4 ms·

> How many other people have done the same? For your own personal sake, you may be selfishly wishing it’s as few people as possible. Eventually they’ll outlaw

by latexr 11mo ago

> How many other people have done the same? For your own personal sake, you may be selfishly wishing it’s as few people as possible. Eventually they’ll outlaw VPNs too and by then you’ll have little recourse. You can’t hide behind them forever, deeper change is needed.

olalonde 11mo ago
> Eventually they’ll outlaw VPNs too and by then you’ll have little recourse. Even China doesn't quite manage to enforce that.
- latexr 11mo ago
  It’s a mistake to think you need to get everyone perfectly all the time to be effective. Stopping businesses from operating legally and having your population afraid of committing a crime does a lot of work by itself. It’s only techies who think “if I can get around it, it’s not that big of a deal”. As long as you live in a society, how other people behave affects what you can do too.
  - ben_w 11mo ago
    Yes, and more. Even those who are happy to break laws, don't generally do so perfectly. Even nation states' pulling James Bond stunts don't do it perfectly. Imperfect enforcement used to be the default even for petty crimes, before CCTV and finger prints and DNA tests and all the other forensics got cheap. The legal systems don't care if the methods are imperfect… and worse, they don't understand why we do, making it hard to explain to them the consequences of this kind of thing in our domain.
- xzjis 11mo ago
  VPNs can never be completely banned because they're a tool used by businesses (nothing is more important than a business in neoliberal capitalism).
  - zorked 11mo ago
    You can create the concept of a legal VPN (tracking inside the tunnel) and keep that legal, though. Businesses will not mind.
- 3rodents 11mo ago
  The western view of China’s Internet censorship often flies in the face of reality. A lot of people seem to think China has an impenetrable firewall. Bypassing internet restrictions in mainland China is a normal part of life for people who want to access the western internet. China is able to censor the Internet effectively because Chinese people are most comfortable using apps that cater directly to Chinese people, through language and culture. The Chinese government has a lot of control over these companies because they’re based are located in China. The English speaking west is so dependent on the U.S. internet that it is impossible to copy the Chinese model.
_dan 11mo ago
I mean good luck banning ssh connections.
- gorgoiler 11mo ago
  You’ll need to have some plausible amount of non-ssh traffic otherwise your account will be automatically re-assigned as an Enterprise Infrastructure Account. It will be temporarily suspended while you apply for a license. EIAs are £452.17/month (a statutory amount originally defined in The Online Safety Act’s 2027 update, subject to triple-lock inflation), licensed, and subject to inspection. There’s a four month waiting list for licensing due to backlogs at the local County Court. The alternative is therefore to use up a strike and apply to have the account repurposed back to a Citizen User Account. CUAs must remain below a 50:1 down/up ratio and must have p90 non-https “control” traffic of 48kbps or less. They are expensive too but you get a 25% discount if you install your ISP’s mobileconfig / MDM profile though. With the profile discount the price is now only £64.99 a month. (This assumes you run an Approved Platform capable of mobile device management. Anything else — Linux based, old versions of macOS, Windows <= 13 etc. — has to pay the full price and CUAs are limited to one Custom Access device per connection.) You can get it down to £49.99 a month if you sign up for a 12-month trial of their home security system — cameras, door “e-locks”, that sort of thing. The devices are locked down but you can see the last 48h of events on their cloud portal. The devices have tamper detectors and the traffic is encrypted e2e but luckily that doesn’t count towards your CUA agreement’s limits on opaque traffic.
  - cedws 11mo ago
    You forgot about the Internet Tunnelling Tax. * does not apply to pensioners
  - _dan 11mo ago
    Well that is ridiculous. ..but sadly within the margin of ridiculousness for our government's approach to the internet.
- latexr 11mo ago
  Good luck having the general public using SSH connections to route their traffic. You’re not a hermit (or you wouldn’t be on HN). You live in a society and what affects your peers and their behaviours also influences your life.
kneel25 11mo ago
I don't know why people immediately have this thought, outlawing VPNs achieves virtually nothing in the UK. An adult bypassing an age check is irrelevant; underage users are at least mature enough to know what a VPN is - not the main target of the act. And there's virtually no real anonymity; hiding from your ISP doesn't make you untraceable. So why would they even consider it?
- salawat 11mo ago
  For the children of course. Haven't you been around for this before?
- latexr 11mo ago
  It’s naive to believe the goal of these laws is truly to protect children and that it has anything to do with age. That’s just the justification which gets them in the door.
  - kneel25 11mo ago
    What is the goal then? Why do they care that you're bypassing it? I wouldn't deny using children in messaging isn't a deliberate focus to strengthen the case, but I don't think they're lying that it's about reducing access to harmful material, and I don't disagree with that goal or the way they've implemented it. It would be a weak case not to use statistics they find in the younger internet users because that's where it's causing the most unacceptable harm.
    - latexr 11mo ago
      > What is the goal then? Why do they care that you're bypassing it? Mass surveillance, population control, and the destruction of services they disapprove of. Pornhub’s traffic went down by 80% when they implemented the mandatory age verification checks in some state. So they simply blocked them because it wasn’t worth it. Later, someone (I don’t have the ability to track down the source right now) was caught admitting one of the goals of the law is to drive those sites out of business. I recommend reading about authoritarian regimes in Europe (it was not just Germany) and how they controlled discourse, and what people had accessed to. Some of their decisions have repercussions which are felt to this day. In Spain, foreign media is dubbed while in Portugal it is subbed. Both are due to their respective dictators.
hodgesrm 11mo ago
> For your own personal sake, you may be selfishly wishing it’s as few people as possible. Eventually they’ll outlaw VPNs too and by then you’ll have little recourse. You can’t hide behind them forever, deeper change is needed. It does not work that way in functioning democracies. This is like blithely raising people's electric bills in the name of preventing global warming. Noble aspirations but brain dead implementation that completely undermines the original goal. And fuels, one might add, the rise of political parties that just want to burn everything down. Personally I went from more or less ignorant of these laws to completely outraged in the time it took to eat a couple of sausages. Why don't we humans think this stuff through? Surely we can do better.
al_borland 11mo ago
A bill was proposed in my state to outlaw VPNs, “for the children”. I am hoping the whole thing dies, but am curious what the ramifications would be. I work from home and need to connect to a corporate VPN for work. Will working from home become illegal, where I need to choose between my job or my home? I don’t think these lawmakers understand what they’re doing.

