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.
“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.
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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.
(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…
i don’t trust a hair on Farage’s little head lol
Lol what is going on over there. The UK is becoming more dystopian by the day.
Nanny state
You’re literally being Jimmy Salvile right now
~ Guy who posed for photo ops with Salvile twenty years ago
Omg my brother amd I went to see Rolf Harris when we were kids and he invited my brother onto the stage. So woerd to think of now 😕
Best of luck with that, idiots. How are you planning to tell the difference between my personal VPN and my work VPN?
Next step: ban on remote work.
It’s not just remote work. All our manufacturing sites use to VPN connections data centres. It would cripple manufacturing on an epic scale if they were instabanned.
They wouldn’t consider such rational things
Either just banning remote work or more realistically you’ll need a permit for running a vpn server. Permit pricing starting at 100k a year
How many small businesses can afford such permit? Hell, I’d argue that even bigger companies will have a problem paying for that.
Also, what if I just connect to a vps overseas and set my exit point there? Will they ban vps too? This is gonna be so much fun to see from the outside
How many small businesses can afford such permit? Hell, I’d argue that even bigger companies will have a problem paying for that.
Feature, not a bug.
They want people back in offices to help landlords and property prices. This way they can say that remote work is not banned and it’s just companies choosing not to buy a permit and offer it.
I work from office and i regularly use a vpn at work to connect remotely to devices that are not physically with me. Not to talk about companies that provide remote assistance and use them to connect to their customers devices.
Remote work is just a byproduct of vpns, but not the real reason why you use them at work.
You think given how well thought through this online safety act has been that they’ll understand that would be an issue and legislate accordingly?
VPN ban risks pushback from their billionaire masters. Multinational corporations don’t want to deal with anything that could hurt profits.
Absolutely not, of course. I’m just hoping they try to enforce this so a shitstorm of proportions only seen in the brexit will ensue.
One thing we must acknowledge to these idiots is how much effort they put on showing the world the consequences of extremely stupid acts so the rest don’t have to do it.
how much effort they put on showing the world the consequences of extremely stupid acts so the rest don’t have to do it.
Kinda sucks to be the world’s policy alpha tester though.
yes everything will be banned and binned. better dust off that carrier pigeon
What about the VPN I have to my home?
Well we just fire you, and the one you’re still using then must be your personal one!
He means, how is the government supposed to tell the difference between personal and work vpns.
he just answered your question. maybe read it again
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.
Isn’t this currently what Russia is trying to do with their internet?
It’s something russia has been doing for a decade and got pretty good at.
A long term blanket vpn ban is not compatible with a modern digital infrastructure, but with certain protocols (openvpn, wireguard) they can detect their usage and filter them out when necessary.
It does require a lot of expensive DPI (deep packet inspection) hardware I’m not sure UK has, so building a Great Firewall of Britain (Hadrian’s Firewall?) will take some time.
Just to add that Hadrian’s Firewall used to exist/does exist, I think. It was located in BT’s main POP in Newcastle.
All good names are taken :<
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?
Possible? Yes. Probable? No. LTE would work wonderfully for such usecase, but the firmware to it is never shared. Wifi would work theoretically, but the distance would get in a way. Bandwidth would go down all the way to a rounding error.
Could limited bandwidth perhaps be transmitted via ham radios?
IP over ham radio is a thing, so yes. Wouldn’t be very fast mind you.
I love watching politicians try to understand the internet.
VPNs have loads of vanilla use cases.
It would be infinitely more productive to regulate the predatory practices of stream providers and reduce the incentive for piracy.
You cant ban vpns, its easy for tech people to set up a vpn server on any server on the internet and connect to it. Wireguard for example, super simple.
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”.
“Hey! Stop using well known workarounds to my idiot demands! Surely this is brand new technology that no one could have known about!”
Kinda hoping MPs don’t read anything here. But, hopefully they omit socks/http proxies from whatever ban they impose…
"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
