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.
But they can’t seem to muster up the “political” will to tax the rich
Someone should start a bussiness near the border of Republic of Ireland and get two antennas pointed at each other across the border, with the RoI side having connected to the free internet, then the UK Northern Ireland side connected to the Intra-net. You pay a “Club Membership Fee” to get access to the proxy network.
Its not a VPN, its a Nerd Techie Club, just with a free proxy service as part of the club membership 😉
Gonna end up with a country-wide rogue WiFi mesh network setup that’s fed from neighboring countries haha
It’s it possible to turn our phones into Intranet nodes and have some connect to the uncensored Internet?
This online safety bill is dishonest. This has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with money.
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.
Selfishly, I think this is great for I2P/Snowflake/Tor. The incoming legitimate traffic helps to protect its most vulnerable users.
Honest question but what makes you think that would happen? Do most businesses use VPNs?
VPNs are one of the core security measures of all large companies.
VPNs aren’t just a “hide your IP” tool, they’re a way of giving someone access to an organisation’s internal network. Sensitive servers such as databases, wikis, scheduling tools etc don’t have publicly exposed IPs, they only have connections that are accessible from inside that VPN. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_(computing)
I have never worked for a company that didn’t utilize VPNs.
Damn near every business uses VPN technology. They literally cannot exist in the modern world without it. It would be incredibly expensive and impractical to do without.
I work in consulting. I have a VPN for my company and also for each client
I have no less than 7 VPNs installed on my work laptop, and I work for one single company.
The UK has long championed writing legislative checks that their emaciated state infrastructure can’t cash.
If they do outlaw it will likely be banned solely for non-business use for this reason alone.
If only I could start my own business….
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??
“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.
it’s both hilarious and sad how this is coming from a “please think of the children!!” perspective meanwhile gender affirming care for trans kids got banned pretty recently
We call this a waste of tax payer’s money.
This bill has nothing to do with safety. Safety is just the scapegoat here.
"If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems.”
When I was a kid, Reddit and general public Internet access weren’t things, but I sure managed to get my hands on pornography. I’m pretty confident that even entirely killing Internet access isn’t going to stop kids who want to get ahold of porn from getting ahold of it.
Kids will be out there studying for their ham radio licenses to setup wireless long range packet networks and bbs’s just to exchange porn lol
Nanny state
You’re literally being Jimmy Salvile right now
~ Guy who posed for photo ops with Salvile twenty years ago
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.
The problem is that content filters don’t work all that well in the age of https everywhere. I mean, you can block the pornhub.com domain, that’s fairly straightforward … but what about reddit.com which has porn content but also legitimately non-porn content. Or closer to home: any lemmy instance.
I think it would be better if politicians stopped pearl clutching and realized that porn perhaps isn’t the worst problem in the world. Tiktok and influencer brainrot, incel and manosphere stuff, rage baiting social media, etc. are all much worse things for the psyche of young people, and they’re doing exactly jack shit about that.
The problem is that they’re not trying to protect kids. They’re trying to be like China where every user has to identify themselves so they can be tracked across the internet.
The new Christian nationalist orders are not so patient. Even Charles X of France rolled back rights too speedily, sparking public outcry resulting in Parisian haircuts. (a bit off the top 🪟🔪)
SCOTUS used to be sneakier, carving out sections of fourth- and fifth-amendment protections, but since Dobbs the Federalist Society Six have tossed subtlety and reason to the wind and now adjudicate away rights based on vibe and conservative rhetoric grievance.
Hopefully the US and UK both will recognize why the French public was swift to act when manarchists took shears to the Napoleonic Code.
Lots of ridiculous-looking people in politics today. They could use some haircuts.
Crazy because every (isp provided) router I have used has these options. They probably aren’t 100% correct all the time, but it would be good enough for children (even though you shouldn’t rely soley on filters to replace watching your kid).
Exactly. This was turned on on my professional phone so that was always an option.
China Laughs Communistically
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
those two people who downvoted you can go eat a big bag of dicks.
Holy shit that is brilliant…
Enterprises will love that. A perfect excuse to end wfh. However, this will cripple business travelers. I’m sure there’ll be some exception for corporations where they can exercise maximum control over their employees while still being allowed to generate capital.
