This isn’t a UK thing, it’s the entire developed world.
Multiple US states are considering it. Chat control in the EU is still a possibility. China and Russia already put efforts in restricting access.
Those in power are always trying to find a way to screw us over.
I miss when no politicians even understood what the internet was.
They still don’t, they’re just more embarrassed about it now that almost everyone else does.
Which leads to more overcompensating and thus stricter controls.
Ironically, the “series of tubes” politician gave a fair layman’s view of bandwidth. The quote was taken out of context.
Know what I miss? Remember when internet purchases were tax free? That lasted so long it blew my mind. When the US started applying sales tax, there wasn’t a whimper of protest.
I lived in the UK for over a decade.
Also lived in other countries in Europe for similar or greater periods.
Britain is definitely at least a decade or two “ahead” in this shit, plus they have very specific and highly entrenched problems around classism, hypocrisy, dynastic elites and how the scions of the elites are pretty much sent to the kind of private school (curiously called “public schools” in Britain) that specializes in turning them into sociopaths (being an “English Gentleman” isn’t actually about being honorable, it’s about maintaining a very specific complex image - complete with a unique non-regional accent - that conveys the impression that one comes from the upper classes).
It’s not by chance that the Snowden revelations showed that Britain was even worse than the US and, whilst in the US they actually walked back (for a while) the anti-constitutional elements of their state surveillance apparatus, in the UK they just retroactively made the whole thing legal and sent a bunch of D-Notices (the British censorship mechanism) to newspapers to shut them up.
Britain has great image management wrapped around a rotten core.
All good points. Been here nearly 50 years and not noticed most of it but then again I keep myself to my family. Or maybe it’s because I’m white so I don’t see the worst of it. I do find a lot of people around me are incredibly racist which is a real shame.
It really depends who you actually know directly.
The higher the social class the more the faking: whilst working class people are generally pretty straightforward, appearances management goes up as you go into the middle class (for example, think about how voiced judgment of quality are all inflated: “it’s interesting” actually means “it’s shit”, “ok” means “bad”, “great” means “mediocre/average”, “amazing” means “good” and so on) and upper class people are pretty much as a fake as it gets (and from the ones I actually knew personally, it wasn’t a thing done with bad intentions, it was purely them having been taught that “that’s how one is supposed to behave”, though that practice in being a fake can easily be leveraged for personal upside maximization with no regard for others)
Also it’s more an English thing than something from the other nations - certainly Scots and Irish are generally not like that.
For me it doesn’t help that before living in Britain I lived in The Netherlands, as the Dutch are probably the most blunt and direct people in Europe, so the contrast was glaring.
And yeah, as a side note, being white with blue eyes (and thus indistinguishable from the natives on appearance alone) I got a lot less racism in Britain than friends of mine with Black, Middle Eastern and even Indian ancestry. “Anti” Racism laws in Britain are all about stopping people from voicing racist things (i.e. they’re really just to manage appearances), but there is little or nothing pushing back on racist discrimination in the way one treats people, so people with different races just get treated different (just try and report a theft to the police whilst being Indian and see how much they care) whilst those doing it never actually voice racist opinions.
Forgive me because I’m not super familiar but like how would you prove someone is using a VPN? Like isn’t the whole idea that it masks where the user is actually from?
I’m afraid this makes me sound like an idiot but I’m genuinely curious
Outside of specific implementations like Tor’s snowflake protocol, it’s very easy for internet providers to see who’s using a VPN, the only thing it buys you is privacy at the other end (so they’ll know you’re using a VPN, just not know what you’re using the VPN to look at, hence why their panties are in a twist).
Other user answered the question accurately. I just wanted to say that asking doesn’t make you sound like an idiot. VPN companies intentionally market their products with the purpose of making people believe that they are some magic and untraceable secure system.
the way vpns are used now is not what they were designed for, and they are sold to layman users with promises they can’t fullfil.
vpn is virtual private network, and what is does is establishing encrypted connection between two vpn points.
