Technology

Funny how its always so important to ban useful and empowering things for citizens in the name of safety but someone we can't ban business practices that cause mass extinctions, change the climate, impoverish the working class or kill enough of us to only be seen as a statistic instead of people. If they actually cared about safety, they would be banning the things that cause mass suffering and death, not VPNs. We should be opposed to these kinds of bans on the principle that it further disempowered us so we are less able to deal with the threats of all the mass suffering and death that they refuse to keep us safe from.

Lol what is going on over there. The UK is becoming more dystopian by the day.

If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems

Your law is the difficult problem you daft cunt

Yeah, businesses will not accept this. Remote work and remote connections rely on VPN for ALL KINDS OF SHIT. If you must adhere to some kinds of government compliance, it is even MANDATED BY THE FUCKING GOVERNMENT. Explain to me how the hell that is going to just poof and not cause all kinds of problems.

Even the CCP can't stop VPNs... good luck UK

To me it looks like every government in the world is pro-surveillance and anti-privacy; they're just all at different stages of depth into those ideologies done in practice. Privacy and anti-surveillance against foreign governments and corporations, pro for domestic. And I continue decade after decade to say that you should fear your domestic government far more than any foreign unless you're a country that may have US and allies bombing/droning and paratrooping your country. Countries with a modern enough military mostly have to worry about their own government rather than foreign governments

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

How is this even feasible? People need them for work, business, school etc. The UK is going nuts with the attempts to regulate the internet.

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

The linked story has been updated. The headline now reads:

Labour rules out VPN ban in UK but issues warning to UK households

Labour won't ban the use of Virtual Private Networks

And the story begins:

Labour has ruled out a possible VPN ban after reports thousands of UK households were at risk following the Online Safety Act kicking in under the government. Labour Party Tech Secretary Peter Kyle has revealed that the Government is "not considering a VPN ban" - after reports in Guido Fawkes suggested it was possible.

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

Labour has already spoken out and said they will make no attempts to ban VPNs.

People are "at risk"... of what? What a terrible article to not even clarify what the risk is. Because it sounds to me like the government is who put those people at risk by making them go look for solutions to a draconian policy.

this is obviously such a dumpster fire that I can't help but wonder, "When will they realize how dumb this is and back out of it?"

then i remember that Brexit happened

fuckin stubbornness is a national identity for you blokes innit

You cant ban vpns, its easy for tech people to set up a vpn server on any server on the internet and connect to it. Wireguard for example, super simple.

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.

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.

for those in the UK and/or Other places in Europe just know it's so painfully easy to either set up your own VPN or just use something like Mullvad.

I set up my own VPN this morning for the first time on my server and it took less than 10minutes. plenty of guides online on how to do it.

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.

after reports in Guido Fawkes suggested it was possible.

That's the only source? A far-right conspiracy website?

Reddit already tried to block VPN users.

Expect the corpos to bend the knee.

What if we all started using I2P for most stuff? The governments couldn't do anything about it.

I don't think it's even possible to get rid of VPNs without outright banning encryption. If I set up a VPN that uses an obscure port and the traffic is encrypted, how are they going to know it's even a VPN?

Can't wait for the next election to kick out the Tories so can roll back all their draconian bills.