6 ms·

Pondering routing more of my traffic via nodes outside the UK

71 points by ColinWright 4mo ago

globular-toast 4mo ago
I'm considering the same thing. I've done the "contact your MP" thing, but it's a waste of time. You just receive a pre-written letter from some minimum wage assistant (or maybe just a bot). It's either that or I just consider the internet dead and move on. It's nothing like it was 20 years ago anyway. There are other things to do. Many books to read and places to go. We had something really cool and we were lucky to experience it while it lasted, but it's gone now.
- echelon_musk 4mo ago
  > consider the internet dead and move on. It's nothing like it was 20 years ago anyway. There are other things to do. Many books to read and places to go. We had something really cool and we were lucky to experience it while it lasted, but it's gone now. I'm pretty much at this stage too. The web/internet was a frontier like the Wild West. But those wild days are gone and are never coming back. Cyberspace has been settled.
  - gizajob 4mo ago
    The web is only a minuscule part of cyberspace. Once millions of people have an AI supercomputer running a graphical node at home in 3-10 years time, then cyberspace will finally start IMO. The web will look like a catalogue file in comparison.
    - mplewis 4mo ago
      don't be a crank
      - gizajob 4mo ago
        Useful feedback thanks.
    - farnsworthfusor 4mo ago
      What will it do?
      - andai 4mo ago
        Full range. Full motion! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkpcYv9Qm5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkpcYv9Qm5w
- verzali 4mo ago
  Depends on your MP. I have received surprisingly detailed responses to some of my past letters. If they can't be arsed to answer you, then you shouldn't be arsed to vote for them, at least in my opinion.
  - benj111 4mo ago
    Yes definitely. I had one MP for 4 years that would personally reply at all hours. I was getting replies at 10pm. I felt the need to tell him off and turn his phone off. But the other 2 I've interacted with were useless.
- cedws 4mo ago
  It’s hard to feel any enthusiasm for democracy watching things you disagree with being pushed through and having no power to stop it. I signed the petition to reverse the OSA and all we got was a canned response. I’ve come to the conclusion the only thing you can really do is leave when you disagree with the direction of your country, but of course not everyone has the ability to do that.
  - nozzlegear 4mo ago
    > It’s hard to feel any enthusiasm for democracy watching things you disagree with being pushed through and having no power to stop it. That often is democracy: what's popular isn't always what's best.
    - lokar 4mo ago
      I find that many comments on this subject here don’t seem to consider that a majority (perhaps a large majority) of citizens in their nation support these policies
      - marcus_holmes 4mo ago
        Because they don't understand the technology or the consequences. When they do, they will change their mind (and probably protest loudly that they never wanted it in the first place). See Brexit for a clear example.
        lokar 4mo ago
        But the argument I see is that the politicians are acting tyrannically against the desire of the voters.
        marcus_holmes 4mo ago
        some voters. The voters who actually understand the technology and the consequences
- TacticalCoder 4mo ago
  > We had something really cool and we were lucky to experience it while it lasted, but it's gone now. You can also recreate a smaller network and enjoy it as a silo, disconnected from the Internet, at times. There's no need to be off the grid 24/7 to feel the relief. It's deeply relaxing to pull the (Internet) plug (I do, literally, physically remove one ethernet cable from a switch right underneath my monitor and I've then got several machines happily communicating only on the LAN: no more Internet). Maybe I'm having fun with my latest acquisition: modelling parts to fix stuff left and right around the house by 3D printing them (I bought a 3D printer for that: I had many things I needed to fix and I knew I'd be able to fix them properly by printing adequate parts). No need for the Internet to model, slice and 3D print. Such an activity does feel like the computing of yore: it takes me back to a time when it was me and a 8-bit machine. Creating stuff "by code" (which now take physical form at home, which 11-years old me would have find utterly mindboggling btw). > There are other things to do. Many books to read and places to go. And hobbies. As a kid from the eighties I love cars from the late 80s/very early 90s: not much electronics, not spying on you. Sure they're a bit of gaz guzzlers but then half the fun is fixing stuff on them and the other half is talking about them with other enthusiasts: there's no need to drive 10 000 kilometers a year with those. When you take time to disconnect a bit from the Internet, then I'd say when you're online (like I'm now) it all feels way more tolerable. No need to go full luddite IMO but YMMV.
  - bigiain 4mo ago
    > It's deeply relaxing to pull the (Internet) plug (I do, literally, physically remove one ethernet cable from a switch right underneath my monitor and I've then got several machines happily communicating only on the LAN: no more Internet). > Maybe I'm having fun with my latest acquisition: modelling parts to fix stuff left and right around the house by 3D printing them Isn't California proposing to put you in jail for having a 3D printer without an internet connection to tattle on you and killswitch your printer if some unaccountable internet service decides you're printing something "bad"? :sigh:
- HDBaseT 4mo ago
  >Many books to read and places to go You cannot travel into the US without providing access to your Social Media accounts. Pretty likely you get denied if you say "I don't have social media".
  - bargainbin 4mo ago
    Incorrect, I don't have social media and tell them as such, it's never an issue.
    - lokar 4mo ago
      Are they asking? I know they said they would, it I’ve not seen reports of it happening
      - account42 3mo ago
        They have been asking for well over a year at least for ESTA with GitHub being one possible pre-defined social media type in the form.
  - Chu4eeno 4mo ago
    Good thing I left my abandoned facebook/twitter/instagram accounts undeleted a decade ago.
phatfish 4mo ago
"people under 16", you mean children right? "who also have the rights to freedom of expression and privacy", plenty of outlets for people to be expressive in the UK (more so than in the US for example, where the right wing will obviously attack any social media restrictions) that don't involve being fed junk divisive content from mainly US tech companies. Privacy != anonymity. Feel free to route your traffic via Wireguard. As long as it is not setup as a service for the mass evasion of age gates by children.
