Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that With the UK's Online Safety Act (OSA) now in effect, it was only a matter of time before tech-savvy under-18s figured out how to bypass the rules and regain access to adult content. The more creative wangled the "robust" selfie-based verification systems by using the in-game selfie feature in the Death Stranding sequel, which …
People under authoritarian regimes always found workarounds. That never meant the system was acceptable - just that people were forced to survive it.
In the USSR, samizdat (hand-copied banned books) spread underground because censorship was total. In East Germany, people built illegal radio receivers in walls to listen to Western news. In Maoist China, people whispered criticism in code or wrote letters they never sent. In Iran, people use Tor, proxies, or burn phones to get past internet blocks - all just to read or speak freely.
None of those workarounds were signs of freedom. They were desperate responses to repression.
So when someone in the UK says, “just create a virtual PC in another region,” as a fix for overreaching surveillance or censorship, it’s worth asking: Why should we need to? That’s not a solution. That’s a red flag. A free country doesn’t make you tunnel your traffic to dodge your own government.
Britain is not immune to authoritarian creep - it just wears a nicer suit. Rights erode slowly, then all at once. Ask anyone who’s lived through it.
The opposite of 'Christian moral code' is 'non-Christian moral code', not no moral code. At least try to make a sensible argument.
You might also try reading this year's World Happiness Report before claiming that any particular religious moral code is the primary driver of a happy society.
@corpse char. National Socialist Security services were atheist as all true believers. They sent believers in transcendence to the camps along with mediums and fortune tellers, contrary to movie myths. .BTW, how many meanings does fascist have these days. In 1970s it was up to 70.
Reform have said they will repeal the act, and Labour are already unlikely to win another election this decade, by- or general. Everything Labour has done since they got in has shovelled votes towards Reform, and censoring the internet was the final nail in their political coffin.
I know it was a Tory law but Labour were in the seat when it was passed, so they will take the bulk of the flack. Reform doubly benefit by placing themselves in opposition to both Labour and Tory, as there was cross party support.
All Labour had to be was competent, and not piss off large sections of the public with idiocy, yet they did that repeatedly, did U turns, but won't do one here. Amateur hour. It's depressing how incompetent they have been.
We have had content blocks at ISP level and with mobile services for years. They were a click away, offering people a choice, without risking their personal information. People not using them was not an excuse to turn the UK into a skint version of China.
Don't blame the government, blame those that put them in. We have too many different groups with different desires. The Tory group wants things to go back to 1950 when we were, allegedly, a world power still. Labour have never really known what they want; they were born out of the trades union movement but with de-industrialisation an the successful denigration of union power their traditional base is significantly eroded. Then the Lib Dems, who like to see themselves as moderate Tories or moderate Labour, but shape-shift where ever they are to garner votes.
Then there are the Greens. A rising power, especially among the young, but as their electoral base grows, their principles come into conflict with the desires of the electorate -- so they sometimes don't want pylons in their constituencies. And then we come to Reform. This is the very bottom of the barrel. They don't think. They hate foreigners, well unless they are white, oh and speak perfect English, oh and come from those English foreign lands (you know, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA even).
None of these groups actually want to pay for anything. They all want someone else to pay. We must keep our services going, but don't ask me for more Council Tax or more Income Tax or more Road Tax or ... Get the 1% to pay for everything.
So until you look at all the scum who are voting for someone else to take the pain to fix their lives, NOTHING will get better. And as long as there is -- hey look, a rabbit -- things will not get better.
"Then there are the Greens" "They don't think"
Never a truer word said. I do find it funny when people make a big deal about reform candidates being 'young and inexperienced' yet never say the same about equally young and equally inexperienced greens or other candidates from similar activist parties.
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
The Tories passed it.
Labour allowed it to be enacted and implemented.
Labour sat and allowed Ofcom to pass the implementation date without providing meaningful guidance on what constitutes a "small" provider, leading to forum operators such as GoL throwing in the towel and closing their services.
Labour could have kicked it to the back burner. They could have repealed it. They could have done something else or amended the problematic bits.
They didn't. And now we've got the Technology Secretary saying anyone who opposes it is a supporter of child molestors and Jimmy Saville (because it was Fromage who called this out. As dirty as we all get to feel about this).
I don't know anyone who voted Labour who thought Starmer and Labour under him would be as bad as it has been.
There was little choice; vote Labour and get the Tories out, vote Lib-Dem or Green, split the vote, and leave Tories in power,
All Starmer and Labour had to do was not make things worse, ideally make some things a little better. They have fucked that up completely handing Farage and Reform the golden opportunity to win the next election.
I don't know if it's fair to give Labour all the credit. The Conservatives were in power for so long Labour have a while yet until they break even.
On the other hand, since I'm fairly sure the reg has been quoting various security experts about why this is a pretty bad idea for nearly the past quarter of a century, you can definitely say they are pushing ahead at a competitive rate. It is not like the reasons this is a bad idea are not well documented.
MPs don't read the reg, but MPs listen to their electorate, and it's the old folks in their electorate who vote. The old folk love it when someone says ban it! And especially if it stops those 'orrible young 'uns from doing something.
QED
MPs don't read the reg, but MPs listen to their electorate, and it's the old folks in their electorate who vote. The old folk love it when someone says ban it!
That's just a tad ageist. I'm a happily COG who's pointed out the stupidity and futility of this Act, even as far as trying to explain why to my MP. MPs might not read El Reg, but there are legions of advisors and civil servants who do, and should have more access.. Unless those advisors are maybe lobbying on behalf of VPN providers. Plus MPs all have to use VPNs to access government services, even if they may not realise it, or understand it. Or just use their own methods to bypass security and end up leaking things they shouldn't.
And government also has the ability to ask their own in-house experts like GCHQ or CESG, trade groups like the LINX or even Vultures. Or ask if El Reg could maybe run a story, and then have a look at the comments.. Where we'd freely point out this was a f'ng stupid bit of legislation.. Except of course the OSA is really a bit of enabling legislation to support a slew of other authoritarian measures. Pitch it as something cuddly, like protecting children, gloss over how it can also be used to censor any discussion of say, Ukrainian rent boys who might have been arson around with a prominent MP.
And especially if it stops those 'orrible young 'uns from doing something.
Well, when I was an 'orrible young 'un, I supported my computer habit by flogging ciggies & pron mags behind the bike sheds. Or whatever bit of the playground I was supposed to be 'supervising'. Then almost getting expelled for charging people to be prefects. Having 'Head Prefect' on a CV isn't always a sign of good character I guess.
But today's me would probably be charging my fellow pupils £10 or more to set up their VPNs, or maybe renting them access to an AWS or other remote server so they could use that. My partner's son is 14 and making decent money renting out Minecraft and other game servers. Which is good because he doesn't need pocket money. But it's one of those things that will spread around the playground like wildfire & kids have already been doing for years to watch US shows, anime etc.
"Blaming labour for a law pasted by the last conservative government is pretty low "
Funny, Liebour have no problems ignoring, forgetting or rewriting any laws they don't like - especially those created by the Tories. But they chose to carry on with this one. What does that tell you about how they regard "their" citizens?