(home network) --- (vpn server) ----- (unsecure internet) ----- (you) (A) -------------- (B) ------------ (x) ----- (x) --------- (C)you can now connect to your home network (which may be your company when you are on home office, or it may be your department of foreign affairs if you are your country’s embassy halfway around the world) using the vpn server, who authenticates you as a user and establishes encrypted connection to traverse the unsecure network.
it increases security in two main ways: the admin of the networks does not have to accept incoming connections from the whole internet, which reduces number of ways to attack the network.
the traffic going over the public internet and servers you have no control over is now encrypted and can`t be hijacked in the middle.
and it hides the route and traffic between
(B)and(C). for everyone in(A), your traffic seems to look coming from(B), they don`t know what is behind it.now using some public vpn service may help you pretend you are in another country (because the provider will provide you with server in that country, and no one sees the route between you and the server.
so you can now convince twitter you are black soccer mom in texas supporting trump, when you are actually gru officer in moscow.
but it is oversold to people as some super secure solution and people think it is more secure than it is. your traffic can no longer be intercepted between you and the vpn server, but can be intercepted anywhere behind it.
if you think you are some enemy of the state, it is actually much less secure. “the enemy” now have limited number of chokepoints where they can try to intercept the traffic, and doesn’t have to intercept all its little enemies independently. it is like if people voluntarily joined the line for some police checkpoint.
there are even conspiracy theories that some vpn providers and tor nodes may be directly operated by “the enemy” instead and if your data are really valuable (you are not a teenager trying to get to netflix, but you are say disident or journalist in some dictatorship country) then using tor, or vpn generally, may put target on your back - hey, these are data that are more likely to contain something interesting and may be worth monitoring.
long story short, vpn is designed to traverse unsecure public internet and connect you to some trusted network. the connection is allowed only to identified users and is encrypted and secure.
using it to connect to unsecure internet helps you
- get access to netflix show that may not be accesible in your location
- may help hide your identity (if the vpn server is in different jurisdiction, it can be complicated for law enforcement to get information)
- may be useful if you think your own internet provider is after you and you trust the vpn provider more (which is definitely not the case for me in europe, i trust my own isp more than some random vpn provider, someone in iran may be in different situation)
- anyone intercepting the traffic in your home provider’s network can see there is a connection between you and the vpn server, but can’t see the content, and can’t easily establish connection between you and outgoing data from the vpn server you are connected to.
and to asnwer your original question, if you operate your own vpn server at the remote location, no one will know. but if you use some public service for 5$/month, these and their servers are of course known.
One security/privacy feature touted by some companies is that they keep no logs and no records. Some even claim that their entire system runs in volatile memory so there is no possibility of data being recorded. Of course, you are trusting that they are both telling the truth and competently executing the system.
Of course, you are trusting that they are both telling the truth and competently executing the system.
that is the thing, you have to trust them. unless they are intentionally malicious actor and if the law of country where they resides allows it, then not keeping the logs is quite hassle-free and actually cheaper than otherwise, so there is a reason to trust them, but you never know.
That’s the thing with anything cybersecurity is trust. Unless you wrote all of the firmware and software and websites and webservers yourself you are ultimately placing trust in another entity.
VPNs are just a technical means of shifting trust. Corporations use VPNs for remote work because the VPN connects the employee to the corporate network which they already trust, rather than trusting whatever wifi the employee happens to connect to. For a consumer using a commercial VPN the only thing you’re doing is shifting your trust from the network provider to the VPN provider. You’re not even really hiding anything from websites thanks to modern browser fingerprint techniques, they just see “user #64742258 but from a known VPN endpoint instead of the usual Spectrum residential network in Maryland, 86% match”
That’s the thing with anything cybersecurity is trust.
luckily not everything, but i think about this every time i am using android keepass implementation written by god knows who 😆
They don’t have to be malicious if they are incompetent.
They could say they don’t use logs and not realize that their tech stack is actually keeping some sort of metadata or maybe using swap or something. Probably not as likely as the other scenarios, but I wouldn’t count it out completely.
Like Mullvad, or would you recommend anyone else?
Mullvad is often considered the gold standard of VPNs when it comes to privacy. It’s nice that they accept crypto and cash, and that they don’t tie the account to anything except an account number. That’s a layer of privacy that really goes above and beyond what a lot of other companies offer, beyond anything to do with the actual product
$5 a month isn’t bad, I’ll give it a shot.
I’ve been using it for a year or two without complaint. Only problem I’ve heard people talk about is lack of port forwarding for torrents. I still torrent on it without much issue though.
Ahh… yeah, sadly that’s most people’s reason for a VPN. 🫣
Using ProtonVPN here, because it gives me de-googled, private e-mail too.