- NVHacker 4mo ago
  Nice try ! But the fact that the solution to protecting children comes with the maximum boost of government powers in the online world (across the set of all possible ways to protect children) is not a coincidence.
- like_any_other 4mo ago
  > Privacy != anonymity. Exactly. You can have your own misgivings about the UK government at home, in private, and share them with no-one. Or you can share them on the online public square, knowing the UK government will know exactly who wrote them. Good thing they never abuse their power of prosecution!
  - dofm 4mo ago
    The government literally doesn't prosecute anyone. It is done by the CPS, which operates independently of government and the police. If I were a betting man I'd place a bet that you are further misinformed about the prosecutions you believe are happening and why. But I am not.
    - like_any_other 4mo ago
      > It is done by the CPS, which operates independently of government and the police. I should have written "state", not "government", you're right. Does that change anything? But, article 35 of the Chinese constitution guarantees their citizens freedom of speech and of the press. You're beyond naive if you believe they're independent. > If I were a betting man I'd place a bet that you are further misinformed about the prosecutions you believe are happening and why. UK politicians admitted the Online Safety Act was: “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse” - https://archive.md/2025.08.13-190800/https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/online-safety-act-botched-2xk8xwlps https://archive.md/2025.08.13-190800/https://www.thetimes.co... Even viewing "terrorist" material carries a potential 15 YEAR jail term: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41479620 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41479620 It's OK to be white and similar stickers landed a man in jail: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c51zn2l33r9o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c51zn2l33r9o https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/04/the-tyrannical-jailing-of-sam-melia/ https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/04/the-tyrannical-jail... I don't know how much worse you need it to be.
nemoniac 4mo ago
“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” -- John Gilmore (probably https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/)
- globular-toast 4mo ago
  There is no "Net" any more. There probably never was really. The internet protocols were designed for resilience from the start. A key to that is packet-switching over circuit-switching. But this thing we call the "internet" today? This thing where more and more nodes can't even speak directly to each other and nobody even cares (see IPv6)? This thing where 90% of traffic goes to a few large multinationals? It's not that. We have no resistance to censorship.
- Chu4eeno 4mo ago
  The problem is that the world is increasingly transitioning from the Internet to regional internet. There are companies that have gotten very good at virtual border control while selling stuff to e. g. the chinese and russians that are allegedly in talks with the UK govt.
CommanderData 4mo ago
The camp who think VPNs and Tor are a solution to government policies feel like disinformation at times. VPNs are trivial to ban, the IP space is well known, Wireguard is easily to fingerprint and block. It will be a cat and mouse game, if the government looses this they'll simply make it illegal to be caught using a VPN including Tor. Which is on the table. The only way this changes is a less crap party, but almost all including Reform are in favour of more censorship.
- Fredkin 4mo ago
  Really? https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/28/reform-uk-vows-to-repeal-borderline-dystopian-online-safety-act https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/28/reform-uk-v... https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/reform-pledges-to-scrap-online-safety-act-over-free-speech-concerns/ar-AA1JrhC2 https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/reform-pledges-to-scra... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/nigel-farage-reform-ofcom-westminster-levi-bellfield-b2797326.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/nigel-farage... Zia Yusuf : "... criticised sections of the legislation that allow ministers to direct regulator Ofcom to modify its rules setting out how companies can comply with requirements to crack down on illegal or harmful content, saying it was “the sort of thing that I think (Chinese president) Xi Jinping himself would blush at the concept of”." And the more radical Restore say this: https://www.restorebritain.org.uk/restore_civil_liberties https://www.restorebritain.org.uk/restore_civil_liberties
- Retr0id 4mo ago
  They aren't the solution to bad policy but they are an unfortunately necessary part of regular internet use now.
cpressland 4mo ago
I’m already using policy based routing on UniFi to send OSA censored websites, imgur for example, via Mullvad VPN - it works for the most part, but for any IPv6 websites it completely breaks as UniFi doesn’t support policy based routes for IPv6. If the government blocks Mullvad then I’ll just switch to Wireguard on a Helsinki based VPS via Hetzner.
- matt-p 4mo ago
  are you manually maintaining the list of 'OSA censored' sites? Sounds great, just I'm lazy :')
- bigiain 4mo ago
  Surely it won't be long before every hyper scalar and even medium sized hosting companies ip address ranges will end up in the block lists for every "questionable" website that is feeling the "chilling effects" from these UK laws? I used to run my own mail server back until about 2014 or 2015, end even then it was practically impossible to reliably send mail to any of the major email providers from and ip address from Linda/AWS/Hetzner/DigitalOcean et al. I'm pretty sure porn sites and unmoderated web forum type thing that have lawyers advising them will soon be blocking not just UK ip addresses, but the bulk of the easy to identify VPN services and VPS providers.
bArray 4mo ago