It's a bit like when Liebour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown finally brought in the requirement for everybody to have an Identity Card - although that soon changed because at least those two had the sense to see where that was headed. The current lot are so convinced of their own inherent superiority to the plebian masses they were elected to govern that they really do think they can do no wrong, and that the "little people" will either see how wise and beneficent their rule is or will be so overawed that they will simply accept anything Suckier and his cronies impose.
The Tories are no better --their policies are basically the same but with blue trim rather than red trim. And both are driving voters into the arms of Reform.
Many of Reform's statements I agree with but I don't trust them an inch. I don't expect them to do anything for the ordinary man once they have achieved power. Look at Trump, said and did some good things but isn't keen on the Epstein story coming out and is still Israel's attack dog.
Reform couldn't balance their last manifesto budget, yet in this last year it hasn't stopped Farage from announcing even more populist policies he has no way to pay for.
Anyone who thinks that if he gets into power he will abandon the economic and regulatroy policies which benefit his wealthy backers rather than the ones which benefit the poorer sectors of society needs to stop outsourcing their brain to LLMs and GBeebies.
Labour ran the election last year on being fiscally prudent, one year in and they're already trying to avoid a re-run of their 1974-79 wage/inflation train crash.
We've had a repeating cycle in this country of Labour governments stuffing things up followed by Conservative governments being in power for so long afterwards that they lose all grip on reality and prove themselves spectacularly unfit to govern.
Would a Reform government do any better? As a party with near zero internal experience of actually governing, the best thing they could do pre-election1 would be to announce that they'll make no policy or spending changes for several months2 while consulting with treasury/business/unions/(extend list here) to build the coherent four year outline plan needed to achieve manifesto commitments.
Oddly enough the currently empowered bunch should also have done this but newly empowered politicos have long been like 3yr olds in a sweet shop where public money is concerned.
1The UK financial markets would be so spooked otherwise at the prospect of an unknown entity (who & how can you bribe be helpful3 to them) that the economy would be taking a 2008/2020/2022 level of hit before the votes are counted.
2 Parliament could spend the time working on (revenue neutral) member sponsored bills that currently go through at about the rate of one a year.
3 Many at the top already seem to have Saville row suits & company directorships.
That's always the benefit of being in opposition, you can throw out any idea you like with no need to make to happen or hold responsibility for the fall out from your ill thought out policies.
It's why some professional politicians mke careers out of being in opposition. Jeremy Corbyn clearly likes being an MP and having a platform to listen to his own voice but he very cleverly ensured he was just too unhinged to ever get elected into government.
Because the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems always keep their promises....SMH......
Tories: Promised to implement Brexit in full. That worked well.
Labour: Promised to respect the Brexit vote.
Lib Dems: Promised not to increase tuition fees, campaigned for a referendum on the EU (and didn't like the outcome one bit).
The UK has only ever voted for one of three parties in hundreds of years and been in managed decline for decades. It's not time for change. It's time for a real transformation.
People under authoritarian regimes always found workarounds. That never meant the system was acceptable - just that people were forced to survive it.
You can also say that about schoolchildren in my experience. All this will do is make the IT savvy kids the most popular ones in school. The ones who have their parents Age Verification password, know how to use a VPN etc. They then just share it around possibly for a small fee. A few years ago I was on the way to the post office just after kicking out time at the local Schools. On the bus ride there I was joined at the back of the upper deck by several spotty teenage youth in uniform. One of them had an impressively high resolution image of one lady and four men engaged in what I now understand is a position referred to as 'airtight'. His phone was filled with such images and films and as this was the latest addition he was bluetoothing or wifi sharing it to his mates sitting around him.
This obviously won’t kill off the access to porn by young people, as we have seen VPN’s are one way round it. AOL when it first launched in this country used a US IP address/addresses for users. What this will do is attempt to satisfy the Daily Mail readers/Mary Whitehouse disciples who get very upset at the amount of filth available. Just realised I would have been the most popular (and richest) kid in my school…….and not Antony who looked like he might be 18 and so his local newsagents sold him some of Richard Desmond’s finest publications (and I’m not talking about the Daily Express).
"In East Germany, people built illegal radio receivers in walls to listen to Western news".
Really? Certainly from the 1960s onward the DDRs own state manufacturers were making technically capable radios that picked up all the bands including the international shortwave. DDR citizens were happily watching Western TV if in the right areas, albeit making their antennas discreet.
True, unfortunately you have all the fucking parents appearing on the news defending it. I'm sorry for the ones that lost kids due to what they saw online but banning access to those things isn't going to fix the fucking problem. Education will/can and sometimes, sadly its the kids mental health thats the actual issue.
No one said parenting would be easy - I am a parent. But too many others don't even bother with the basics to protect/parent their children. "oh it's too complicated" etc.
Well sorry, you chose to be a parent. Put an hour aside a month to maybe make an effort to keep your child safe and teach them good/bad/right and wrong etc. Stop waiting or expecting the world to do your job. It's not hard to use built in protections that come with a lot of phones and PC's these days to put restrictions in place.
Easy workaround is to just create a virtual PC in a different zone in Azure/AWS etc. Then use that for browsing. No VPN, no recognisable traffic going via the UK.
750 hours per month might not be enough for some people..... or the 100GB limit on their remote connection. ;)
Seriously, AWS offer free tier for training and to lure people into taking more services. They will soon notice if loads of free EC2 resource is taken up by people running a just a browser.
Exactly what?
"This law isn't a problem, because I - a techie - can get around it" is so missing the point, you're in a different universe.
It reminds me a bit about any article about ads, and invariably, a bunch of people will post "What are ads? I use AdBlock"!
That's akin to my 7 year old bursting into the room shouting "look daddy, I just changed my t-shirt", expecting some sort of praise for it.
That box also then tunnels through a non-UK based VPN provider to a random country adding extra safety.
Well, an illusion of safety. It always amuses me with the VPN providers pitch that it stops ISPs spying on you.. But makes it a lot easier for the VPN provider to slurp your browsing habits and then profile you.
It's not that simple, unfortunately. There are existing registries of IP blocks that are used to deny access to connections originating from VPNs. These include IPs from major data centers and cloud providers, which is where VM IPs are assigned. The idea is that if you are a user/browser, your traffic shouldn't be originating from within a data center. It's actually fairly trivial to block, and already done by organizations that want to block VPN users. Banks often do this, for example.
I run a VPN between my home and a family member's home. Not for any particularly nefarious purpose but because its another level of tinkering and it makes devices on both LAN's accessible from both locations. I'd be exceptionally p'd off if I had to register to become an "approved" end point and to be frank if I could do it then so could anyone so it would be pointless. One end point is inside A&A so I hope they would kick up sh*t if that was proposed.
ISPs don’t see NordVPN or the like, they see the use of protocols like PPTP, L2TP, the use of IPSec protocols, OpenVPN, WireGuard etc. with no way to differentiate business from personal use, since hostnames are not required to connect, and even if they were, OpenVPN lets you specify an IP and run certificate checks against the hostname independently. Banning IP addresses is a no-go since a lot of providers now tap residential IP pools in addition to business ones, and banning access to residential IP ranges wholesale is a surefire way to break a lot of small businesses. Even if all of this was possible, nothing would stop folks from using tools like stunnel to hide the fact a VPN is in use, and even if that didn’t work, there’s a whole bunch of DPI exploits available to bypass every UK ISP filter, and many VPN providers already ship with such exploits preloaded as part of their clients, they just keep mum about their use of them for legal reasons (they don’t want you to incur any legal liability as a customer, ignorance is bliss).