I was looking at Proton, what are you paying monthly? Any negatives you can think of?
what are you paying monthly?
I have proton unlimited subscription that comes to about €10 per month (though you can often get temporary better deals for the first year or so), and that includes proton mail as well, which was my main reason for getting it. Just the VPN should be a bit cheaper.
Any negatives you can think of?
Not many. Speeds are good, and the IPs seem to have a better reputation than on Private Internet Access, for example: no captchas on google.com.
One recent change I was rather annoyed by is that they restricted the number of servers that are available with a manual wireguard configuration file to 10 per country, when hundreds are available through the app or browser extension.
I’ve had a few connectivity issues with the firefox browser extension as well, but nothing as of late.
What is your threat model exactly? What are you trying to protect against? Commercial VPNs have an extremely narriw spectrum of threats that they protect against, and most customers don’t realize this
For me it’s about separating online identities.
I don’t want adult sites to know anything about my real identity or location. I don’t want social network sites to know about my kinks or to be able to correlate my IP data with that of other people who may be on the same network. I don’t want online stores to know my ID on social network sites, or vice versa.
I do have separate browser profiles for each of my online identities, but they could still be tied together if I would use them from the same IP, so they each get a different VPN connection.
i am sorry, i don’t really follow market in this area, so i have no idea.
It’s like an internet glory hole. It stops the people monitoring your broadband from seeing exactly where you’re browsing and what you’re viewing, and it stops the people who run those websites from seeing exactly who you are.
But it’s entirely possible for your broadband provider to see that you’re standing at a glory hole with your junk out. And the people serving you the website can also see your junk through the hole.
Fantastic comparison thank you
No I think it’s much worse. They are thinking of adding an app on your device that’ll constantly monitor all media to see if it is CSAM and report to police.
Edit sources- techlore video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzmR4nt1rpE
Proposed bill https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/63901/documents/7465
For LEA - CSAM is the worst thing in the world and I do not support CSAM but this is not the way to combat it.
Great, that way we can have lots of false reports to eat up investigators’ time.
I’d be down for an initiative where 18 y.o. women and men send pictures to random phone numbers to swamp the police in reports.
Better yet send it to the politicians who vote for this bill
Jesus…
Jaysus
Do you have a sauce for that?
That seems way too draconian for labour to be able to get away with.
techlore video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzmR4nt1rpE
Proposed bill https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/63901/documents/7465
Yeah that’s what I mean it’s not an actual bill. It’s a proposal and any idiot can ride a proposal.
I thought you were saying that they were actually definitively going to implement this and I don’t think they are. It might even get as far as consideration but I can’t think of a situation where they can actually mandate this without a feasibility study. Which will be fun to look at.
This is just something that the loud mouths are pushing.
亲爱的英国同志们：
谢谢您对我们长城的支持
Dear Beloved British Comrades:
Thank you for showing support to our Great Wall!
🇨🇳🤝🇬🇧
Dear Americans: You’re next
Y’all it is not a coincidence that these authoritarian tactics are applied after years of successful resistance against genocide in Palestine. The U.K. is one of the only countries in the world where a Zionist arms supplier, Elbit, was forced to close a facility due to repeated direct action interference in operations. They are terrified that the internet is more resilient to conventional means of propaganda than what other forms of media are; which liberals have already spent a century trying to get under control. Combined with a perceived increased threat to “democracy” by Russian social media disinformation campaigns – which are somehow undesirable yet consistent with capitalistic imperatives – liberals are terrified of the internet’s ability to challenge their rule.
I think this counts as misinformation. How old is the ‘news’ source depicted in the top right?
I’m not aware that there are any plans to actually ban VPN use - that would be pretty ridiculous. What I am aware of is that members of the UK parliament are considering demanding that VPN providers verify the ages of their clients; but this is a bit of a different issue to the one insinuated in the post.
Every 4th article on lemmy talking about legislation is some bullshit that some bullshitter proposed. Any (US) state politician can “propose” legislation 2-seconds after they’re sworn in.
Some dipshit freshman from the Louisiana state House could propose banning lemmy and there would be serious discussions on the topic around here.
This would make current work from home tech stacks effectively illegal and would cause massive problems for industries with a lot of money and influence.
I think we may assume corporations would still be allowed to operate VPN. The ban would target commercial services that provide anonymity.
