Hello ,
As the title says what happens if theUK requires age verification for VPN’s or makes it illegal to use them?
Does that mean everyone will move to tor or I2P?
It seems if the UK gov keep pushing their agenda under the guise of protecting children people will increasingly go dark .
I guess what I’m asking is how does everyone think this will unfold?
M
With the Tories soon you can’t go online if your webcam is off. The UK has not longer something to do with the EU, it’s more and more like the US. The UK always was very curious monitoring the nettraffic since a lot of years.
I’m already using the Shadowsocks bridge in Mullvad. If things get more serious, I’ll do some research and consider switching to Tor with either obfs4 or WebTunnel on Tails, and Snowflake on mobile.
Yes, this way they need 2 seconds more to track you, if they want. TOR is the most monitored Network by all security agencies and secret services, it was created by these. I2P is maybe somewhat more secure. Decentralized network is anyway the future, also P2P communications.
I2P is brilliant, yes, but I can’t use it for clearnet sites.
Besides, in this case I would be using it purely for tunneling without detection by my ISP. Anonymity would be more of a bonus.
I2P certainly is not the clearnet, but if they continue to contaminate the clearnet with massive surveillance, there are not much more alternatives if you don’t want to go back to communicate with Finger commands like in the 70th (still works, see also this)
I hope they’re dumb enough to just ban VPNs … and completely halt half the corporations from working, because any WFH or remote accessing is built on VPNs.
Hell, it might just make using Zscaler illegal, one of the biggest cybersecurity tools in the corporate world!
Just use a VPN outside the country or lease a low end VPS outside the country with decent bandwidth and host your own VPN endpoint. They can’t force ISPs to block all of the VPN protocols in general or they’ll lose a ton of businesses that rely on it for basic security of remote/traveling employees.
Even if they did, you can run VPNs over https, or make Tor disguise itself as other kinds of web traffic.
If the UK is serious about blocking VPNs that don’t comply they’ll mostly succeed for the big ones. They’ll get them removed from app stores which will prevent most normies from finding and using them. They’ll apply network blocks to their entrance IP addresses (laughably easy, there are commercial vendors who sell data like this so they don’t even need to invent the wheel here) and make it difficult. They wouldn’t be able to prevent truly determined VPN providers from providing service but the days of $4/month for privacy/torrenting would be gone as the prices would likely be higher and you’d have to do things like mail cash.
Beyond the known IPs, VPN traffic is fairly easy to flag with DPI solutions and could be detected and blocked or dropped by ISPs acting under the law. This could also be used to stop people running tunnels to hosted VPS solutions outside of the country or run by friends from their homes. There are obviously ways around these, disguising traffic, various techniques but for most people they’d give up and either stop browsing porn or cough up their ID. Of course this would create a dangerous state of affairs where anyone using a VPN without being KYC’ed is clearly a criminal, at the very least a suspected video pirate, at the most a dangerous child predator or terrorist.
Additionally the UK isn’t like Russia or China, lots of western CEOs and employees pass through and within its jurisdictions and if a particular VPN is providing service without this they could try and arrest c-suite people or engineering staff associated with it and slam them with jail time. So that’s a problem.
I know you aren’t saying this. But it’s not just porn that’s the issue. It’s the wider scope this act encompasses and a trend other govs could follow. I use porn sure , but imagine your facial and sexual preferences leaking. What if you come from a religious family and you’re a lesbian and pitted by this?
Make good connections with people you trust internationally. If it really comes down to it, between friends, people who care could work together to set up SOCKS5 tunnels or some such to walk around it pretty cleanly, but you would really have to trust whoever you give credentials to since they would be using your internet connection for whatever. Could also straight up just install the OpenVPN server for this.
Once or twice I have opened a tunnel to friends on one of my servers through a bastion host - any outgoing traffic from the server goes through my own VPN, so it wouldn’t matter if they couldn’t access a VPN in their country.
For anyone who doesn’t care to learn, which in my experience is the vast majority of all people, not much can be done. Even the people I meet who say they do feel that they care deeply mainly just like to be loud about that, but never actually put in the work to learn how to do something as simple as use
ssh -D, let alone learn how a proxy actually functions.I suppose the best those in the know can do is to make it clear that they do know. Should friends actually begin to care, then they will know who to go to for possible solutions.