When it comes to KYC requirements, that is a losing battle too. Many paid anonymous VPN providers allow people to sign up without providing a digital paper trail on their end, including the ability to buy gift cards or simply paying using physical cash via the postal service. Even if the government somehow managed to make providers fall in line, nothing would stop people buying VPS hosting, or, depending on the use case, simply using Tor to bypass the censorship.
The government knows is this a losing battle, they’re clearly just attempting to appease the parents who are unable to think and act for themselves.
No, they're not trying to appease parents. If the parents were worried they'd set up their own filters and screen time rules as they should. The "think of the children" pretext is just a cover story for censorship. The government realise that there is "anti-establishment sentiment" and are attempting to deal with it via censorship.
If the law -- which I do not condone -- was written correctly then it would be the provider's responsibility to not only verify their "customers" but identify those trying to circumvent the verification. So if I arrive at a site via a VPN (perish the thought...) then its up to them to do what Netflix and BBC do and kick me off. No need to meddle with all the other legitimate uses of VPN's.
So the law is either knowingly flawed -- but at least we did something, unknowingly flawed -- those tech guys are sooo tricksy, look what they did to us, or its part of a planned ratcheting up of controls -- and I'd prefer not to go down that particular conspiracy theory rabbit hole...
Wouldn't this require global services like Reddit to restrict access to everyone using a VPN worldwide, in order to comply with UK legislation? By definition it's difficult to identify the geographic location of VPN users. Other jurisdictions aren't too keen on such extra-territorial reach, not least our American friends. Netflix is in a different boat because it's enforcing its own content licensing agreements.
How could Reddit tell you're using a VPN? If it comes from a known VPN endpoint, sure, but that's only going to get the major providers - and that assumes those major providers don't switch the IP addresses of their endpoints around regularly. Because if that's what they have to do to keep their customer base, that's what they will do.
Reddit isn't going to do anything to satisfy the UK's authoritarian dreams any more than Apple was willing to.
I will give the Labour party credit for trying a different way to fight against the Trumpy nutter party we in the US haven't yet considered - trying to be even more nutjobby and more authoritarian than they are. Somehow I don't think that's a winning strategy.
"we in the US haven't yet considered"
Actually I'm pretty sure that the autopen admin desperately wanted to do something similar and even more authoritarian. What was her name? Nina Jankowicz. So the high ranking members of the Democrat elite concoct a completely false narrative about how the roosians magically hacked* the 2016 election and then use this to create a department in the DHS that literally has the goal of manipulating what people can see and do on the internet.
"Somehow I don't think that's a winning strategy."
Yeah, you don't say! And the Dems wonder why they lost 2024. (apart from the awful choice of candidate, the very niche 'populist' policies and terrible mess they'd made)
* Yes, at the time the media were reporting that the election had been 'hacked'
Yes, at the time the media were reporting that the election had been 'hacked'
Show us some links. Not some random claim that the "election had been hacked" but articles from reputable media quoting someone in the Obama administration claiming that? You can't, because no one claimed that.
What they did claim was that was Russia attempted to INFLUENCE the election. Not change votes, but change opinions in the run-up to the election. This was conclusively proven. Not by democrats or "mainstream media" or the "deep state" but by a republican dominated Senate committee in a very detailed and highly sourced 1000 page report. A committee chaired by Trump's current secretary of state Marco Rubio.
https://rollcall.com/2020/08/18/senate-intelligence-committee-russian-interference-2016-election-report/
Oh dear, another reality denier!
"articles from reputable media"
One problem, ANY media I quote you will claim is not reputable :)
The reality is that Russia didn't hack the DNC, didn't steal Hillary's emails, didn't alter vote tallies and really didn't influence much apart from some facebook ads. Crowdstike admitted under oath that there was no actual evidence of russian hacking of the DNC and that there was no actual evidence that the emails were even hacked.
In that article you linked there are many used of the phrase 'the committee report said'. Doesn't mean it actually happened.
Now when it comes to the media and what they report, it doesn't seem to matter what the source is and the viewers don't bother to check if the story is verified or not.
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/12/politics/russia-hack-us-election/index.html
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/22/politics/hillary-clinton-challenge-results/
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-06-13/russian-breach-of-39-states-threatens-future-u-s-elections
https://time.com/4828306/russian-hacking-election-widespread-private-data/
"You can't, because no one claimed that"
Equally no-one from the admin corrected the press on their misinformation.
The same goes for the poop on the walls in the Capitol on Jan 6th, you can't prove it, there is no evidence, but Dem supporters froth at the mouth over the claim. Its always 'source said'.
labour have had a hard on for ID since Tony Blair's time.... And this lot have Palantir whispering in their ear far too much. This is all about control, nothing about protecting kids. That was proved when access to the new Corbyn/Sultana party sign up site came subject to the act.
There's always something more when it comes to government enshittification.
For example it's been pointed out that if this law existed 20 years ago Jimmy Saville would now be celebrated as a charity figurehead. I'm sure there are a non zero number of Savile wannabes in the civil service who have added their voices to the call for this to be implemented. Nonces don't care about invading people's privacy, they care about noncing.
So at minimum I'd say it's about government surveillance and noncing. Nothing more than that.
Also extortion. Someone's undeniably already worked out how they can extort businesses into paying to not have their content scrubbed.
So it's about government surveillance, noncing, extortion and smart red uniforms. Because however you look at this it is impossible not to see it as a kind of modern Spanish inquisition.
So there you have it. Government surveillance, noncing, extortion, smart red uniforms and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.
... I'll come in again.
Woah! Paranoia alert!
Whilst it would certainly help those situations you mention, but to think it's the designed purpose is q-anon level cuckoo.
Besides, the government ain't that bright. This is simply to pacify the daily-mail/reform readers with their pitchforks in their inbred hands.
The government may not be very bright but they are working to an agenda. Those trying to get the agenda through are having to work through the government who have to pretend that this is about protecting children and adults from online harms. It's actually about protecting the establishment against damaging information becoming widely known.
No, this isn't government surveillance. If you're looking for a needle in a haystack (that one kid in the crowd of blowhard bullshitters who is actually going to do something violent) then you do not enact legislation that makes the haystack a million times bigger.
Time was when there were business VPNs, hobbyist VPNs, paranoid VPNs and actually dangerous people VPNs. Eliminate the business ones and sift through the hobbyists, paranoids and whatnot until you find someone who's actually criminal or dangerous.
Now we've added zillions of one-handed web surfers to the mix and permanently made working out who to watch well nigh impossible. No, this was not a calculated act by government in any way or wise. This was idiots following on with the actions of the previous idiots and wildly ignoring the civil service advice.
So what you're saying is they've exposed millions of people circumventing the measures they put in place to Protect The Children, which means millions of potential paedophiles since they already made that link.
The only way to control that is to ban VPNs and end-to-end encryption... oh look, we got what we've been pushing for for at least a decade.
If you think government surveillance is about finding the one terrorist who will hurt members of the public then you miss the point. It's the government and those who control the government looking out for itself. As the new Police Squad was set up to monitor "anti-migrant sentiment" is not looking for the odd person but to clamp down on the vast numbers of people.
