5 ms·

Won't everyone just use a VPN?

by lwhi 3y ago

wlkr 3y ago
There have been proposed amendments deliberately targeting the use of VPNs. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vpns-online-safety-bill-labour-champion-b2239810.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vpns-online-s...
- kmlx 3y ago
  by the opposition none the less.
  - andrepd 3y ago
    """opposition""" at this point.
    - cassianoleal 3y ago
      Indeed. Keir Starmer's Labour is hardly any opposition at all.
      - lwhi 3y ago
        To be totally fair, it does look like his Labour party will be the next gov.
        cassianoleal 3y ago
        I do kind of expect that to be true as well. That said, it won't be much of a change, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
acdha 3y ago
VPNs aren’t a solution to this class of problem unless the same government restricting content chooses not to enforce its policies. Their traffic is trivially detectable so you’re basically putting up a sign declaring your intention to violate local laws and as a sovereign state they can pressure businesses to enforce regulations by banning VPN clients which won’t geolocate to the country level. The only solutions for this are political.
- Zak 3y ago
  That depends on whether they're serious about enforcement, or just trying to appear to be doing something for political points. I suspect this is the latter.
  - acdha 3y ago
    True, but would you want to bet your personal future on that always being the case? It's not exactly unprecedented for laws to be selectively enforced or some change in leadership leading to previously unenforced laws being taken far more seriously.
- cassianoleal 3y ago
  Apologies if I'm being daft but I'm having a hard time parsing your comment. What do you mean by: "you’re basically putting up a sign declaring your intention to violate local laws" and "banning VPN clients which won’t geolocate to the country level" ? Are you saying that using any kind of VPN for any purpose at all would mean you'd get flagged as having intention to violate the law? And what does it mean for a VPN client to geolocate to the country level?
  - acdha 3y ago
    > Are you saying that using any kind of VPN for any purpose at all would mean you'd get flagged as having intention to violate the law? And what does it mean for a VPN client to geolocate to the country level? My argument would be that it _could_ be seen that way, and you're gambling either that it won't be or that you'd be able to convince the authorities that your usage was entirely legitimate. If your VPN connection terminates at a major corporate office in the same country, that's going to be a lot easier than if you're connecting to a public VPN service which doesn't follow local laws. It's nowhere near certain that they'd go after you but basically I'd be hesitant to recommend to anyone that they leave a public track record of using something which could be viewed as a circumvention tool because you don't always know in advance when changes in leadership mean that some previously unused law will be zealously enforced or creatively reinterpreted – we're seeing that in the United States where things like a doctor's office having a Facebook button is now a problem in that it allows a conservative prosecutor to subpoena Facebook's records for anyone in their jurisdiction looking for birth control. > And what does it mean for a VPN client to geolocate to the country level? Say I'm running a VPN service. Even if I'm in a different country, the UK government can come to me and say that my service will be blocked unless I buy IPs on a UK network and ensure that any client request originating from a UK network has their traffic routed through those IPs, and they'll audit that my company follows all applicable legal requirements for logging, identity validation, etc. Anyone running a legitimate business is faced with the choice of to either cooperating or not serving UK clients, and most are going to set up those dedicated ranges if they haven't already for other reasons such as geofenced content, and having a business presence means it's easy for further requirements to be attached in the future. Everyone else is basically playing a dangerous game of getting blocked and/or attracting more attention as the percentage of VPN traffic by law-abiding users goes down. Each level of difficulty is going to mean that more people drop out – privacy benefits constantly being weighed against performance/stability – so it'll be easier for VPNs to be portrayed as law-evasion technology, especially if people try to bypass ISP-level blocks by tunneling their traffic since a judge is going to be told that you would only do that if you knew you were violating laws. This is why I was trying to push the solutions as political: yes, not everything turns into China overnight but there's a long-running attitude in technical circles that this kind of thing can be solved with technical measures and that's only true in societies which value privacy and the rule of law. This century has more examples contradicting “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it” than supporting it.