> In the name of “online safety”, the fundamental rights of both freedom of expression and privacy appear to be under imminent threat. The current UK government don't actually care about children, if they did then they would actually investigate the child SA gangs, or holding people to account on the Epstein lists. We have seen other countries such as Australia [1] "magically" have the same idea at the same time, so this is likely a global group influencing this push. > The current proposal to ban people under 16 - who also have the rights to freedom of expression and privacy - from some (as yet not fully delineated) social media services is likely to result in wide-spread verification. This is the real objective, it will be just like the UK porn verification [2]. To express yourself online, you will soon need to associate your activity with your real identity. With the discussion of clamping down on VPNs, it won't be long before you need to verify your ID just to connect to the internet. This has been a long time coming. Years ago you could buy a sim card with money already on it, use it, and then throw it away. Now you need to associate some credit card or ID with the sim card and perform some verification process. > And so, for the first time, I am considering locating something (perhaps a WireGuard node, or a SOCKS proxy, or a recursive DNS server / DNS proxy, or perhaps all of them) somewhere on the Internet outside the UK, so that I can route some traffic through that, as needed, to maintain my access to the web. It won't be enough. At some point the UK government will just mandate that they should be allowed to perform deep packet inspection, and then there will be nowhere left to hide. These changes are also being rolled out everywhere - which Country do you trust to run your data through? I remember the New Zealand Christchurch attack on a mosque, and how multiple governments around the world pressured Facebook to remove it entirely [3]. They were more worried about people seeing and sharing the attack, than the attack itself. The manifesto was entirely banned [4], and people were left entirely dependent on the state to convey a narrative about the attack. I have a feeling that this all fell out of the "Christchurch Call" [5]. I don't think this recent push spearheaded by them, but I believe it had a large influence on the efforts now ongoing. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyp9d3ddqyo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyp9d3ddqyo [2] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/age-checks-for-online-safety--what-you-need-to-know-as-a-user https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/a... [3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47620519 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47620519 [4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/24/censor-bans-manifesto-of-christchurch-mosque-shooter https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/24/censor-bans-ma... [5] https://www.christchurchcall.org/ https://www.christchurchcall.org/
Retr0id 4mo ago
I've set up a socks5 "proxy multiplexer" that routes requests to different upstream proxies based on the request hostname. For example reddit routes via a VPS in Dublin, and imgur routes via Tor. I believe socks5 is the ideal layer to do the multiplexing at, for web traffic, because the request hostnames are visible to the multiplexer even if ECH/ESNI is in use. It was a oneshot vibecoded solution but it's been pretty solid thus far, so maybe I should open-source it. I wrap the outbound sock5 traffic in mTLS, so it should look "normal" to anyone packet sniffing (not obvious proxy/VPN traffic), even though stealthiness isn't part of the threat model at the moment.
- BLKNSLVR 4mo ago
  Please do open source it, I'd be interested in running something similar.
- bigiain 4mo ago
  Perhaps consider putting it in public domain instead of using an "open source" license? There's a decent legal ethical argument that LLM output isn't copyrightable, and for me a "one shot vibe code" definitely _isn't_ "your creative work", so the copyright that open source licenses rely on probably doesn't exist there. I wonder if a new category of "non copyrighted shared source code" needs to exist for people who use Gan AUI to create genuinely useful software which would ne a net positive to society if shared, but that doesn't risk murkying the waters and undermining the copyright basis that licenses like GPL and Apache and BSD and MIT rely on?
  - farnsworthfusor 4mo ago
    If LLM output isn't copyrightable then it's already public domain, even if you say it isn't - if this is true you can just ignore the wishes of the person who thinks they're the copyright holder.
    - marcus_holmes 4mo ago
      this. The whole licensing of software stands on copyright. If the content is already in the public domain because it was generated by an LLM (copyright only protects human works) then it can't be licensed. However, there's no compunction to publish the generated code, even if it's public domain. We end up in a strange nega-OSS world where all code can be used by anyone for any reason, if you can get your hands on it.
mschuster91 4mo ago
> And so, for the first time, I am considering locating something (perhaps a WireGuard node, or a SOCKS proxy, or a recursive DNS server / DNS proxy, or perhaps all of them) somewhere on the Internet outside the UK, so that I can route some traffic through that, as needed, to maintain my access to the web. Good luck, it will probably impossible as admins fed up with AI scraper bots increasingly choose to outright blanket ban anything not being a residential or business line. There's a reason why there are so many "ethically sourced proxies" aka people installing software on their smart TVs and whatnot that comes with an "monetization SDK" by one of the numerous VPN providers. That's the dirty secret behind a lot of the "bypass youtube/netflix/whatever region lock" VPNs.
- farnsworthfusor 4mo ago
  What's dirty about it?
  - Chu4eeno 4mo ago
    Residential proxies aren't usually used for good.
    - farnsworthfusor 3mo ago
      What are they usually used for?
  - mschuster91 3mo ago
    Companies tell their customers (i.e. people who wish to bypass streaming service region restrictions) that they "ethically source IP addresses". The people who provide the IP addresses (i.e. people installing f2p games on their phones or smart TVs that come with the VPN exit gateway SDK) don't know that, because no one reads the T&C. In the end, both are deceived. The customer thinks there are no ethical issues attached to their VPN provider, the ones whose IP addresses get abused don't even know what's going on.
    - farnsworthfusor 3mo ago
throwaway6af03 4mo ago