by latexr 11mo ago

olalonde 11mo ago

> Eventually they’ll outlaw VPNs too and by then you’ll have little recourse. Even China doesn't quite manage to enforce that.

latexr 11mo ago
It’s a mistake to think you need to get everyone perfectly all the time to be effective. Stopping businesses from operating legally and having your population afraid of committing a crime does a lot of work by itself. It’s only techies who think “if I can get around it, it’s not that big of a deal”. As long as you live in a society, how other people behave affects what you can do too.
- ben_w 11mo ago
  Yes, and more. Even those who are happy to break laws, don't generally do so perfectly. Even nation states' pulling James Bond stunts don't do it perfectly. Imperfect enforcement used to be the default even for petty crimes, before CCTV and finger prints and DNA tests and all the other forensics got cheap. The legal systems don't care if the methods are imperfect… and worse, they don't understand why we do, making it hard to explain to them the consequences of this kind of thing in our domain.
xzjis 11mo ago
VPNs can never be completely banned because they're a tool used by businesses (nothing is more important than a business in neoliberal capitalism).
- zorked 11mo ago
  You can create the concept of a legal VPN (tracking inside the tunnel) and keep that legal, though. Businesses will not mind.
3rodents 11mo ago
The western view of China’s Internet censorship often flies in the face of reality. A lot of people seem to think China has an impenetrable firewall. Bypassing internet restrictions in mainland China is a normal part of life for people who want to access the western internet. China is able to censor the Internet effectively because Chinese people are most comfortable using apps that cater directly to Chinese people, through language and culture. The Chinese government has a lot of control over these companies because they’re based are located in China. The English speaking west is so dependent on the U.S. internet that it is impossible to copy the Chinese model.