You can quite easily distinguish between a private network for work, where you connect from the outside to a company’s in-house network, and a general VPN where thd server might be anywhere.
And a general VPN isnt capable of connecting your company network. It can only pretend that you are on a different IP address at the public internet.
Boradcast TV channels restrict their content with geo-limits based on IP origin. They do it for contractual reasons. But I want to maintain my French comprehension orale skills, so I use VPN to watch French mainstream TV, which strictly speaking I shouldn't. But Camping Paradis and HPI isn't going to corrupt my delicate mind.
This week the streams, that were always very smooth, have started to degrade and become a bit stuttered from time to time. On one occasion my breakout server in France became overloaded and I couldn't connect. This is all thanks to the surge in use by ham shankers and the government pushing them down that route.
So I expect my VPN service price to increase as the provider has to upgrade their cloudy box in France, and the bandwidth between UK and France.
By the way, those people lamenting the loss of TdF to PayWall TV in the UK might consider a VPN to watch France.TV 2 and 3, which do excellent coverage.
I'd argue that the primary use case of VPNs that pop out in different countries was and always will be streaming of content available in a different region - if it was just about relative privacy, there would be no reason for it not to be a UK end-point. So increase in customers should roughly equate to the same level of increased bandwidth requirements.
Arguably, the new traffic will probably operate in, erm, "burst mode", so wouldn't actually be a linear increase compared to the baseline. None of the new users will be streaming the content equivalent to a box set..
I've read this week, either on somewhere like here or Reddit, that someone got round the age verification by downloading a photo of a driving licence found after a quick search.
The people this is designed to block access to are the most technical literate people of their generation, ever. We should be hiring tehm to do pen testing.
Nah he wants to show he is a tough guy so he will probably demand the police round up a sizeable number and tell the judiciary to "make a severe example of them" in the hope he can intimidate people into compliance, along with having various "meeja" contacts run stories about VPNs being a tool of groomers and kids using them have been groomed and are about to be kidnapped and abused, then it goes all over Muppet sites like m--umsnet, "social networks" and before you know, street cabs are being set on fire, phone workers are being harassed, beaten up or killed, computing classes in schools are shut down to "avoid controversy in the current climate", computing teachers are either sacked or placed under suspicion or ridiculous restrictions on what can and cannot be taught to sate the rage of the brain dead mob.
.... at the moment, yes.
But it's not healthy having a party that seems to be inspired by the refash party (Ltd)
And now, refash has launched it's own DOGE UK (https://www.politico.eu/article/zia-yusuf-doge-tech-millionaire-reform-uk-elon-musk/), expect things to get worse.
However Nigel Farage has said he would repeal it, so they will either have to reverse their position fairly directly or change their current strategy of slavishly copying Reform's homework and pretending it's want Labour voters want.
"However Nigel Farage has said he would repeal it"
Of course he's saying that, and framing it as a "free speech" issue to keep singing from the Trump/Vance hymn sheet. However, if he got in to power (god forbid), there is no chance whatsoever he'd repeal it but would instead block anything that doesn't agree with him.
Nailed it. "Free speech for us, not our opponents"
Also, every time Farage speaks, does he remind you of the kid running for class president: "I'm going to demand free soda machines in the classrooms, and ban all homework"?
For any government, when has the government petition site been anything other than a PR stunt?
The most you can hope for is forcing a "discussion" and hoping that will embarrass them, but it's all performative theatre, and won't even be seen by the citizens that you want to become aware.
To be fair that's well under 1% of the population of registered voters.
If they immediately overturned any legislation that 1% of the population objected to they'd get nowhere.
I appreciate that it's 1% who are sufficiently motivated to click a link, enter their name on a form and then click on another link by email - but it's still hardly a damning indictment of democracy.
The very fact they have a threshold to move this from aspiration to consideration means that any number above that is a meaningful minority. As you yourself mention these are people motivation to go through the process to get themselves counted and there is normally an order or more between those who are not happy and those who will put their name down.
Since they have already passed the threshold by 300% this should be the cue for an opposition MP to get on their hind legs and start squealing
A Labour MP wakes in the night, eyes wide, heart pounding: “Someone, somewhere, is talking. Unmonitored. Unverified. Uncontrolled.” They fumble for their phone to check the stats - still no kill switch for Telegram. Still no dossier on who’s watching what. Power is leaking through the cracks, and they feel it.
The Online Safety Act isn’t about kids. It’s not even about safety. It’s a tool of digital feudalism - a pact between government and tech monopolies. In exchange for entrenching their platforms as gatekeepers, the state gets the crown jewel: the infrastructure of surveillance. It’s corporate fascism by design - control masquerading as care.
And it’s cheered on by power-drunk bureaucrats and MPs whose worldview is indistinguishable from a DSM diagnosis. Delusions of omnipotence, paranoia about dissent, obsessive need for control. They don’t understand VPNs, encryption, or protocols - but they understand this: people are slipping out of reach.
To them, private conversation is sedition. Anonymity is deviance. And bypassing their systems is heresy.
This is the same logic that animated the Stasi, the CCP, and the ayatollahs - not because Britain is “just like them,” but because power, once unaccountable, converges. Always.
The UK isn’t banning VPNs yet - but it’s floating the idea, conditioning the public, preparing the ground. The message is clear: liberty is now conditional. And the people demanding your compliance aren’t defenders of democracy - they’re middle managers of a digital panopticon, desperate to stay relevant.
This isn’t a safety bill. It’s a permission slip for tyranny - wrapped in childproof branding and sold to a frightened, distracted and beaten up public.
While the Conservatives introduced the initial drafts, the concept of significant online regulation, and indeed a "duty of care" on tech companies, was championed by Labour long before the OSA became law. They consistently argued for stronger regulation and a more proactive approach to online harms.
Throughout the bill's passage, Labour repeatedly criticised the government for delays and for not being ambitious enough. They tabled numerous amendments, almost exclusively to strengthen the bill, not to dilute it. For example, they pushed for senior managers to be held criminally liable for failures to protect users, a measure that went beyond the government's initial proposals.
The Online Safety Act, as it stands, incorporates many elements that Labour actively campaigned for. To suggest they merely "rubber-stamped" it ignores the extensive parliamentary scrutiny and debate where Labour MPs actively participated, pushing for more stringent measures on a range of issues, from child safety to combating misinformation.
The very broad scope of the "legal but harmful" content provisions, which are now a significant concern for free speech advocates, were often a point where Labour pushed for more intervention, not less.
If Labour genuinely believed the OSA was a Tory overreach they merely "rubber-stamped" and found it problematic, they would have every opportunity to repeal, significantly amend, or deprioritise its implementation. Their continued commitment to the Act, and indeed, their past calls for its strengthening, strongly suggest it aligns with their policy objectives rather than being a forced imposition.
Starmer and his shadow cabinet have consistently reiterated their commitment to the principles of the Online Safety Act. There have been no significant indications that a Labour government would roll back its provisions; quite the opposite, their historical position suggests they would be keen to see it fully implemented and potentially even expanded.
Comrade, we all see Labour for what they are - Corporate fascists in "I am a Socialist" wrapper.