Publishing under a throwaway account for obvious reasons. I've felt this slide in the UK for a long period of time. I route _all_ of my traffic through Mullvad with DAITA [1] because I think it's the only the likes of chaffing and winnowing [2] that can defeat traffic analysis. The endpoint changes. I have a high-end SBC router. For the moment, I do not obsfucate the fact that the tunnels exist and are wireguard. Mullvad can disguise them effectively with QUIC / SNI obsfucation, or even vless / xray / vmess. They're quite good at that. I also have an Amsterdam VPS and it runs wireguard. My phone has a wireguard client to it. It's a reputable VPS provider from a major cloud hosting company. It has a reverse WG tunnel to my house not through mullvad (I have a public IPv6 address range, but not IPv4); my phone (and partner, friends etc phones) get access to my local servers and resources and then all traffic goes out anonymously through mullvad. I also have another VPS, paid for in cryptocurrency (XMR) that I mine in the winter (the waste heat is cheaper than gas heating where I live, if you assume the compute is paid for...). This acts as a port forwarding host and it connects via another WG tunnel or two to my server, doing tunnel-in-tunnel, but essentially is a reverse proxy host. I naturally run a recursive resolver _and_ dnscrypt on the ISP connection for bootstrapping. This gives me _some_ degree of anonymity, I feel, online: I've inspected the traffic going through the ISP router and you see remarkably little, especially with QUIC SNI spoofing turned on. The volume of traffic is quite large and probably idiosyncratic – the endpoints are known – which is the biggest problem amongst all of this. But I have _privacy_ and for me that matters a lot. I think this age verification, KYC, show your faces stuff is organised internationally on two very simple predicates: 1) Disinformation or political interference provided by Russia and possibly China have affected national election results in many democracies (Brexit, likely Trump, probably more). Controlling the narrative is increasingly viewed as absolutely required by the political class. This is difficult with social media, and strong identity verification makes it more obvious where at least your enemies are. 2) Online actions are increasingly having real world consequences and the establishment wants to be able to more easily _punish_ those people who have broken "the law". This is related to, but distinct from, point 1. There are plenty of examples of this in the UK – but more widely spread worldwide. Having strong identity verification makes it easy to catch people, and if you do that enough, change behaviour (the single biggest determinant of which is shortening the time between "offending" and being caught). Minor points I think behind this are: 1) A fear of a large-scale war and worries about information security, population influence, and associated military shadowy figures saying things 2) A fear (or fact) of encryption making any sort of content dragnet much harder. Most large web presences undoubtedly have backdoors but genuine p2p without exposed metadata is a fear of the spook community because they kill people on the basis of metadata and machine learning state-of-the-art...as it was in 2014 [3] -- I am sure they do the same now. The reason for metadata is that it is accessible, by design, everywhere. VPN ± tor usage is probably ubiquitous amongst some genuinely bad actors, and they will have spent considerable resources being able to unmask those actors. Depending on the technique, it may genuinely make it much harder if there is a large fraction of the population actually using those tools. 3) Some genuine transnational rise in avoidable harm, like CSAM; some genuine transnational rise in political harms, like the (oft-religious) right. [1] https://mullvad.net/en/vpn/daita https://mullvad.net/en/vpn/daita [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaffing_and_winnowing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaffing_and_winnowing [3] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-nsas-skynet-program-may-be-killing-thousands-of-innocent-people/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...
msephton 4mo ago
I route a bunch of mine via a proxy server of my own that is hosted outside the EU. This gives me access to Japanese websites and other things.
h4kunamata 4mo ago
Australia isn't different, but homelab is my jam so solutions were implemented :) 1. Nginx Proxmox LXC container with domains that require digital ID such as X. I can easily add or remove domains to it via Ansible. 2. Mullvad VPN server/client setup on OPNSense 3. OPNSense Firewall rules with aliases from the local lists from step 1 4. Every time I access X or whatever, OPNSense firewall rule redirects that traffic via the Mullvad VPN Gateway bypassing the digital ID enforcement 5. I host Pihole + Unbound recursive DNS so I have full control over my DNS. Recursive DNS uses the 13 root nameserver, I do not use public DNS such as Google or whatever, in fact, they are all blocked. My data under my control.
- h4kunamata 4mo ago
  Side note, I do agree with under 16 being denied access to social media. Spend 5 minutes on X, Instagram or even worse Snapchat for you to see what these minors are doing. A lot generation, all for likes. GenZ is so cooked, by the time they reach their 30s, damn. Gen Alpha being born within the digital and AI world is even more cooked.
  - Chu4eeno 4mo ago
    I don't think social media is any healthier just because people are older, I'd rather just ban them outright. And from what I remember of the coverage of the scientists presenting their case in the UK there wasn't enough evidence to say whether it had an impact on children. Personally I think ipad as babysitter is more to blame, but until the proper studies are done it's all just speculation.
    - h4kunamata 4mo ago
      >Personally I think ipad as babysitter is more to blame, but until the proper studies are done it's all just speculation. Proper study?? Look around us, kids are talking to ChatGPT instead of running, playing, instead of being kids. Kids cannot speak and yet have a tablet to interact with, by adulthood those kids are cooked. Teens at school can't read, they have been using ChatGPT to cheat exams. If somebody tells me that more study is required to prove what is right there in from of our eyes, that somebody is part of the problem, full stop!!
benj111 4mo ago
From a UK politics perspective I don't really get this. New labour certainly have an authoritarian streak. I remember when they tried to introduce ID cards but there was a load of push back. But they are also somewhat friendlier to 'the youf' but this seems squarely aimed at the Daily Mail brigade. It just seems like they're trying to out conservative, the Conservatives. Maybe I'm trying to make sense out of something that isn't?
pSYoniK 3mo ago
I have submitted this before, but for those maybe a bit uncomfortable with setting up a VPS to act as an exit node for Wireguard, my article covers most things: https://psyonik.tech/posts/a-guide-for-wireguard-vpn-setup-with-pi-hole-adblock-and-unbound-dns/ https://psyonik.tech/posts/a-guide-for-wireguard-vpn-setup-w... For this particular use case, I would probably suggest something like OVH/Scaleway as they have nodes in France so physical distance between UK and "somewhere else" is low which will affect latency. If you're willing to wait longer and go further, I recommend Infomaniak (Switzerland - they have nodes in Geneva I think/Zurich). Hetzner (a crow favorite) hasn't been that good for me while I was in the UK, I was getting dropped packets even after switching a few VPSes, but might've just been something temporary.
nly 3mo ago
Been using a VPN on my phone and PC for 20 years. Always use non-UK exit points

