middle school.
And if they don’t know they will use Reddit to find out how to access the sites:
https://reddit.adminforge.de/r/teenagers/comments/tv70x0/do_yall_know_a_good_vpn/?
Don’t underestimate kids.
All it takes is one big brother/sister that knows how to access a free or paid VPN and their 5 year old little sibling and all their friends will have it also. Despite the difficulty teaching them math or history, they DO learn very quickly and are fast to figure out new things that interest them.
Do you know what’s smarter and more talented the the UK government?
14, 402, 544 kids…
Were you never a child? I formatted my family pc and reinstalled windows xp in 5th grade, and used a proxy to circumvent the schools online filter in 7th grade.
Children are not as stupid as you seem to think
VPNs also accept many anonymous payment methods that happen to be easily accessible to children, like gift cards. And free VPNs exist
Where there is a will there is a way, I guess.
Still, a possible ban on VPNs affects way bigger group of business and adult users than the number of tech savvy kids.
Where should the line be drawn? How much rights should everyone have to give up so that little techie Billy can’t hack his way to see some titties?
I started using a VPN after my friends/classmates told me about them in my Sophomore year of HS, mostly to get around the Wifi banning us from accessing certain apps (social media). Now, like all the other dumb kids, I used whatever they recommended, which was some shitty “Free” VPN that was probably stalking my data. But by Senior year, I smartened up and learned about online privacy and got myself a Proton VPN subscription after using the free version for a bit.
So yeah, I could totally believe middle-school and up are using VPNs, cause that’s what we literally did.