"legal but harmful"
This is the worst bit as the concept of 'harmful' is so subjective. Similar subjective wording has been used to arrest people for posting a picture of 4 progress pride flags arrange to look a bit like the Hindu symbol for luck and prosperity and also arrest people for holding up blank sheets of paper near King Charlie.
Tory bill yes, but Labour's only criticism was that it didn't go far enough. Someone a while back said our parliamentary system is great until you get an issue the parties all agree on, then it doesn't work, as there is no scrutiny, debate or challenge, which invariably results in really bad legislation. See also Theresa May's Net Zero Bill.
In Sarah Wynn-Williams' book, Careless People, which is her story about working in the higher echelons of Facebook, she articulates the deals that Facebook cut with multiple countries including, in at least one case, giving a foreign government 'enhanced' access to private user data and the tools to restrict communication at the push of a button (almost literally). Facebook's engineers even helped them write the code to do it!
Wynn-Williams also details the power wielded by Facebook during elections (over a period of a decade now) and how it has been used by politicians and lobbying groups. Government is not trying to stop this; they're trying to better leverage it.
'Big tech' is most certainly in bed with governments around the world. It has become a symbiotic arrangement. People are not customers, nor are they citizens to be served: they are the 'product' to be tracked, manipulated and herded like cattle.
Moo.
You're overcooking this a bit. Maybe speak to someone who has lived in China, East Germany or the Islamic Republic of Iran and you will understand what it's like to live in a genuine authoritarian regime? The people who shout loudest about lack of freedom of speech tend to have columns in The Telegraph and shows on GB News, where they are free to say pretty much whatever they like.
Labour MPs are probably more likely to wake up in the middle of the night because the economy is flatlining, Starmer has the charisma of a plank of wood, and as a consequence, some incompetent muppet from Reform UK Ltd is going to have their seat off them. Farage is a far bigger threat to personal freedoms than Labour.
None of this is to minimise Labour's controlling tendencies. Call Me Tony is still banging on about ID cards and he left office a while ago.
The classic liberal deflection: “It’s not real authoritarianism unless people are vanishing in the night.”
Let’s break this down.
1. “Talk to someone who lived in China, East Germany or Iran”
Many of us have. And you know what they’ll often say? That early warning signs were dismissed with exactly this tone. “Don’t be dramatic. You can still talk to friends. Just be careful. It’s for safety.” Authoritarianism doesn’t arrive overnight. It creeps - normalised by people who think encryption bans and digital surveillance are fine “if you’ve got nothing to hide.”
Britain isn’t identical to those regimes - it’s worse in some ways. It wraps authoritarian tools in corporate branding and liberal justification. “It’s for online safety. For the children. For trust and accountability.” It uses the velvet glove of bureaucracy instead of the iron fist - but the goal is the same: centralised control over speech, thought, and communication.
2. “People on GB News and Telegraph still have platforms”
That’s not a defence of freedom - it’s a symptom of managed dissent. Letting a few acceptable heretics rant within the Overton window doesn't prove liberty. It shows the system tolerates controlled opposition - loud enough to blow off steam, never enough to change anything. Try launching a platform that allows genuine anonymity, E2EE, or unfiltered speech and see what happens. (Ask the Signal team. Or Tutanota. Or the creators of Matrix.)
3. “Labour MPs worry about the economy”
They don’t. If they did, they wouldn’t be trying to micromanage memes, ban VPNs, or build digital ID schemes. They’d be fixing productivity, housing, or the NHS. Instead, they’re obsessed with speech control, censorship infrastructure, and outsourcing enforcement to unaccountable platforms. Why? Because economic failure makes control more necessary. The more brittle the system gets, the more hostile they become to anything they can’t monitor.
4. “Farage is a bigger threat”
This is rich. The man has zero institutional power. He’s a disruptor. You might not like him, but he isn’t embedding surveillance protocols into national telecoms. Labour is. Farage doesn’t want to scan your face before you browse Reddit. Labour does. When Blair wanted ID cards, it was the civil liberties left who stopped him - a left that no longer exists in Starmer’s hollowed-out shell.
5. “None of this is to minimise Labour’s controlling tendencies…”
Yes it is. That’s exactly what you’re doing - minimising and deflecting. Reassuring yourself that since no one’s been arrested for a meme yet, it’s all fine. Just like people in East Germany once said: “We can still joke about the Stasi… at home… quietly.”
Britain’s slide isn’t about ideology - it’s about architecture. Surveillance infrastructure, compliance-by-default platforms, and a cultural elite that sees privacy as a threat. That doesn’t need a dictator - just a rotating cast of technocrats who think dissent is “misinformation” and freedom is a risk factor.
So no - we’re not “overcooking it.” You’re just underreacting.
Pretty much. Some of the recent anti-protest arrests in Australia have been a tad frightening, actually, when you think about the circumstances and the justification used by police. Simply writing the wrong words on your placard might be enough to get you collared ... or to lose an eye.
It is absolutely right to say that authoritarianism creeps into existence - it happens over years, decades even - as each new measure is justified for 'safety' and 'security' and 'crime prevention' then normalised because "we've been doing this for years".
I attend DSEI (usually in the papers as an 'arms fair' in London) every couple of years.
In 2017 and 2019 I saw an organised protest, and a controlled protest. The protesters had signs out, were shouting, but were up against the wall at the DLR stop and not stopping people going in and out of the ExCel. There are a number of guns and tanks and jet fighters and drones and whatever in there, and I can absolutely see why someone could find it morally reprehensible. Palantir had a whacking great stand last time, and I'm not exactly a fan.
I knew one of the guys helping organise the protest, and thanked him afterwards- they got their point across without (at least as far as I saw in person or on the news) any violence or intimidation. Just some placards, some posters, and some shouting. Absolutely proportional protesting.
In 2023 I went and the place was dead. A couple of crusty looking types in a tent, visibly scared to say anything with the police nearby.
It was chilling seeing the effect of anti-protest legislation. And this is coming from someone who was being protested.
I look forwards to seeing what happens this year, under the even tighter yoke of Labour.
"It was chilling seeing the effect of anti-protest legislation"
But this is what the sort of people protesting DSEI wanted. They just didn't realise it would be used on them as they see themselves as the good guys.
"intimidation"
In the past protest groups have released names, photos and addresses of people with links to companies showing at events such as DSEI. I know this for a fact as this happened to the company I worked for many moons ago.
And also you could class shouting as intimidation. This claim is certainly made about protests by other groups. The UK police have even recorded a non-crime hate incident for people standing silently due to the 'intimidation' it was causing.
Its sorta funny that the violent anti-protesters are getting a dose of their own medicine. The far left authoritarians have been blithering on about how awful it is that people they dislike get to protest something so we get knee-jerk reaction laws that are nice and broad so ALL protests get squashed!
I largely agree, but your dismissal of Farage is dangerous.
He hasn't done bad things simply because he hasn't been in the position to do so. And whilst he might not do the things talked about here, give him some power and you'll soon see draconian laws relating to immigrants, and renewable energy, and climate change denial.
After all, Trump was harmless when he wasn't president too.
As for the "Telegraph and GB News people complaining about being censored" - those people the OP mentioned are attacking "wokie leftie do-gooders", not "government censorship", so whilst you are correct in saying mocking their stance doesn't mean we are free from government overreach, the reason most people do it is because these folks are paranoid about "cancel culture" and can rightly be mocked for that. I'm not disagreeing with your response there - it was the OP who mislabelled that point.