71 points by ColinWright 4mo ago

I'm considering the same thing. I've done the "contact your MP" thing, but it's a waste of time. You just receive a pre-written letter from some minimum wage assistant (or maybe just a bot). It's either that or I just consider the internet dead and move on. It's nothing like it was 20 years ago anyway. There are other things to do. Many books to read and places to go. We had something really cool and we were lucky to experience it while it lasted, but it's gone now.

echelon_musk 4mo ago
> consider the internet dead and move on. It's nothing like it was 20 years ago anyway. There are other things to do. Many books to read and places to go. We had something really cool and we were lucky to experience it while it lasted, but it's gone now. I'm pretty much at this stage too. The web/internet was a frontier like the Wild West. But those wild days are gone and are never coming back. Cyberspace has been settled.
- gizajob 4mo ago
  The web is only a minuscule part of cyberspace. Once millions of people have an AI supercomputer running a graphical node at home in 3-10 years time, then cyberspace will finally start IMO. The web will look like a catalogue file in comparison.
  - mplewis 4mo ago
    don't be a crank
    - gizajob 4mo ago
      Useful feedback thanks.
  - farnsworthfusor 4mo ago
    What will it do?
    - andai 4mo ago
      Full range. Full motion! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkpcYv9Qm5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkpcYv9Qm5w
verzali 4mo ago
Depends on your MP. I have received surprisingly detailed responses to some of my past letters. If they can't be arsed to answer you, then you shouldn't be arsed to vote for them, at least in my opinion.
- benj111 4mo ago
  Yes definitely. I had one MP for 4 years that would personally reply at all hours. I was getting replies at 10pm. I felt the need to tell him off and turn his phone off. But the other 2 I've interacted with were useless.
cedws 4mo ago
It’s hard to feel any enthusiasm for democracy watching things you disagree with being pushed through and having no power to stop it. I signed the petition to reverse the OSA and all we got was a canned response. I’ve come to the conclusion the only thing you can really do is leave when you disagree with the direction of your country, but of course not everyone has the ability to do that.
- nozzlegear 4mo ago
  > It’s hard to feel any enthusiasm for democracy watching things you disagree with being pushed through and having no power to stop it. That often is democracy: what's popular isn't always what's best.
  - lokar 4mo ago
    I find that many comments on this subject here don’t seem to consider that a majority (perhaps a large majority) of citizens in their nation support these policies
    - marcus_holmes 4mo ago
      Because they don't understand the technology or the consequences. When they do, they will change their mind (and probably protest loudly that they never wanted it in the first place). See Brexit for a clear example.
      - lokar 4mo ago
        But the argument I see is that the politicians are acting tyrannically against the desire of the voters.
        marcus_holmes 4mo ago
        some voters. The voters who actually understand the technology and the consequences
TacticalCoder 4mo ago
> We had something really cool and we were lucky to experience it while it lasted, but it's gone now. You can also recreate a smaller network and enjoy it as a silo, disconnected from the Internet, at times. There's no need to be off the grid 24/7 to feel the relief. It's deeply relaxing to pull the (Internet) plug (I do, literally, physically remove one ethernet cable from a switch right underneath my monitor and I've then got several machines happily communicating only on the LAN: no more Internet). Maybe I'm having fun with my latest acquisition: modelling parts to fix stuff left and right around the house by 3D printing them (I bought a 3D printer for that: I had many things I needed to fix and I knew I'd be able to fix them properly by printing adequate parts). No need for the Internet to model, slice and 3D print. Such an activity does feel like the computing of yore: it takes me back to a time when it was me and a 8-bit machine. Creating stuff "by code" (which now take physical form at home, which 11-years old me would have find utterly mindboggling btw). > There are other things to do. Many books to read and places to go. And hobbies. As a kid from the eighties I love cars from the late 80s/very early 90s: not much electronics, not spying on you. Sure they're a bit of gaz guzzlers but then half the fun is fixing stuff on them and the other half is talking about them with other enthusiasts: there's no need to drive 10 000 kilometers a year with those. When you take time to disconnect a bit from the Internet, then I'd say when you're online (like I'm now) it all feels way more tolerable. No need to go full luddite IMO but YMMV.
- bigiain 4mo ago
  > It's deeply relaxing to pull the (Internet) plug (I do, literally, physically remove one ethernet cable from a switch right underneath my monitor and I've then got several machines happily communicating only on the LAN: no more Internet). > Maybe I'm having fun with my latest acquisition: modelling parts to fix stuff left and right around the house by 3D printing them Isn't California proposing to put you in jail for having a 3D printer without an internet connection to tattle on you and killswitch your printer if some unaccountable internet service decides you're printing something "bad"? :sigh:
HDBaseT 4mo ago
>Many books to read and places to go You cannot travel into the US without providing access to your Social Media accounts. Pretty likely you get denied if you say "I don't have social media".
- bargainbin 4mo ago
  Incorrect, I don't have social media and tell them as such, it's never an issue.
  - lokar 4mo ago
    Are they asking? I know they said they would, it I’ve not seen reports of it happening
    - account42 3mo ago
      They have been asking for well over a year at least for ESTA with GitHub being one possible pre-defined social media type in the form.
- Chu4eeno 4mo ago
  Good thing I left my abandoned facebook/twitter/instagram accounts undeleted a decade ago.

phatfish 4mo ago

"people under 16", you mean children right? "who also have the rights to freedom of expression and privacy", plenty of outlets for people to be expressive in the UK (more so than in the US for example, where the right wing will obviously attack any social media restrictions) that don't involve being fed junk divisive content from mainly US tech companies. Privacy != anonymity. Feel free to route your traffic via Wireguard. As long as it is not setup as a service for the mass evasion of age gates by children.