Hey UK: suck it.
They couldn’t switch off VPNs for businesses. I work in a hospital and we use VPNs to create secure tunnels to other third party health care companies as well as NHS adjacent health services amongst other things. This is to protect patient sensitive data amongst other things. This would cripple our service and go against NHS england and government requirements for the secure transfer and sharing of data.
This would have to be public VPNs only. Despite the fact that it would be complete bullshit either way.
Exactly. The best they could hope to do would be to create an exemption for businesses in which case I open my own fapping business.
and now you have to pay lost of business taxes even if you don’t have any income
I shall pay my debt in crusty socks.
Unless things have changed massively in the UK in the last 5 years or so, in my actual experience you don’t unless you make a profit.
The yearly baseline costs of opening and operating a Limited company in the UK are pretty low (less than £100 if I remember it correctly).
Ive got a few UK coworkers that will be out of the job if anything disables VPNs. They voted for that mess now they can sleep in their 1/3 salary local jobs too.
A VPN is just a proxy. I don’t see how this would be enforced.
An encrypted proxy. Thats a pretty hefty distinction.
Damn. Labor really wants to lose that election to Farage. Good luck to Corbyn and Sultana, I guess.
Farage: Gets elected.
Everyone: At least you’ll abolish the OSA!
Farage: Nah, I said that because it would make me popular. Amma use the OSA to ban things I consider “woke”.
Most authoritarian option there is.
And Farage would say doing it is “Common Sense”.
(NOTE: Any links to politician tweets in this comment are from Nitter mirrors, not direct links to Elon Musk’s nazi bar.)
The Technology Secretary, Peter Kyle, pretty much called Nigel Farage a paedophile in a news network interview earlier today because he opposed the Online Safety Act, by saying he’s on the side of sex offenders like Jimmy Savile.
He then went to Twitter and doubled-down on this stance:
If you want to overturn the Online Safety Act you are on the side of predators. It is as simple as that.
This of course generated a lot of fury among the site’s users.
For context, the Online Safety Act has been used to censor and age-gate anything and everything deemed “illegal content” under Ofcom guidelines. Any social media platforms must comply, else risk getting fined up to 10% of your annual global revenue. This is so broadly worded that it includes anything related to illegal immigration and people-smuggling (literally quoted in the GOV.UK page I linked.)
Twitter had genuinely been forced to censor all coverage around anti-asylum seeker protests behind age verification requirements, which has riled up a lot of right-wing politicians here. The reason for these protests is that the previous (Conservative) government had been paying exorbitant amounts of money to house asylum seekers in hotels, effectively lining the pockets of hotel chain executives - all while we deal with a massive housing and cost of living crisis.
This was meant to be a measure to give asylum seekers temporary accommodation which was put in place at the start of COVID, but has been government policy since 2020 with no end in sight.
Labour have also done jack-shit to resolve our skyrocketed (legal) immigration levels since they got into power, except for scrapping the Rwanda Deal which would have deported any illegal migrants to a third country for processing (which as the name obviously suggests, is the East African state of Rwanda.)
Zia Yusuf (head of Reform’s DOGE division, yes they’re ripping off Trump and Elon Musk) had this to say about the OSA on Twitter:
Britain is now a country which you can enter illegally without ID, but need photo ID to watch a protest against people entering without ID.
Let that sink in.
Labour have fucked up so catastrophically hard with how they’ve handled this legislation, that they’ve straight-up generated bipartisan sympathy for the leaders of a right-wing populist party - who are the only political force that have vowed to repeal the legislation because it is being used for mass surveillance and censorship.
Also, if you’re thinking of voting Reform UK in 2029 (and it has honestly crossed my mind because age verification checks are a major sticking point for me), then you should take the pledges from Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf with a grain of salt. Richard Tice (the party’s deputy leader) openly tweeted support for pushing through mandatory ID checks on social media four years ago.
If Labour don’t get rid of Keir Starmer, do a full cabinet reshuffle and reverse course, we are going to see a Reform landslide in the next election…
