UK PEOPLE: this is REALLY IMPORTANT.
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@cstross just to point out that Linux, Android and other things have a VPN built in so the results will actually be even more idiotic.
It will also stop trans kids using Tor to get info, something I am sure labour think is a huge win@etchedpixels @cstross I'm not sure that TOR is a "VPN". It's not an encrypted tunnel, it's a distributed internet packet routing system.
But it rather depends on what any law defines a VPN as. Something that lawmakers will have a lot of fun with!
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@cstross It's impossible to restrict access to VPNs.
They could perhaps persuade some of the big providers to add access controls, but that would only result in more people using smaller or even self-hosted VPN services.
You can't un-invent encryption algorithms.
Self-hosted VPNs already have age verification. I know 100% of the people who use my own WireGuard tunnel (i.e. me) and all of them are over 18.
The same is true of corporate VPNs: credentials are given only to employees and they are over 18 for various existing legal reasons.
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For those who don’t believe that an ordinary commercial VPN service can improve your privacy, here’s a simple experiment you can run at home: Get two similar computers, one with a VPN and one without. Use them both to download Hollywood movies through bittorrent, and see which one results in notifications of incoming lawsuits from movie studios.
Fortunately, there’s no need to do this experiment yourself. Millions of people around the world have already done it for you.
I know a bunch of people who did this without a VPN and didn't get any legal notices. The worst that they got was bandwidth throttling from their ISP.
If you have a VPN, then it's trivial for someone in the right jurisdiction to subpoena the VPN provider and require them to provide data on which account was responsible. Asking an ISP and asking a VPN provider for this information are no different, and both may have legal obligations to keep the information to be able to answer this kind of question (and, even when they don't, may have commercial incentives because their choice is often something like 'tell us who was using your service to attack Google's servers, or the entire Google infrastructure will block or severely rate limit every IP range that you own').
If you use something like Tor, no one has this data, but last time I heard of someone torrenting over Tor they were getting MODEM levels of speed.
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RE: https://social.vivaldi.net/@LonM/115966748145817371
UK PEOPLE: this is REALLY IMPORTANT. If the government bans under-16s from using VPNs, then logically they must intend to REQUIRE AGE VERIFICATION FOR ALL VPN USE. Which will affect adults too!
*Your* privacy and right to anonymous web browsing is at risk!
@cstross signed
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@david_chisnall @cstross But it's almost impossible for a government to detect a VPN service that doesn't have age restrictions. Unless it's one of the big well-known ones.
A foreign entity could set them up, or someone aged less than 16 for themselves (and perhaps also their mates).
You need:
1. A cheap server, anywhere in the world, connected to the internet.
2. VPN server software, available for free from lots of places.
3. Some instructions, easily available. -
@david_chisnall @cstross But it's almost impossible for a government to detect a VPN service that doesn't have age restrictions. Unless it's one of the big well-known ones.
A foreign entity could set them up, or someone aged less than 16 for themselves (and perhaps also their mates).
You need:
1. A cheap server, anywhere in the world, connected to the internet.
2. VPN server software, available for free from lots of places.
3. Some instructions, easily available.@Fonant @david_chisnall Doesn't matter: if the law goes on the books then at any point where your phone/laptop/etc is seized for other reasons it may be discovered to have an illegal VPN and then you get prosecuted.
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@cstross it's really not that useful a first step.
It's just what the VPN industry has drummed into us with ubiquitous marketing.
Just install the "tor browser". It's free, cross platform and provides much more privacy than any VPN.
If you need true anonymity then use a privacy focused OS like "tails" - also free and uses TOR internally
Even better, these tools cannot be blocked or gated by governments.
VPNs are largely useless things sold by people who want your money.
@oschonrock
I'm assuming that this is the government's intention. To produce a generation of teenagers who understand TOR, and choose to use it as a first step, using their phones as routers and randomised exit points.
@cstross -
@Fonant @david_chisnall Doesn't matter: if the law goes on the books then at any point where your phone/laptop/etc is seized for other reasons it may be discovered to have an illegal VPN and then you get prosecuted.
@cstross @david_chisnall That assumes that I do something that is bad enough for government to seize my computer.
Unless they do, there is no way (without GCHQ spending a lot of time and effort) that a VPN ban could be enforced.
If I did do something that got the attention of the security services, having a VPN without age restrictions is going to be the least of my problems!
It's the same as the Online Safety Act. It makes a lot of noise, but is almost entirely unenforceable (see: Ofcom's fine for 4chan).
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RE: https://social.vivaldi.net/@LonM/115966748145817371
UK PEOPLE: this is REALLY IMPORTANT. If the government bans under-16s from using VPNs, then logically they must intend to REQUIRE AGE VERIFICATION FOR ALL VPN USE. Which will affect adults too!
*Your* privacy and right to anonymous web browsing is at risk!
@cstross It's ALWAYS about control and NEVER about protecting the kids. The latter would require adults to ensure safe spaces for children, which is hard, and undesirable for a plethora of other nefarious reasons; hence, GeStaPo Blitzkrieg it is. @craignicol
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@cstross @david_chisnall That assumes that I do something that is bad enough for government to seize my computer.
Unless they do, there is no way (without GCHQ spending a lot of time and effort) that a VPN ban could be enforced.
If I did do something that got the attention of the security services, having a VPN without age restrictions is going to be the least of my problems!
It's the same as the Online Safety Act. It makes a lot of noise, but is almost entirely unenforceable (see: Ofcom's fine for 4chan).
@Fonant @david_chisnall You Are Wrong. The government can seize your computer and *then* search it, if you did something else. Consider why rape prosecutions in the UK collapsed since 2018—cops routinely seized and searched rape victims' phones for evidence of contact with the alleged rapist before or after the incident, so they stopped coming forward.