Won't everyone just use a VPN?

by lwhi 3y ago

Won't everyone just use a VPN?

wlkr 3y ago

There have been proposed amendments deliberately targeting the use of VPNs. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vpns-online-safety-bill-labour-champion-b2239810.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vpns-online-s...

kmlx 3y ago
by the opposition none the less.
- andrepd 3y ago
  """opposition""" at this point.
  - cassianoleal 3y ago
    Indeed. Keir Starmer's Labour is hardly any opposition at all.
    - lwhi 3y ago
      To be totally fair, it does look like his Labour party will be the next gov.
      - cassianoleal 3y ago
        I do kind of expect that to be true as well. That said, it won't be much of a change, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

acdha 3y ago

VPNs aren’t a solution to this class of problem unless the same government restricting content chooses not to enforce its policies. Their traffic is trivially detectable so you’re basically putting up a sign declaring your intention to violate local laws and as a sovereign state they can pressure businesses to enforce regulations by banning VPN clients which won’t geolocate to the country level. The only solutions for this are political.

Zak 3y ago
That depends on whether they're serious about enforcement, or just trying to appear to be doing something for political points. I suspect this is the latter.
- acdha 3y ago
  True, but would you want to bet your personal future on that always being the case? It's not exactly unprecedented for laws to be selectively enforced or some change in leadership leading to previously unenforced laws being taken far more seriously.
cassianoleal 3y ago
Apologies if I'm being daft but I'm having a hard time parsing your comment. What do you mean by: "you’re basically putting up a sign declaring your intention to violate local laws" and "banning VPN clients which won’t geolocate to the country level" ? Are you saying that using any kind of VPN for any purpose at all would mean you'd get flagged as having intention to violate the law? And what does it mean for a VPN client to geolocate to the country level?
- acdha 3y ago
  > Are you saying that using any kind of VPN for any purpose at all would mean you'd get flagged as having intention to violate the law? And what does it mean for a VPN client to geolocate to the country level? My argument would be that it _could_ be seen that way, and you're gambling either that it won't be or that you'd be able to convince the authorities that your usage was entirely legitimate. If your VPN connection terminates at a major corporate office in the same country, that's going to be a lot easier than if you're connecting to a public VPN service which doesn't follow local laws. It's nowhere near certain that they'd go after you but basically I'd be hesitant to recommend to anyone that they leave a public track record of using something which could be viewed as a circumvention tool because you don't always know in advance when changes in leadership mean that some previously unused law will be zealously enforced or creatively reinterpreted – we're seeing that in the United States where things like a doctor's office having a Facebook button is now a problem in that it allows a conservative prosecutor to subpoena Facebook's records for anyone in their jurisdiction looking for birth control. > And what does it mean for a VPN client to geolocate to the country level? Say I'm running a VPN service. Even if I'm in a different country, the UK government can come to me and say that my service will be blocked unless I buy IPs on a UK network and ensure that any client request originating from a UK network has their traffic routed through those IPs, and they'll audit that my company follows all applicable legal requirements for logging, identity validation, etc. Anyone running a legitimate business is faced with the choice of to either cooperating or not serving UK clients, and most are going to set up those dedicated ranges if they haven't already for other reasons such as geofenced content, and having a business presence means it's easy for further requirements to be attached in the future. Everyone else is basically playing a dangerous game of getting blocked and/or attracting more attention as the percentage of VPN traffic by law-abiding users goes down. Each level of difficulty is going to mean that more people drop out – privacy benefits constantly being weighed against performance/stability – so it'll be easier for VPNs to be portrayed as law-evasion technology, especially if people try to bypass ISP-level blocks by tunneling their traffic since a judge is going to be told that you would only do that if you knew you were violating laws. This is why I was trying to push the solutions as political: yes, not everything turns into China overnight but there's a long-running attitude in technical circles that this kind of thing can be solved with technical measures and that's only true in societies which value privacy and the rule of law. This century has more examples contradicting “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it” than supporting it.