UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill
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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?
Attached below is a Wireshark trace I obtained by sniffing my own network traffic.
I want to draw your attention to this part in particular:
Underneath "User Datagram Protocol", you can see the words "OpenVPN Protocol". So anyone who sniffs my traffic on the wire can see exactly the same thing that I can. While they can't read the contents of the payload, they can tell that it's OpenVPN traffic because the headers are not encrypted. So if a router wanted to block OpenVPN traffic, all they would have to do is drop this packet. It's a similar story for Wireguard packets. An attacker can read the unencrypted headers and learn
- The size of the transmission
- The source and destination IP addresses by reading the IP header
- The source and destination ports numbers by reading the TCP or UDP headers
- The underlying layers, up until the point it hits an encrypted protocol (such as OpenVPN, TLS, or SSH)
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I doubt their corpo overlords would allow a VPN ban considering the amount of companies that use them.
It would be trivial for them to write it so it bans it for citizen use but is allowed for corporate and government use. The people have no rights anymore
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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.
We arent smarter. Actually most people here have no voice or influence outside of their computer screen.
We can use some tech, sure. But I very much challenge the idea that we are smarter as a group than other university students.
But since a lot of us have poor social skills, we compensate by thinking we are smarter or better, when we should instead train our social skills and stop thinking like that.
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They couldn't switch off VPNs for businesses. I work in a hospital and we use VPNs to create secure tunnels to other third party health care companies as well as NHS adjacent health services amongst other things. This is to protect patient sensitive data amongst other things. This would cripple our service and go against NHS england and government requirements for the secure transfer and sharing of data.
This would have to be public VPNs only. Despite the fact that it would be complete bullshit either way.
Well, you could just go back to sending stuff by fax machine forever, but then instead of even using the fax machine to sync patient data just make the patients fill out their own entire medical history from scratch every time they go to a different doctor and take their word for it.
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We arent smarter. Actually most people here have no voice or influence outside of their computer screen.
We can use some tech, sure. But I very much challenge the idea that we are smarter as a group than other university students.
But since a lot of us have poor social skills, we compensate by thinking we are smarter or better, when we should instead train our social skills and stop thinking like that.
I agree, but I think it is a trap we can easily fall into. Especially in this case.
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I agree, but I think it is a trap we can easily fall into. Especially in this case.
Yeah I agree. We have to wake up a bit. Real change happens outside of this place.
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Prominent backbench MP Sarah Champion launched a campaign against VPNs previously, saying: “My new clause 54 would require the Secretary of State to publish, within six months of the Bill’s passage, a report on the effect of VPN use on Ofcom’s ability to enforce the requirements under clause 112.
"If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems.” And the Labour Party said there were “gaps” in the bill that needed to be amended.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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
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You're literally being Jimmy Salvile right now
~ Guy who posed for photo ops with Salvile twenty years ago
Omg my brother amd I went to see Rolf Harris when we were kids and he invited my brother onto the stage. So woerd to think of now
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Prominent backbench MP Sarah Champion launched a campaign against VPNs previously, saying: “My new clause 54 would require the Secretary of State to publish, within six months of the Bill’s passage, a report on the effect of VPN use on Ofcom’s ability to enforce the requirements under clause 112.
"If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems.” And the Labour Party said there were “gaps” in the bill that needed to be amended.
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.
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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.
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Prominent backbench MP Sarah Champion launched a campaign against VPNs previously, saying: “My new clause 54 would require the Secretary of State to publish, within six months of the Bill’s passage, a report on the effect of VPN use on Ofcom’s ability to enforce the requirements under clause 112.
"If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems.” And the Labour Party said there were “gaps” in the bill that needed to be amended.
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
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The problem is that content filters don't work all that well in the age of https everywhere. I mean, you can block the pornhub.com domain, that's fairly straightforward ... but what about reddit.com which has porn content but also legitimately non-porn content. Or closer to home: any lemmy instance.
I think it would be better if politicians stopped pearl clutching and realized that porn perhaps isn't the worst problem in the world. Tiktok and influencer brainrot, incel and manosphere stuff, rage baiting social media, etc. are all much worse things for the psyche of young people, and they're doing exactly jack shit about that.
That's a problem is for ISPs and content providers to figure out. I don't see why the government has to care other than laying out the ground rules - you must offer and implement a parental filter for people who want it for free as part of your service. If ISPs have to do deep packet inspection and proxy certs for protected devices / accounts then that's what they'll have to do.
As far as the government is concerned it's not their problem. They've said what should happen and providing the choice without being assholes to people over 18 who are exercising their rights to use the internet as they see fit.
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That's a problem is for ISPs and content providers to figure out. I don't see why the government has to care other than laying out the ground rules - you must offer and implement a parental filter for people who want it for free as part of your service. If ISPs have to do deep packet inspection and proxy certs for protected devices / accounts then that's what they'll have to do.
As far as the government is concerned it's not their problem. They've said what should happen and providing the choice without being assholes to people over 18 who are exercising their rights to use the internet as they see fit.
@arc99 @SpaceCadet thats basically allowing the Government to force the ISP's to build a solution which is able to sensor every content. Sorry there is alot of reasons why you should be against it.
PS: even your deep packet inspection falls short to end 2 end encryption / decryption ...
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Parents should monitor what their kids are doing not the government
While I agree wholeheartedly with this, it's often not that easy.
Back in the days of 28.8 modems my parents found my little bro's downloaded porn stash. It was in a Zip disk in his underwear drawer. They then locked down both of our AOL accounts so we couldn't see that stuff.
I thought this was bullshit because I kept my Zip disk full of porn next to all the other ones and labeled it "Homework." Why should I get punished if I didn't get caught?
So I downloaded a keylogger, stole my dad's password, and unlocked my account and continued to download porn.
However, I don't think government regulation would have worked in my case.
That's the other issue, kids will find ways around it they always have when it comes to restrictions.
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That's the other issue, kids will find ways around it they always have when it comes to restrictions.
Tell some kid they get all the porn they want if they figure out fusion power and we’d have it in a fortnight.
Took me about that long to figure out how to boot up silently, resume downloads, and shutdown the pc before my dad woke up for work.
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Tell some kid they get all the porn they want if they figure out fusion power and we’d have it in a fortnight.
Took me about that long to figure out how to boot up silently, resume downloads, and shutdown the pc before my dad woke up for work.
Yeah never underestimate a horney teenager haha.
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What if we all started using I2P for most stuff? The governments couldn't do anything about it.
Good idea, for sure.
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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.
The Russians also have some pretty good tools.
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The Great Firewall doesn't block by protocol. If you set up your own OpenVPN server, you can still connect to it. I've done this many times in my trips to China, and it's worked fine. That being said, they still do seem to throttle connections to international servers, though this happens to all servers, even those that are not blocked. There are many clandestine VPN operators in China who spin up their own VPN servers and sell the service. They are mostly OpenVPN-based.
My university used Cisco AnyConnect, and I was able to successfully connect to the university VPN servers as well.
The limited experimentation I have conducted seems to indicate that the Great Firewall blocks by IP and not by protocol.
And how do they update that IP list? Manually?
If you set up your own overseas server, it's gonna be ok for a few days for sure. But they update the block list automatically so people had to e.g. use CloudFlare websocket as a jump host to avoid switching providers every other month. Of cos CF is mostly blocked these days too so it's probably just easier to offload the work to those VPN operators you mentioned.Universities are a different matter. They use Edu network and there used to be no censorship at all in Edu IPv6. Nowadays it's still relatively easy for them to get exemptions for their labs and whatnot.
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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
