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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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Will the next step be banning VPS then? Because that's what will happen: if you ban VPNs (good luck with that lol), people will just connect to a VPS in a less stupid country and exit from there.
I hope they start looking at TOR too, that should be really fun.
Well, if you connect to your own VPS, you're still "illegally" using a VPN if they ban them. Yeah, you enter a world of how they will enforce it. But, it's not dodging the law to make your own VPN on a VPS.
Sure, but how do you confirm that I'm using it as a vpn and not as a real server to run my own apps (for example a cloud storage or a media server)?
Oh right, you just ban VPS as a whole too, because why not, right?
And next thing, since we are at it, we should ban encrypted traffic because who knows what are you doing with your encrypted communications! Fuck HTTPS! Think of the children!!!
And the worst thing is that I can completely see them doing it.
But that's true of any law. They need to prove you broke the law. I doubt they will ban VPS'. They might ban private use of VPN's and they will occasionally convict someone of it, to keep the fear level up. Just like most hard-to-prove laws.
The thing is, if they're able to monitor traffic, then they can easily isolate "likely" VPN traffic. HTTPS will almost always be on 443 and to a variety of sites. If suddenly you have a metric ton of encrypted traffic going to a single host and your traffic going to other hosts also drops accordingly. You've got a very likely use of VPN.
Now, yes to prove it they'd need to get search warrants and the like. Which is why I think enforcement will be one of those things they make a big noise about when they do. Just to keep normal people scared to do the thing.
Just like IPTV use, normal piracy, and this kind of thing.
What if the VPS' start offering no-logs policies so it's impossible to know anything about the traffic and encryption so they don't even know whose that traffic?
This is gonna be an arms race and I don't doubt of the stupidity of the politicians. The brexit showed us how dumb they can be.
No. I fully expect them to monitor the traffic from the UK. And search warrant your premises. People using VPNs are most likely going to have evidence (the keys for the VPN and ways to start it up) on the machines, in their house that they could seize. They don't need to touch your VPS.
Like I say, it'll be a rarity. It's too much work to go after people wholesale for this and the manpower to get the hard evidence it prohibitive. But, they will make a few examples.
For court purposes (and they will be careful to keep these cases in magistrate courts unless there's solid evidence of more crimes found), there will be enough evidence to show the changing traffic patterns and the proof of a working method of accessing sites from another jurisdiction present on the machines found in the user's possession. More than enough for well trained magistrates to convict.
But look, this is IF they try to route of banning VPNs too. It's just the ranting of one or two MPs right now.