Technology

"Stop defending yourself, and let me hit you" vibes.

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.

"Hey! Stop using well known workarounds to my idiot demands! Surely this is brand new technology that no one could have known about!"

I'm looking forward to the next UK election where the headline will be: Labour has lost the election in a landslide that left them with dozens of votes total

Every single person who didn't think this would affect them who watches porn in any capacity is very likely highly pissed off and will continue to be for as long as this draconian bullshit is enabled.

just do what the chinese do to get around thier great wall. use proxies and anti-detect browsers, its the next step after VPN.. you might want to look around how to set these up.

But they can't seem to muster up the "political" will to tax the rich

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 😉

If they outlaw VPNs then all internet-connected businesses will flee and everyone will just move to the dark net. Then you’ve got a whole other problem.

These ancient tyrants are in over their heads.

This online safety bill is dishonest. This has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with money.

They can come and pry TOR from my cold dead hands lmfao

this law can eat shit. i ain't gonna dox myself and feed my personal info to companies. maybe they should take this as a hint that most people care about their privacy

if you don't want kids seeing NSFW stuff be an actual parent and don't raise your kids on the internet??

"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.

"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.

It would have been smarter for the UK to mandate that every ISP must provide a family filter for free as part of their service. Something that is optional and can be turned on or off by the account holder but allows parents to set filters (and curfews) if they want. They could even require that ISPs require new signups to affirm if they want it on or off by default so people with families are more likely to start with it enabled.

Nanny state

Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives

https://use-their-id.com/

Damn. Labor really wants to lose that election to Farage. Good luck to Corbyn and Sultana, I guess.

Enterprises will love that. A perfect excuse to end wfh. However, this will cripple business travelers. I'm sure there'll be some exception for corporations where they can exercise maximum control over their employees while still being allowed to generate capital.

Hey UK: suck it.

(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...