_dan 11mo ago

I mean good luck banning ssh connections.

gorgoiler 11mo ago
You’ll need to have some plausible amount of non-ssh traffic otherwise your account will be automatically re-assigned as an Enterprise Infrastructure Account. It will be temporarily suspended while you apply for a license. EIAs are £452.17/month (a statutory amount originally defined in The Online Safety Act’s 2027 update, subject to triple-lock inflation), licensed, and subject to inspection. There’s a four month waiting list for licensing due to backlogs at the local County Court. The alternative is therefore to use up a strike and apply to have the account repurposed back to a Citizen User Account. CUAs must remain below a 50:1 down/up ratio and must have p90 non-https “control” traffic of 48kbps or less. They are expensive too but you get a 25% discount if you install your ISP’s mobileconfig / MDM profile though. With the profile discount the price is now only £64.99 a month. (This assumes you run an Approved Platform capable of mobile device management. Anything else — Linux based, old versions of macOS, Windows <= 13 etc. — has to pay the full price and CUAs are limited to one Custom Access device per connection.) You can get it down to £49.99 a month if you sign up for a 12-month trial of their home security system — cameras, door “e-locks”, that sort of thing. The devices are locked down but you can see the last 48h of events on their cloud portal. The devices have tamper detectors and the traffic is encrypted e2e but luckily that doesn’t count towards your CUA agreement’s limits on opaque traffic.
- cedws 11mo ago
  You forgot about the Internet Tunnelling Tax. * does not apply to pensioners
- _dan 11mo ago
  Well that is ridiculous. ..but sadly within the margin of ridiculousness for our government's approach to the internet.
latexr 11mo ago
Good luck having the general public using SSH connections to route their traffic. You’re not a hermit (or you wouldn’t be on HN). You live in a society and what affects your peers and their behaviours also influences your life.

kneel25 11mo ago

I don't know why people immediately have this thought, outlawing VPNs achieves virtually nothing in the UK. An adult bypassing an age check is irrelevant; underage users are at least mature enough to know what a VPN is - not the main target of the act. And there's virtually no real anonymity; hiding from your ISP doesn't make you untraceable. So why would they even consider it?

salawat 11mo ago
For the children of course. Haven't you been around for this before?
latexr 11mo ago
It’s naive to believe the goal of these laws is truly to protect children and that it has anything to do with age. That’s just the justification which gets them in the door.
- kneel25 11mo ago
  What is the goal then? Why do they care that you're bypassing it? I wouldn't deny using children in messaging isn't a deliberate focus to strengthen the case, but I don't think they're lying that it's about reducing access to harmful material, and I don't disagree with that goal or the way they've implemented it. It would be a weak case not to use statistics they find in the younger internet users because that's where it's causing the most unacceptable harm.
  - latexr 11mo ago
    > What is the goal then? Why do they care that you're bypassing it? Mass surveillance, population control, and the destruction of services they disapprove of. Pornhub’s traffic went down by 80% when they implemented the mandatory age verification checks in some state. So they simply blocked them because it wasn’t worth it. Later, someone (I don’t have the ability to track down the source right now) was caught admitting one of the goals of the law is to drive those sites out of business. I recommend reading about authoritarian regimes in Europe (it was not just Germany) and how they controlled discourse, and what people had accessed to. Some of their decisions have repercussions which are felt to this day. In Spain, foreign media is dubbed while in Portugal it is subbed. Both are due to their respective dictators.

hodgesrm 11mo ago

> For your own personal sake, you may be selfishly wishing it’s as few people as possible. Eventually they’ll outlaw VPNs too and by then you’ll have little recourse. You can’t hide behind them forever, deeper change is needed. It does not work that way in functioning democracies. This is like blithely raising people's electric bills in the name of preventing global warming. Noble aspirations but brain dead implementation that completely undermines the original goal. And fuels, one might add, the rise of political parties that just want to burn everything down. Personally I went from more or less ignorant of these laws to completely outraged in the time it took to eat a couple of sausages. Why don't we humans think this stuff through? Surely we can do better.

al_borland 11mo ago

A bill was proposed in my state to outlaw VPNs, “for the children”. I am hoping the whole thing dies, but am curious what the ramifications would be. I work from home and need to connect to a corporate VPN for work. Will working from home become illegal, where I need to choose between my job or my home? I don’t think these lawmakers understand what they’re doing.