NVHacker 4mo ago
Nice try ! But the fact that the solution to protecting children comes with the maximum boost of government powers in the online world (across the set of all possible ways to protect children) is not a coincidence.
like_any_other 4mo ago
> Privacy != anonymity. Exactly. You can have your own misgivings about the UK government at home, in private, and share them with no-one. Or you can share them on the online public square, knowing the UK government will know exactly who wrote them. Good thing they never abuse their power of prosecution!
- dofm 4mo ago
  The government literally doesn't prosecute anyone. It is done by the CPS, which operates independently of government and the police. If I were a betting man I'd place a bet that you are further misinformed about the prosecutions you believe are happening and why. But I am not.
  - like_any_other 4mo ago
    > It is done by the CPS, which operates independently of government and the police. I should have written "state", not "government", you're right. Does that change anything? But, article 35 of the Chinese constitution guarantees their citizens freedom of speech and of the press. You're beyond naive if you believe they're independent. > If I were a betting man I'd place a bet that you are further misinformed about the prosecutions you believe are happening and why. UK politicians admitted the Online Safety Act was: “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse” - https://archive.md/2025.08.13-190800/https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/online-safety-act-botched-2xk8xwlps https://archive.md/2025.08.13-190800/https://www.thetimes.co... Even viewing "terrorist" material carries a potential 15 YEAR jail term: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41479620 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41479620 It's OK to be white and similar stickers landed a man in jail: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c51zn2l33r9o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c51zn2l33r9o https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/04/the-tyrannical-jailing-of-sam-melia/ https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/04/the-tyrannical-jail... I don't know how much worse you need it to be.

nemoniac 4mo ago

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” -- John Gilmore (probably https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/)

globular-toast 4mo ago
There is no "Net" any more. There probably never was really. The internet protocols were designed for resilience from the start. A key to that is packet-switching over circuit-switching. But this thing we call the "internet" today? This thing where more and more nodes can't even speak directly to each other and nobody even cares (see IPv6)? This thing where 90% of traffic goes to a few large multinationals? It's not that. We have no resistance to censorship.
Chu4eeno 4mo ago
The problem is that the world is increasingly transitioning from the Internet to regional internet. There are companies that have gotten very good at virtual border control while selling stuff to e. g. the chinese and russians that are allegedly in talks with the UK govt.

CommanderData 4mo ago

The camp who think VPNs and Tor are a solution to government policies feel like disinformation at times. VPNs are trivial to ban, the IP space is well known, Wireguard is easily to fingerprint and block. It will be a cat and mouse game, if the government looses this they'll simply make it illegal to be caught using a VPN including Tor. Which is on the table. The only way this changes is a less crap party, but almost all including Reform are in favour of more censorship.

Fredkin 4mo ago
Really? https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/28/reform-uk-vows-to-repeal-borderline-dystopian-online-safety-act https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/28/reform-uk-v... https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/reform-pledges-to-scrap-online-safety-act-over-free-speech-concerns/ar-AA1JrhC2 https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/reform-pledges-to-scra... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/nigel-farage-reform-ofcom-westminster-levi-bellfield-b2797326.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/nigel-farage... Zia Yusuf : "... criticised sections of the legislation that allow ministers to direct regulator Ofcom to modify its rules setting out how companies can comply with requirements to crack down on illegal or harmful content, saying it was “the sort of thing that I think (Chinese president) Xi Jinping himself would blush at the concept of”." And the more radical Restore say this: https://www.restorebritain.org.uk/restore_civil_liberties https://www.restorebritain.org.uk/restore_civil_liberties
Retr0id 4mo ago
They aren't the solution to bad policy but they are an unfortunately necessary part of regular internet use now.

cpressland 4mo ago

I’m already using policy based routing on UniFi to send OSA censored websites, imgur for example, via Mullvad VPN - it works for the most part, but for any IPv6 websites it completely breaks as UniFi doesn’t support policy based routes for IPv6. If the government blocks Mullvad then I’ll just switch to Wireguard on a Helsinki based VPS via Hetzner.

matt-p 4mo ago
are you manually maintaining the list of 'OSA censored' sites? Sounds great, just I'm lazy :')
bigiain 4mo ago
Surely it won't be long before every hyper scalar and even medium sized hosting companies ip address ranges will end up in the block lists for every "questionable" website that is feeling the "chilling effects" from these UK laws? I used to run my own mail server back until about 2014 or 2015, end even then it was practically impossible to reliably send mail to any of the major email providers from and ip address from Linda/AWS/Hetzner/DigitalOcean et al. I'm pretty sure porn sites and unmoderated web forum type thing that have lawyers advising them will soon be blocking not just UK ip addresses, but the bulk of the easy to identify VPN services and VPS providers.