Sadly, it's not just about sex, but all aspects of human life that involve vulnerability, insecurity, fear, greed, etc.
But then all those aspects are also the concern of parental responsibility—helping the youngsters take on the 'real world' in constructive ways, and knowing, mostly, how not to get sucked down the vortex of some one else's failure to live a worthwhile life.
I think for cows that may be true, but round here you still see a ram with a chalk bag on his chest so you can tell which ewes have been tupped.
The really posh farms have different colour chalk on different rams so you know who’s been where…
round here you still see a ram with a chalk bag on his chest so you can tell which ewes have been tupped.
And also which way. I remember one walking holiday noticing several ewes with chalk patches on their heads. I ran into the farmer a little later and mentioned it to him, and he replied "New young ram, hasn't quite got the hang of it yet."
In my experience the kids raised on farms tend to be at the more lively end of the 'normal' spectrum, except for those that aren't, but then we can't choose our parents, and some of them are bloody useless, not to say dangerous to life.
If you want your kids to not be exposed to this kind of stuff on the internet...buy them a fucking featurephone and limit their use of a computer. End. Of. Story.
Stop trying to limit the accessibility of adult things from adults in the name of children. Take responsibility for your own offspring and if you want to limit them in some fashion then do so yourself, only to yourself.
What? You mean I have a grinding 80-hour workweek that looks good on my resume, the 4 supercars in the garage, the perfect 10/10 rockstar mate, the McMansion home, the picket fence, the 2.5 children, the dog... and then I'm still expected to spend time with the rugrats too! What do you mean I can't have it all and have someone else be responsible for it!?
I can understand that perhaps the Online Safety Act needs constructive criticism. But I have no time for the kowtowing to US Big Tech that just wants to walk all over us.
More important, British ideas of free speech are different from American ideas. Britain has always recognised that slanderous or criminal speech should be restricted. It is outrageous American imperialism that they dictate their own ideas on free speech to the rest of the world.
I think you're missing the point. 'Big tech' is helped by the OSA, not hindered, and writing some code to do it is a few days' work. From their perspective, who cares if some kids get blocked? Kids don't vote and don't have money. Hence why neither government nor big tech are actually fussed whether it really works. It's been amusing watching big tech complain while they rapidly slurp up ever more private data and exploit it. And it's been a mixture of awe and despair watching the 'won't someone think of the children' lobby groups so effectively pursue their arguments that, in the end, won't do much to actually protect their kids - they've been fooled better than anyone.
But the additional ID and tracking data big tech gains from adults, and what that enables ... now that's a veritable gold mine for corporations, governments and their agencies.
I think Putin couldn't be happier by the development of OSA and Labour's lack of foresight.
I wonder how many of those age check companies that pop left and right are actually run by Russian and other hostile nation's intelligence agencies.
It's a matter of time a politician will be linked to their embarrassing tractor habit and then blackmailed.
and that's just one of countless attack vectors this enabled.
Also don't forget training the whole population to hand over personal sensitive data to anyone who asks.
"Britain has always recognised that slanderous or criminal speech should be restricted"
And this is the same in the USA. However what is policed in the UK is far from slanderous or criminal. The UK police have been tasked with protecting everyone from any potential of taking offence or dislike to something. We're going down the same road as Germany who have specific 'public insult' laws.
"The UK police have been tasked with protecting everyone from any potential of taking offence or dislike to something." Have they? There are lots of comments on this site that some people might potentially dislike or take offence at. Will PC Plod be kicking down the doors of The Reg's office or will they be going after individual commenters?
Thank God I am posting anonymously! Oh no, Christians might potentially take offence at or dislike my blasphemy! I better flee the country.
As the AC notes, this has NOTHING to do with America. This is UK's Fundamentalists flexing their self-righeousness and telling everyone else what to do.
No more, no less. The UK is doing this to itself and need to stop trying to blame "U.S. Big Tech", the Boogieman, and "American imperialism". Nice way to dodge responsibility for your own authoritarian leanings - "It's all someone else's fault! Yes! It's not *our* politicians doing it to us, it must be someone else pulling their strings for the benefit of...whom, exactly?" Introduced by UK bureaucrats, you're more than capable of screwing your own pooch. Own up to it.
So nobody at Facebook is suggesting that verified advert-consumer ID and an effective ban on independent and community sites would be lead to a politician's future remunerative role as vice‑president of global affairs?
It's just a pure coincidence that Newer Labour's control freakery and Meta's corporate plans align so perfectly
Wow. o.O. I'd seek therapy.
Yes, your conspiracy theory is "pure coincidence"; if FacePlant wanted it they'd also seek to enable it over on this side of the pond. And the mere mention of it, *from anyone*, gets a huge "Fsck off!!!" from the rest of us.
AGAIN, this is a UK problem, no more no less. Deal with it as necessary and kill the infection at the bud and stop trying to point a finger as if you're not the victim of your own stupidity.
I think the governments aim was an end of online anonymity, so they can track what everybody does online, every webpage you visit, every social media post, every phone call. They probably already have a long list of online profiles that they would like to put real names against.
People who care about privacy are not going to trust online identity verification services with their sensitive documents, and will undoubtedly start using VPN services as a workaround. The governments next step therefore will be requiring VPN providers to check the identity of their users.
I get the feeling that this is the thin end of the wedge and over time it will be extended to more and more sites until eventually you need to prove your ID in order to do anything online at all.
I tend to agree. The thing is, I can't imagine that this originated in a party room or party commitee. When you think through the degree of planning, the obfuscation of intent and manipulation of loud lobby groups to generate the public inertia, then it seems far more likely that this was dreamt up in a security and intelligence agency then sold to government. Being also beneficial to 'big tech' - they get positive ID on every user, which is a marketing gold mine - makes it an easy sell to bring them onboard, and it was probably already on their wish list.
"at odds with something like MI5 has in their statute"
OSA serves dual interests. Marketing information for big tech - money for them - but better identification and tracking of adult internet users - which serves intelligence and security interests. Don't you see that?
(I think it's possible to get so worked up on a subject that one can argue about ... everything).
... when has common sense or advice from technical experts ever held back knee-jerk tech legislation before in the UK. We have a long history of ignorant politicians shouting "what about the children" and making stupid decisions that deny the reality of how things actually work.
If you want to stop *CHILDREN* doing things, then stop *CHILDREN* from doing things, not adults. Ban *CHILDREN* from using VPNs. And if they break the law, what are you going to do? Send 'em to prison?
If you ban VPNs, then you cripple the NHS (how would you tell?), which probably has the highest VPN usage of any organisation in the UK.
We had a very successful No2ID campaign that encouraged the previous Labour government to abandon attempts at mass surveillance.
Noting that this isn't specifically a Labour bill (but very, very much supported by the current government), it's depressing that the "just think of the children" crowd have succesfully short-circuited any rational discussion of a pretty disastrous and nonsensical policy.
New Labour was pressing ahead with ID cards until the bitter end and it had already issued the first ID cards (some hapless traveller being denied boarding on a ferry when he tried to travel with his). The plan was that enrolment would be theoretically optional but harder and harder to avoid over time, for example, if you wanted to go on holiday or access government services.
