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.
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Individual customer VPN providers get banned, corporate VPN providers not banned. It's quite simple really.
Or are you expecting the average Joe to spin up his own VPN server?
And how do you expect that to work on a technical level?
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.
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.
They looked at their calendar and thought "Oh shit!" when they saw they were overdue to start V for Vendetta.
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
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.
Because they are all fuckin crooked and all want to keep their power.
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
We didn't have a referendum on this though, and if we had done I don't think it would have passed
Don't forget the raging alcoholism
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
Labour has already spoken out and said they will make no attempts to ban VPNs.
Even the CCP can't stop VPNs... good luck UK
Most conventional VPNs, e.g. OpenVPN, WireGuard, AnyConnect, PPTP/L2TP, IKEv2/IPsec, etc., actually don't work in China. Technology-wise GFW is quite sophisticated and conventional VPNs are not designed for censorship circumvention anyway.
You'll have to use things like Shadowsocks or V2Ray, which is out of the reach of most people.
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.
Oh, sweet summer child. Of course you can ban them. Lawmakers don't always care about the technicality of things, because in most cases they don't have to.
You can't prevent VPN from existing, and short of a very tightly curated whitelist of services, you can't prevent people from actually using them, sure. Unless you're on the side of the state, the Law, and the enforcement. In which case, you can. A blanket ban on VPN usage is the perfect gateway to "we've seen traffic from your house toward a known VPN server, so, blam, arrest". And it does not have to stop at known server.
Given the regular tries to outright ban encryption, this is the perfect venue to mass target encrypted communications. Depending on the wording, the mere presence of unobservable traffic could be enough for an arrest.
If what I'm saying here sound dystopian to you, just remember that not only most of this was actually tried (and aborted) time after time, but also that until quite recently, the general public actually using strong encryption was illegal in many places, including our western countries, and experiments to make state spyware mandatory are also a recurrent thing (which might take hold with the "ID verification through your phone" apps soon).
Thanks for this. I think it's really important to point out that merely having unobservable traffic could be a trigger for this.
We can't avoid taking these threats seriously because we think we are smarter.
yup just did it this morning on my server because now I'm moving my stuff, yet again, away from European companies because of all this. it was painfully simple and easy. I just followed a guide I found on a linux blog and within 10minutes I had a VPN of my own up and running.
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.
Bonus points if you can route your personal VPN server through your VPN provider, the flow looks a little like this:
Client <—> Personal VPN server <—> VPN Provider
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.
This shows that this bill has shit all to do with the protection of children, it's just again the over reach of religious zealots
Can we please ban religions instead? This would ACTUALLY protect minors and just in general make the world such a better and more beautiful place.
Convert churches into museums for art and displaying the horrors of religion
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.
China 1.5
What if we all started using I2P for most stuff? The governments couldn't do anything about it.
"Hey! Stop using well known workarounds to my idiot demands! Surely this is brand new technology that no one could have known about!"
after reports in Guido Fawkes suggested it was possible.
That's the only source? A far-right conspiracy website?
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.