bArray 4mo ago

> In the name of “online safety”, the fundamental rights of both freedom of expression and privacy appear to be under imminent threat. The current UK government don't actually care about children, if they did then they would actually investigate the child SA gangs, or holding people to account on the Epstein lists. We have seen other countries such as Australia [1] "magically" have the same idea at the same time, so this is likely a global group influencing this push. > The current proposal to ban people under 16 - who also have the rights to freedom of expression and privacy - from some (as yet not fully delineated) social media services is likely to result in wide-spread verification. This is the real objective, it will be just like the UK porn verification [2]. To express yourself online, you will soon need to associate your activity with your real identity. With the discussion of clamping down on VPNs, it won't be long before you need to verify your ID just to connect to the internet. This has been a long time coming. Years ago you could buy a sim card with money already on it, use it, and then throw it away. Now you need to associate some credit card or ID with the sim card and perform some verification process. > And so, for the first time, I am considering locating something (perhaps a WireGuard node, or a SOCKS proxy, or a recursive DNS server / DNS proxy, or perhaps all of them) somewhere on the Internet outside the UK, so that I can route some traffic through that, as needed, to maintain my access to the web. It won't be enough. At some point the UK government will just mandate that they should be allowed to perform deep packet inspection, and then there will be nowhere left to hide. These changes are also being rolled out everywhere - which Country do you trust to run your data through? I remember the New Zealand Christchurch attack on a mosque, and how multiple governments around the world pressured Facebook to remove it entirely [3]. They were more worried about people seeing and sharing the attack, than the attack itself. The manifesto was entirely banned [4], and people were left entirely dependent on the state to convey a narrative about the attack. I have a feeling that this all fell out of the "Christchurch Call" [5]. I don't think this recent push spearheaded by them, but I believe it had a large influence on the efforts now ongoing. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyp9d3ddqyo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyp9d3ddqyo [2] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/age-checks-for-online-safety--what-you-need-to-know-as-a-user https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/a... [3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47620519 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47620519 [4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/24/censor-bans-manifesto-of-christchurch-mosque-shooter https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/24/censor-bans-ma... [5] https://www.christchurchcall.org/ https://www.christchurchcall.org/

Retr0id 4mo ago

I've set up a socks5 "proxy multiplexer" that routes requests to different upstream proxies based on the request hostname. For example reddit routes via a VPS in Dublin, and imgur routes via Tor. I believe socks5 is the ideal layer to do the multiplexing at, for web traffic, because the request hostnames are visible to the multiplexer even if ECH/ESNI is in use. It was a oneshot vibecoded solution but it's been pretty solid thus far, so maybe I should open-source it. I wrap the outbound sock5 traffic in mTLS, so it should look "normal" to anyone packet sniffing (not obvious proxy/VPN traffic), even though stealthiness isn't part of the threat model at the moment.

BLKNSLVR 4mo ago
Please do open source it, I'd be interested in running something similar.
bigiain 4mo ago
Perhaps consider putting it in public domain instead of using an "open source" license? There's a decent legal ethical argument that LLM output isn't copyrightable, and for me a "one shot vibe code" definitely _isn't_ "your creative work", so the copyright that open source licenses rely on probably doesn't exist there. I wonder if a new category of "non copyrighted shared source code" needs to exist for people who use Gan AUI to create genuinely useful software which would ne a net positive to society if shared, but that doesn't risk murkying the waters and undermining the copyright basis that licenses like GPL and Apache and BSD and MIT rely on?
- farnsworthfusor 4mo ago
  If LLM output isn't copyrightable then it's already public domain, even if you say it isn't - if this is true you can just ignore the wishes of the person who thinks they're the copyright holder.
  - marcus_holmes 4mo ago
    this. The whole licensing of software stands on copyright. If the content is already in the public domain because it was generated by an LLM (copyright only protects human works) then it can't be licensed. However, there's no compunction to publish the generated code, even if it's public domain. We end up in a strange nega-OSS world where all code can be used by anyone for any reason, if you can get your hands on it.

mschuster91 4mo ago

> And so, for the first time, I am considering locating something (perhaps a WireGuard node, or a SOCKS proxy, or a recursive DNS server / DNS proxy, or perhaps all of them) somewhere on the Internet outside the UK, so that I can route some traffic through that, as needed, to maintain my access to the web. Good luck, it will probably impossible as admins fed up with AI scraper bots increasingly choose to outright blanket ban anything not being a residential or business line. There's a reason why there are so many "ethically sourced proxies" aka people installing software on their smart TVs and whatnot that comes with an "monetization SDK" by one of the numerous VPN providers. That's the dirty secret behind a lot of the "bypass youtube/netflix/whatever region lock" VPNs.

farnsworthfusor 4mo ago
What's dirty about it?
- Chu4eeno 4mo ago
  Residential proxies aren't usually used for good.
  - farnsworthfusor 3mo ago
    What are they usually used for?
- mschuster91 3mo ago
  Companies tell their customers (i.e. people who wish to bypass streaming service region restrictions) that they "ethically source IP addresses". The people who provide the IP addresses (i.e. people installing f2p games on their phones or smart TVs that come with the VPN exit gateway SDK) don't know that, because no one reads the T&C. In the end, both are deceived. The customer thinks there are no ethical issues attached to their VPN provider, the ones whose IP addresses get abused don't even know what's going on.
  - farnsworthfusor 3mo ago

