UK government targets VPNs in new online safety consultation as Lords vote for ban

Comments

• IanTwenty@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Parliament itself recommends VPN use for its members:

  Labour’s Lord Knight acknowledged that VPNs could “undermine the child safety gains of the Online Safety Act” but warned that age-gating the apps could be “extremely problematic”. He said:

  “My phone uses a VPN, following a personal device cyber consultation offered by this Parliament. VPNs can make us more secure, and we should not rush to deprive children of that safety.”

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  • loops@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    You’re right. Parliament also has a bar where they serve alcohol.

    They’re not banning VPNs. They’re attempting to limit use to adults.

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    • IanTwenty@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I know, I’m also highlighting what he says about how we should not rush to deny that protection to children.

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• YesButActuallyMaybe@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Someone eli5 please: how are they gonna know I’m using a vpn if I use port 80 or 443?

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  • deadcream@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    You think UK would be the first country to ban VPNs? There are thousands of talented and very committed computer scientists in authoritarian countries tirelessly working to enforce internet censorship. They discovered many wonderful technical solutions to this problem.

    All the mainstream VPN protocols like OpenVPN and Wireguard don’t even try to hide themselves and are easily detected no matter what port you use. They are useless if you country is seriously set to block VPNs.

    There are different protocols specifically designed to circumvent censorship and they do so by masking their traffic to like something innocuous like HTTPS. However even they can be detected using advanced traffic analysis. For example, if a given machine only sends and receives HTTPS traffic to a single specific overseas server, it is safe to assume that it’s not actually a genuine website traffic but a VPN masquerading as HTTPS.

    There is special hardware that all users’ traffic goes through that detects these patterns and automatically throttles/blocks these connections.

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    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      What if you were playing a browser game for hours? Wouldn’t that also be HTTPS traffic to the same server all the time?

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    • floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Some P2P routing solution seems to be needed, along the lines of Tor or i2p.

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  • floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Presumably they’d learn the IP addresses the VPN providers are using and watch for connections to those.

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  • Flax_vert@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    China manages to figure it out using deep packet inspection.

    Funnily enough, they don’t fully ban them. Just randomly cut them off to inconvenience the user.

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  • Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Most of them do that too a degree anyway. Credit cards are only available to over 18s, so if you pay with one of those, that’s your ID. I guess this is mostly for free VPNs (although I’ve never found one that was any good) and people paying with debit cards or crypto.

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    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      A lot of people in the UK don’t have credit cards. Debit cards are fine and kids have those too. Dont Mullvad accept cash?

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• Infernal_pizza@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Isn’t this part of the same amendment that will make government spyware mandatory on all devices? So does that mean that part passed as well?

  page 20

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  • floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Is Linux about to become illegal in the UK? It certainly seems to make GrapheneOS and all other privacy-preserving phone OSs illegal.

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    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I wonder if we can get around that. Tamper proof in software? So device comes with Windows and you can’t uninstall their crap It’s tamper proof! But you can just remove Windows.

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• danielquinn@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I will never get used to the comfort Britons appear to have with surveillance. I guess it’s time to set up a Wireguard instance of my own in the Netherlands to proxy everything through.

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  • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    It’s not like we have a choice

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  • FishFace@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    But id cards, which might actually be useful, are unthinkable!

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    • loops@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      The British will never ever ever accept ID cards.

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    • Paddzr@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Are they tho? anti ULEZ was driven hard due to cameras invading privacy. At least in the circles I’ve seen.

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• homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Goddamn, UK.

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