It was the Tories who actually abolished ID cards and the associated ID database (National Identity Register). This was when there were still some libertarian Tory MPs around. Thank you, David Davis.
Why do you have to ban them, why can't you just apply the same (or slightly better in the discord case) age verification to commercial VPN applications?
Sure some will create their own, or take to cloud computing etc but it'll solve another 5 or 10% of the issue. Why should an under 18 or under 16 or whatever be allowed to VPN?
I was going to suggest that as it follows the same logic as the current scheme, just taking it one step further. But it would only be a bandaid on a gaping wound. There is no 100% reliable solution and, just like a lot of legislation enacted to try and resolve a problem, it has a far greater impact on those who were not part of the problem - those causing the problem will generally ignore or work around the legislation.
This post has been deleted by its author
I'm not British but I totally get the sentiments expressed here.
We do have to stand up and say "fuck you" to government overreach and surveillance. The same with Google, Facebook etc and their endless surveillance.
Here in Australia the government ploughs on with its stupid ban on people under 16 using social media.
That'll be worked around in about 5 seconds flat as well.
The laws of unintended consequences would be invoked for sure. I for one would campaign against any political party advocating for this massive overreach.
Right now some of the noises coming out of Labour are a bit troubling, but hopefully VPN banning wont go mainstream. If it did, Labour would be dead to me. Much like the rest of the political parties in the UK.
Successive UK governments have seriously put forward the idea of secure encryption with a government back door. Just because banning VPNs would be moronic, incredibly expensive and wholly impractical will not stop them. Labour MP Sarah Champion is already pushing in this direction. Rachel Reeves is meant to be pro-growth, yet I wonder how many businesses would leave the UK if they were prevented from securing remote access to their systems?
I suppose one benefit on this is that kids will gain technical skills as they learn how to set up their own VPNs, how Tor works etc etc
Having just got back from holiday in Turkey last week, I can confirm they do a very good job of blocking VPNs (where they've been banned for a few years now). Some will get through, of course, but the game of cat and mouse between VPNs adding IPs and governments blocking IPs is going to make them at best unreliable. See also: China.
I don't think it's going to happen for lots of reasons, but saying it's technically impossible is pretty easy to prove wrong: just get on a place
All they have done is push a load of traffic into encrypted channels,VPNs and Tor effectively making their life harder. It's an arms race they won't win simply becasue politicians are generally technologically illiterate and wouldn't recognise a viable solution Vs a fantasy solution if it came up and slapped in the face with a wad of £50 notes.
I suspect right now some large business involved in data harvesting is lobbying the government to mandate a proxy filter for every home at the taxpayers expense to mirror the sucess of the smart meter rollout
Perhaps, but by the same token would you support the selling of top shelf mags to anyone? Because by the same extension, there was no point in banning it for under 18s, cos their older looking mate could just buy it for them, or they could just find a suspiciously stuck-together copy in a bush somewhere. Pointless even trying to ban it!
Yes, it's a terribly implemented solution (the correct one was to implement it at an ISP level, similar to what mobile networks already do, and force the ISPs to provide better levels of control around content to technical illiterate parents), but it is needed for the same reason we prevent kids from buying booze or physical copies of the same content.
Yeah I meant to add that bit when I was posting it, I'm pretty sure this was implemented by the big 5 or 6 ISPs as a way to defer the OSA (basically they said "self regulate, or we'll regulate you") and initially they were going to add controls by default to any new contract (essentially you had to opt-in to adult content, rather than opting out), but I think that gradually disappeared as a promise.
And yeah, it won't stop determined teenagers, much like I managed to find nudity before the age of the interwebs.
"This is the police. Place your hands on the yellow circles and assume the position. Citizen, you are hereby informed that all locks are now banned, because criminals can use them to secure their illegally-gotten gains, and to hamper the police. You must discard or disable all locks in your possession or under your control. This has been a police action. Thank you for your cooperation."
The more poor laws like the OSA are passed, the less people will respect any laws.
When your stupid / evil (take your pick) government insists on passing stupid laws, people will work around them because they see that the laws are stupid. This greatly diminishes the respect that people have for the law and increases the likelihood that they will also flout other laws. This leads to calls for more laws and for out of proportion punishments for breaking them. Repeat until the police state is total.
As a parallel, look at cigarette sales in the UK. Driven by the "public health" lobby's hate of smokers, the government has repeatedly raised duty on tobacco to the point that people with normal salaries now buy smuggled cigarettes. This has created an enormous black market, run entirely by criminals. The people buying these smuggled cigarettes couldn't give a toss about financing the criminals who run the black market and that gives the criminals even more power and funds to supply other black market goods.
The "think of the children" argument is a simple tool designed to silence objection, it has nothing to do with genuine concern for said children.
Your comment on too many laws and the resultant erosion of respect for the law is so true!
One could argue that this is by design - if the government wants to arrest you they can always find a law that you've broken. There's a US book about this called "Five felonies a day" - the tittle indicating how many laws the average person in the US breaks.
There's a bandwagon out there that suits politicians to jump on because it has popular support - it's a vote winner (or maybe just not a vote looser) and extra kudos if you can imply that anyone not agreeing with the general principle that children must be kept safe is clearly a danger to the public if they got into office. There's no need for elected people to worry unduly about exactly how the rules will work - or even if they do work - because they can say something has been done and take the credit for being on the side wot dun it.
Want to genuinely protect children both online and in real life? Here's an idea: start with parents and potential parents. They have a responsibility to teach their kids that the real world has real dangers and it's their job to educate them so they go into life suitably equipped. You'll end up with a more rounded, capable and mindful population as a result. Mind you, there's no votes in that and it'll take a generation or two - so, politically, it's pretty much a non-starter. At the moment, when little Johnny turns out to be a wrong 'un and drowns the neighbours cat, too many people blame the state for failing him rather than give any thought to his parents being irresponsible fuckwits.
Legislating against technology on the other hand is always going to be, at best, whack-a-mole: kind of by definition, technology has a habit of finding new and innovative ways to solve challenges.
The problem with computing is that it is seen as a bunch of nerds doing stuff instead of a science. No politician would go ahead and pass a law that affects medicine or physics without consulting with scientists. But the average know-all that sits in parliament thinks that they understand computing and then they have these crazy ideas. Normally you'd think they they're under the influence of medicine they previously banned. But that's just 50-50 chance with computing. The other 50% is pure ignorance and even ignorance of their ignorance. Good luck hitting all those brick walls that you've been warned about.
Yes, and that is the biggest reason this is so stupid. In 5 years, when every 20-year-old has been using Tor for all their browsing for several years because of this law, there will be no chance to monitor even run-of-the-mill dumb criminals' traffic!
At the moment, Tor use is exceptional. Next year every teen boy will be using it.
Register of IP address and DNS - fix it here to support strong trusted identity on civilian, commercial and industrial versions of internet. Once IOT takes off it's cars, power plants, critical infrastructure online the address and name system built for www is no longer fit for purpose and requires significantly higher regulation/ governance and enforcement.
The problem here is not VPNs, the uptick in their use was completely predictable, it's the government implementing poorly thought through laws.