throwaway6af03 4mo ago

Publishing under a throwaway account for obvious reasons. I've felt this slide in the UK for a long period of time. I route _all_ of my traffic through Mullvad with DAITA [1] because I think it's the only the likes of chaffing and winnowing [2] that can defeat traffic analysis. The endpoint changes. I have a high-end SBC router. For the moment, I do not obsfucate the fact that the tunnels exist and are wireguard. Mullvad can disguise them effectively with QUIC / SNI obsfucation, or even vless / xray / vmess. They're quite good at that. I also have an Amsterdam VPS and it runs wireguard. My phone has a wireguard client to it. It's a reputable VPS provider from a major cloud hosting company. It has a reverse WG tunnel to my house not through mullvad (I have a public IPv6 address range, but not IPv4); my phone (and partner, friends etc phones) get access to my local servers and resources and then all traffic goes out anonymously through mullvad. I also have another VPS, paid for in cryptocurrency (XMR) that I mine in the winter (the waste heat is cheaper than gas heating where I live, if you assume the compute is paid for...). This acts as a port forwarding host and it connects via another WG tunnel or two to my server, doing tunnel-in-tunnel, but essentially is a reverse proxy host. I naturally run a recursive resolver _and_ dnscrypt on the ISP connection for bootstrapping. This gives me _some_ degree of anonymity, I feel, online: I've inspected the traffic going through the ISP router and you see remarkably little, especially with QUIC SNI spoofing turned on. The volume of traffic is quite large and probably idiosyncratic – the endpoints are known – which is the biggest problem amongst all of this. But I have _privacy_ and for me that matters a lot. I think this age verification, KYC, show your faces stuff is organised internationally on two very simple predicates: 1) Disinformation or political interference provided by Russia and possibly China have affected national election results in many democracies (Brexit, likely Trump, probably more). Controlling the narrative is increasingly viewed as absolutely required by the political class. This is difficult with social media, and strong identity verification makes it more obvious where at least your enemies are. 2) Online actions are increasingly having real world consequences and the establishment wants to be able to more easily _punish_ those people who have broken "the law". This is related to, but distinct from, point 1. There are plenty of examples of this in the UK – but more widely spread worldwide. Having strong identity verification makes it easy to catch people, and if you do that enough, change behaviour (the single biggest determinant of which is shortening the time between "offending" and being caught). Minor points I think behind this are: 1) A fear of a large-scale war and worries about information security, population influence, and associated military shadowy figures saying things 2) A fear (or fact) of encryption making any sort of content dragnet much harder. Most large web presences undoubtedly have backdoors but genuine p2p without exposed metadata is a fear of the spook community because they kill people on the basis of metadata and machine learning state-of-the-art...as it was in 2014 [3] -- I am sure they do the same now. The reason for metadata is that it is accessible, by design, everywhere. VPN ± tor usage is probably ubiquitous amongst some genuinely bad actors, and they will have spent considerable resources being able to unmask those actors. Depending on the technique, it may genuinely make it much harder if there is a large fraction of the population actually using those tools. 3) Some genuine transnational rise in avoidable harm, like CSAM; some genuine transnational rise in political harms, like the (oft-religious) right. [1] https://mullvad.net/en/vpn/daita https://mullvad.net/en/vpn/daita [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaffing_and_winnowing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaffing_and_winnowing [3] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-nsas-skynet-program-may-be-killing-thousands-of-innocent-people/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...

msephton 4mo ago

I route a bunch of mine via a proxy server of my own that is hosted outside the EU. This gives me access to Japanese websites and other things.

h4kunamata 4mo ago

Australia isn't different, but homelab is my jam so solutions were implemented :) 1. Nginx Proxmox LXC container with domains that require digital ID such as X. I can easily add or remove domains to it via Ansible. 2. Mullvad VPN server/client setup on OPNSense 3. OPNSense Firewall rules with aliases from the local lists from step 1 4. Every time I access X or whatever, OPNSense firewall rule redirects that traffic via the Mullvad VPN Gateway bypassing the digital ID enforcement 5. I host Pihole + Unbound recursive DNS so I have full control over my DNS. Recursive DNS uses the 13 root nameserver, I do not use public DNS such as Google or whatever, in fact, they are all blocked. My data under my control.

h4kunamata 4mo ago
Side note, I do agree with under 16 being denied access to social media. Spend 5 minutes on X, Instagram or even worse Snapchat for you to see what these minors are doing. A lot generation, all for likes. GenZ is so cooked, by the time they reach their 30s, damn. Gen Alpha being born within the digital and AI world is even more cooked.
- Chu4eeno 4mo ago
  I don't think social media is any healthier just because people are older, I'd rather just ban them outright. And from what I remember of the coverage of the scientists presenting their case in the UK there wasn't enough evidence to say whether it had an impact on children. Personally I think ipad as babysitter is more to blame, but until the proper studies are done it's all just speculation.
  - h4kunamata 4mo ago
    >Personally I think ipad as babysitter is more to blame, but until the proper studies are done it's all just speculation. Proper study?? Look around us, kids are talking to ChatGPT instead of running, playing, instead of being kids. Kids cannot speak and yet have a tablet to interact with, by adulthood those kids are cooked. Teens at school can't read, they have been using ChatGPT to cheat exams. If somebody tells me that more study is required to prove what is right there in from of our eyes, that somebody is part of the problem, full stop!!

benj111 4mo ago

From a UK politics perspective I don't really get this. New labour certainly have an authoritarian streak. I remember when they tried to introduce ID cards but there was a load of push back. But they are also somewhat friendlier to 'the youf' but this seems squarely aimed at the Daily Mail brigade. It just seems like they're trying to out conservative, the Conservatives. Maybe I'm trying to make sense out of something that isn't?

pSYoniK 3mo ago

I have submitted this before, but for those maybe a bit uncomfortable with setting up a VPS to act as an exit node for Wireguard, my article covers most things: https://psyonik.tech/posts/a-guide-for-wireguard-vpn-setup-with-pi-hole-adblock-and-unbound-dns/ https://psyonik.tech/posts/a-guide-for-wireguard-vpn-setup-w... For this particular use case, I would probably suggest something like OVH/Scaleway as they have nodes in France so physical distance between UK and "somewhere else" is low which will affect latency. If you're willing to wait longer and go further, I recommend Infomaniak (Switzerland - they have nodes in Geneva I think/Zurich). Hetzner (a crow favorite) hasn't been that good for me while I was in the UK, I was getting dropped packets even after switching a few VPSes, but might've just been something temporary.

nly 3mo ago

Been using a VPN on my phone and PC for 20 years. Always use non-UK exit points