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@Fonant @david_chisnall Doesn't matter: if the law goes on the books then at any point where your phone/laptop/etc is seized for other reasons it may be discovered to have an illegal VPN and then you get prosecuted.
Unless I misunderstood the proposed law, it's the VPN operator that would be prosecuted in this case. They may lose their ability to take money from people in the UK.
If I'm over 18, it is not illegal for me to use the VPN, so someone would have to prove that I am using it but no one checked that I was over 18. If I am under 18, then the provider is at more legal risk but they could claim that they did age verification and this user managed to bypass it somehow.
The simplest way of doing age verification is to require a payment from a credit card in your name. The easiest way of bypassing this is to use a parent's credit card. If a company takes payment for VPN use via credit card, and makes a minimal effort to not accept debit cards or pre-paid cards for folks in the UK, they're probably okay.
Which doesn't mean that this is in any way a sensible law.
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Unless I misunderstood the proposed law, it's the VPN operator that would be prosecuted in this case. They may lose their ability to take money from people in the UK.
If I'm over 18, it is not illegal for me to use the VPN, so someone would have to prove that I am using it but no one checked that I was over 18. If I am under 18, then the provider is at more legal risk but they could claim that they did age verification and this user managed to bypass it somehow.
The simplest way of doing age verification is to require a payment from a credit card in your name. The easiest way of bypassing this is to use a parent's credit card. If a company takes payment for VPN use via credit card, and makes a minimal effort to not accept debit cards or pre-paid cards for folks in the UK, they're probably okay.
Which doesn't mean that this is in any way a sensible law.
@david_chisnall @cstross The government has to discover that there is an illegal VPN being used in the first place.
It is quite possible for millions of VPNs to be made available to UK children, hosted all over the world. Perhaps hosted by children, sharing the small monthly server costs. Quite secret, extremely difficult to find.
The proposed law could only ever hope to apply to a few big VPN companies. Which just moves the VPN usage by children underground, where other dangers lurk.
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@Fonant @david_chisnall You Are Wrong. The government can seize your computer and *then* search it, if you did something else. Consider why rape prosecutions in the UK collapsed since 2018—cops routinely seized and searched rape victims' phones for evidence of contact with the alleged rapist before or after the incident, so they stopped coming forward.
@cstross @david_chisnall I'm not planning to do anything that would result in the government seizing my computer
There is no way the government can know whether or not I use a VPN or not, nor whether I use TOR.
Unless the law allows the police to randomly inspect people's computers, and they do this to a significant proportion of the population, I can use any VPN I like without fear. We don't live in a police state yet...
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RE: https://social.vivaldi.net/@LonM/115966748145817371
UK PEOPLE: this is REALLY IMPORTANT. If the government bans under-16s from using VPNs, then logically they must intend to REQUIRE AGE VERIFICATION FOR ALL VPN USE. Which will affect adults too!
*Your* privacy and right to anonymous web browsing is at risk!
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@fazalmajid Right, so that would require me to learn and install OpenBSD and a full stack. (The last BSD I used in anger was SunOS 4.1.3.)
@cstross there are others, like Argo, or Streisand (linked in the README), but more annoying because they unnecessarily require you to have Ansible installed on your system.
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RE: https://social.vivaldi.net/@LonM/115966748145817371
UK PEOPLE: this is REALLY IMPORTANT. If the government bans under-16s from using VPNs, then logically they must intend to REQUIRE AGE VERIFICATION FOR ALL VPN USE. Which will affect adults too!
*Your* privacy and right to anonymous web browsing is at risk!
The assumption is that the govt needs to implement age verification for an ostensibly sensible reason (in this case preventing under-16s accessing unsuitable material), but in reality age verification is often no different to identity verification and so by extension the govt ends up verifying the identity of the user of every mobile device, which thanks to the general dependency on Apple and Google phones would give the govt the ability to identify and track anyone with a smartphone.
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@Fonant @david_chisnall You Are Wrong. The government can seize your computer and *then* search it, if you did something else. Consider why rape prosecutions in the UK collapsed since 2018—cops routinely seized and searched rape victims' phones for evidence of contact with the alleged rapist before or after the incident, so they stopped coming forward.
@cstross @david_chisnall I agree. Allowing for inspection of innocent people's personal computers is both unacceptable and also counter-productive for law enforcement.
The police are not going to be randomly doing "illegal VPN inspections" on everyone. They can only target the few big public VPN services, and persuade them to add age verification.
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@oschonrock
I'm assuming that this is the government's intention. To produce a generation of teenagers who understand TOR, and choose to use it as a first step, using their phones as routers and randomised exit points.
@cstrossI have no idea if that is their intention. Highly doubt it, given how clueless they are.
The smart ones will use TOR bridges so it's even less trackable.
But then you were probably being sarcastic, and well, I agree. That's what happens when you put stupid logs in people's way.. they learn to jump over them. And some will break their legs doing it.
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@cstross @david_chisnall I'm not planning to do anything that would result in the government seizing my computer
There is no way the government can know whether or not I use a VPN or not, nor whether I use TOR.
Unless the law allows the police to randomly inspect people's computers, and they do this to a significant proportion of the population, I can use any VPN I like without fear. We don't live in a police state yet...
@Fonant @david_chisnall Sure you're not planning on doing anything. That doesn't mean it won't happen to you. Remember, "if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear" was a favourite saying of Lavrenti Beria.
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So in the context of this discussion, and if you lived in the UK, would you object to being age/identity verified when purchasing your vpn subscription?
It is almost certainly not an annonymous transaction anyway, as those are very very difficult to execute..?
@oschonrock @PeterSommerlad @cstross I'm presuming they'd want to check your age every time you USE a VPN connection? Otherwise the restriction on underage use would be meaningless.