Well then just start a VPN service where everyone is an employee instead of an user. Problem solved.
Loopholes are allowed for corporations and the wealthy.
The rest of us live under a draconian implementation of the law.
“Rules for thee, not for me.”
I smell a business opportunity.
Firstly it’s not going to happen this is just something someone’s claim to they can make a thread. Zero sources posted.
Secondly I’d like to see you craft a law that allows corporate VPNs but not private VPNs and doesn’t have any loopholes in it.
Laws don’t need to be meticulously worded to be logically consistent. They just need to be selectively enforced, like most other laws, to have the desired effect.
Except that’s not how the law works.
If you want the law to work it has to be logically enforceable if it isn’t logically enforceable it will get challenged in court.
🎶 Fascists to the “left”, Fascists to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle again. 🎶
Friendly reminder that despite the flaws this is the best system we have the issue isn’t the system it’s human nature. We (collective) need to grow up.
The older I get the more I wonder if the drive for more power, more money, more control… It’s all just mental illness. We should not be applying laurels to the likes of Musk or Bezos. We should be addressing the underlying mental issue that has made an unhealthy disconnect from humanity.
I’m conflicted on this comment. I vehemently disagree that this is the best possible system we could have. But I also strongly agree with the rest lol.
That “best system” is what produces that mental illness.
The shit in Britain is definitely not “the best system we have”, and I say this having lived a decade there (were I was even involved in Politics for a bit) and also decades elsewhere in Europe hence having observed it first hand.
Britain is “interesting” in how power is controlled there, being at best very much at the low end of democratic, if at all democratic, with things like a head of state with some real power who inherits the post, a second chamber whose members are nominated or inherit their seats, no written Constitution and a First Past The Post voting system, plus the 5 decades of Neoliberalism having de facto made the State as a power secondary (maybe even subservient) to Money.
A performative vote which through Mathematical rigging for most people doesn’t really control how a country is managed and forces them into choosing “small evil” to stop “big evil”, with on top of it the very way the power structures are shaped robbing them of even more power to set the direction of the country, isn’t Democracy.
Totally disagree with that first paragraph. Don’t disagree with the rest.
I’m not saying it could never happen, but literally all this is a handful of MPs and lords making noise about shit they don’t understand.
There’s no plan for this. I don’t think we need to be quite so alarmist in a thread with literally zero sources posted anywhere.
The shitshow we are seeing currently started as a handful of MPs, lords and interest groups lobbying them to ban privacy.
I agree with you there mate. It’s worth keeping an eye on, but there’s not much to see just yet that warrants some of the reactions in here! HNY bud.
They’re was talk of age verification for buying a VPN, but not of an outright ban.
Not great, but not the end of the world either since credit cards are only available to over 18s anyway. If your VPN accepts anonymous payments then whatever.
Banned protesting under the guise of “preventing terrorism” banning VPN and creating sweeping oppressive online surveillance under the guise of “protecting the children”.
Those who would trade their liberty for false promises of safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Kind of wrong. I think even the foolish and politically disempowered deserve liberty and safety.
Maybe its skyrocketed because the misnamed “online safety act” does nothing useful and just gets in the way of people trying to use the internet!
A lot of government ministers like to just say random shit. It doesn’t mean there’s any sort of policy.
I can’t imagine Starmer really wants to piss off even more the electret right now. The online safety act has been hugely unpopular and the people they expected to cheer them on haven’t done so. Mostly because people with kids also want to access content without having to submit a licence. Also the general consensus that the checks are been performed by the lowest bidder and it’s only a matter of time before there’s a data breach.
Russians, Iranians and Chinese did a fuckton of work to develop protocols that bypass this kinda shit, you’ll be fine
Labour have completed Blair’s project and become the quintessential centrist libfash party.
All y’all Americans who like Buttegieg or Newsom, this is what you’re trying to get for yourselves.
Newsom sucks, but California doesn’t have laws like this.
Starmer didn’t suck this bad until he got PM either.
True.
A place where entertainment and tech industries hold much of the economic and political power? Oh, it’s coming.
Corporate Office owners overjoyed.
Yeah which is exactly why it’s not happening. You’ll notice there’s no source provided because it’s just some scaremongering tactic that idiots like to post online trying to generate some controversy out of thin air, because they’re bored.
Labour or are quite shit it is to be said, but they’re not suicidally stupid. Which this is.
