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UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill
(www.birminghammail.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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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.
It does feel that way. UK bureaucracy is just one giant guinea pig stunting it's own commonwealth.
Next someone will try enforcing paper umbrellas as a solution for climate action. We'll all say, "That won't work". They'll still do it; it won't work. We'll say, "We told you so", and it won't get reversed because they're already aiming at the next foot to shoot.
He tries his best...
There has to be a logical next step for the information age. Old school government is not fucking working, and we can all see it.
The fact that there aren't large scale riots already is astounding.
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.
I’m uninformed. What’s the reason for the porn ID thing? Is it just porn or more?
You know the old saying... The politicians don't want children to be able to recognize a cunt.
Surveillance due to paranoia due to all the shady shit they're doing.
Neoliberal political class implementing fascist surveillance capitalism laws — masquerading as child protection — because they are owned by a fascist oligarchy.
It's never about the children, it's an excuse for surveillance capitalism.
If data is collected that can be used for blackmail, it will eventially be used for that purpose.
Christian evangelists at the root of it all. 'nuff said.
Must protect the children
It's probably true that a few anti-porn people exist somewhere in the world. It's certainly true that fascists love adding in new tools to keep the general population from using the internet freely.
So the answer to your question is yes, and yes.
It also general censorship they are applying it to some political content as well.
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?