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.

Oh, sweet summer child. Of course you can ban them. Lawmakers don't always care about the technicality of things, because in most cases they don't have to.

You can't prevent VPN from existing, and short of a very tightly curated whitelist of services, you can't prevent people from actually using them, sure. Unless you're on the side of the state, the Law, and the enforcement. In which case, you can. A blanket ban on VPN usage is the perfect gateway to "we've seen traffic from your house toward a known VPN server, so, blam, arrest". And it does not have to stop at known server.

Given the regular tries to outright ban encryption, this is the perfect venue to mass target encrypted communications. Depending on the wording, the mere presence of unobservable traffic could be enough for an arrest.

If what I'm saying here sound dystopian to you, just remember that not only most of this was actually tried (and aborted) time after time, but also that until quite recently, the general public actually using strong encryption was illegal in many places, including our western countries, and experiments to make state spyware mandatory are also a recurrent thing (which might take hold with the "ID verification through your phone" apps soon).

I don't think it's even possible to get rid of VPNs without outright banning encryption. If I set up a VPN that uses an obscure port and the traffic is encrypted, how are they going to know it's even a VPN?

I doubt their corpo overlords would allow a VPN ban considering the amount of companies that use them.

Thanks for this. I think it's really important to point out that merely having unobservable traffic could be a trigger for this.

We can't avoid taking these threats seriously because we think we are smarter.

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.

We arent smarter. Actually most people here have no voice or influence outside of their computer screen.

We can use some tech, sure. But I very much challenge the idea that we are smarter as a group than other university students.

But since a lot of us have poor social skills, we compensate by thinking we are smarter or better, when we should instead train our social skills and stop thinking like that.

I agree, but I think it is a trap we can easily fall into. Especially in this case.

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.

You're literally being Jimmy Salvile right now

~ Guy who posed for photo ops with Salvile twenty years ago

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.

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

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.

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.

That's a problem is for ISPs and content providers to figure out. I don't see why the government has to care other than laying out the ground rules - you must offer and implement a parental filter for people who want it for free as part of your service. If ISPs have to do deep packet inspection and proxy certs for protected devices / accounts then that's what they'll have to do.

As far as the government is concerned it's not their problem. They've said what should happen and providing the choice without being assholes to people over 18 who are exercising their rights to use the internet as they see fit.

Parents should monitor what their kids are doing not the government

While I agree wholeheartedly with this, it's often not that easy.

Back in the days of 28.8 modems my parents found my little bro's downloaded porn stash. It was in a Zip disk in his underwear drawer. They then locked down both of our AOL accounts so we couldn't see that stuff.

I thought this was bullshit because I kept my Zip disk full of porn next to all the other ones and labeled it "Homework." Why should I get punished if I didn't get caught?

So I downloaded a keylogger, stole my dad's password, and unlocked my account and continued to download porn.

However, I don't think government regulation would have worked in my case.

That's the other issue, kids will find ways around it they always have when it comes to restrictions.

Tell some kid they get all the porn they want if they figure out fusion power and we’d have it in a fortnight.

Took me about that long to figure out how to boot up silently, resume downloads, and shutdown the pc before my dad woke up for work.

What if we all started using I2P for most stuff? The governments couldn't do anything about it.