If they had sat down with IT experts and asked "how can we construct an open standard for an age verification system which was acceptably accurate, while 100% maintaining privacy" the result would probably ended up with something like the authenticator apps from google, M$ and others, using some form of public key encryption to authenticate that this anonymous person is over age X. If all the verification was done on your local device then, personally, I would be much happier.
Instead we have ended up with the worst possible outcome, many different systems for different sites, each requiring us to share personal data with possibly untrusted third parties in possibly foreign jurisdictions, creating a privacy and security nightmare.
“f they had sat down with IT experts and asked "how can we construct an open standard for an age verification system which was acceptably accurate, while 100% maintaining privacy" the result would probably ended up with something like the authenticator apps from google, M$ and others, using some form of public key encryption to authenticate that this anonymous person is over age X.”
Well maybe they did and the ‘IT experts’ rightly told them that it is impossible, also I’m sorry but your comments about authenticator apps and PKE are a bit vague, they confirm that you are in possession of a particular device and/or that both ends of a connection are who they claim to be. Nothing at all about who the user is. Unless I’ve misunderstood your point, I probably have, so maybe you could clarify it for me?
There is zero, zero chance of VPN’s being ‘banned’, there is no discussion or proposal to do this, other than in the fetid imagination of some writers, who claim ‘xyz', possibly to get more clicks!
Yes I get it, VPNs do and will get around the OSA, so it does seem reasonable to suppose that they will get banned, but that’s a bit like saying that since pornographic magazines and books exists, therefore we are going to ban any and all books, pictures and the use of the written word!
There have been comments above, that the OSA is designed to erode privacy on the internet with an aim of removing it entirely so that everything can be controlled. Maybe, but there is a simpler and probably more likely reason. I think it is reasonable to be concerned about some of the stuff that children can find on the internet, a feeling that ‘something should be done about it’. The OSA is a truly classic case of, something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it’.
The people who drew up the Law, most (I suspect) of the politicians who supported it, knew, absolutely knew that this would happen, but went with it anyway, so that they can say, ‘look we did this to help keep the children safe(er)’! But hasn’t OFCOM already made a statement along the lines of ‘yes we know that use of a VPN will render any age verification system moot, but we urge parents to check that their children aren’t installing them and using parental control software to.....’?
'Christ on a crutch’? Parental supervision! Who might have thought of such a thing?
No this whole thing is just an exercise is saying ‘yes we have put measures in place to reduce the abilities of under 18s to view.....’; and that is probably true, it probably does ‘reduce’ the chances (for a small value of chance) so the authorities now move on,
The fact that it is about as effective as a tissue-paper condom is irrelevant, they can say that they have done this and claim it as a success. Such is the way governments work.
Oh, and incidentally, the Opera browser will need to be outlawed, no it doesn’t have a built-in VPN as often claimed, it uses a couple of reverse proxies, so they’ll need to be outlawed as well.
Careful with the generalisations. An increasing number of said demographic used to /still do work in IT or engineering etc and are perfectly capable of working these things out for themselves. Me, I'm 10 years retired this coming March. I'd say there's also a huge proportion of non-older generation are still clueless about IT. As are many of the kids, who just aren't that way minded.
as in, the other day I WASN'T on a VPN. I have a nabis screen to sell for a shower, do NOT search for that at work as the images are "colourful", I was also really confused why they even popped up for a shower screen. All those images are enough to "enjoy" without even clicking through them.
The whole bill is stupid. Its the parents that should be monitoring the network, if they can't, tough tits, we shouldn't all be blocked because they don't have the knowledge and expect the government to be their nanny. I have no issue with the parents not having the knowledge, I have an issue with their rules being forced on everyone else.
Again, its people deciding how the internet should work with no technical knowledge.
Also, we can all run our own VPNs.
People (adults) obviously have short memories:
“ HideMyArse was created in 2005 in Norfolk, England by Jack Cator. At the time, Cator was sixteen years-old. He created HMA in order to circumvent restrictions his school had on accessing games or music from their network.”
Given how well HMA did and the number of users, I expect many under 18s simply carried on as usual.
This will get downvoted (again), but your company would have its own VPN server which lets employees connect to devices on your company’s network the same as if your computer at your home was plugged into the company’s Ethernet network or was directly connected to your company’s WiFi network. You need a profile for that VPN server which your company’s IT only hands to trusted employees.
Talk of banning the sale of "VPN kit?". I'm not sure what that means. Practically anything with a WiFi or Eth NIC and an OS can be a node on a VPN. You'd have to prohibit the sale of anything that was remotely computer-ish.
Regarding the ban on VPNs in UAE, I've (casually) understood the reason to be purely commercial; they want you to have to pay to use their services and not anyone elses.
VPNs aren't actually banned in the UAE, I don't know why the article says that. It is illegal to use them for doing illegal things (tautology) or for accessing blocked or illegal content (practically unenforceable), but it's not a blanket ban - that wouldn't be very business friendly.
That was my understanding based on old knowledge. Family members living there simply VPNed their households and mobiles to outside the UAE to experience non-UAE internet (and enable WhatsApp and such to work properly). Wasn't ever a problem for them. I just assumed that since then the rules had changed, but apparently not!
This post has been deleted by its author
You'd have to block literally all TLS traffic. All SSH connections. All ecommerce will be gone, you'd have to shut down all government online services.
Put another way - the internet would be gone. And you still wouldn't block VPNs because you'd just dress them up as some other protocol.
They might be able to block the publicly known ones, but there's a whole problem with it'd end up in court and the government would lose.
I'm amazed that some on here are still talking as if this is about child safety. Even if it was, that should primarily be a parent's role which is a real issue. There is a reason we have been pushed towards needing two parents to work for a reasonable lifestyle and delegation of child rearing to the state and it isn't benign. Keep looking around, you are watching the end of a system in the West that has generally brought peace and prosperity (to us), it could've been even more so incidentally. Anyway, my point is, there will be more and more bites at freedom and democracy until it is gone. It is not an accident and it is not incompetence. The politicians we see may be stupid and incompetent but they are puppets, well paid if they do a good job and all their odd proclivities swept under the carpet. E.g., What came of the 3 Ukrainian rent boys that seemed to know Starmer? How does a story like that vanish?
You think this is an attack on freedom? Wait until CBDC and centralised id are imposed. It wont matter who you vote for if they are given media air time, that's an indication they are more puppets. Where is this coming from, well I'm sure the banking system, particularly central banking has a big role as they control money and affluence, not sure who else but probably many including intelligence agencies that behave like mafia.
"Speaking of which, the UK's largest mobile network operator, EE, proudly announced this week that it was the first carrier to launch SIMs for under-18s that block access to "inappropriate content." "
This is the way things should have been from any kind of legislation. Imagine a law which required that phones provided to children, by shops/parents or guardians must be required to have a 'kiddy' sim in it. These sims wouldn't only block dodgy content but also block VPN connections.
Sure some tech savvy types would have worked around it, but then here we are in a VPN wonderland which is obviously a better work around. I'm so done having to accommodate other peoples crotch goblins.
> This is the way things should have been
Err no.
The laugh about the EE pitch, is they already provide a level of parental and content controls, for free on their services. I seem to remember adult content is blocked by default on their mobile SIMs.
The problem with the opt in EE SIM approach is that people actually need to deliberately purchase child SIMs. Whereas, every SIM should by default be child friendly to some degree ie. By default block access to adult content, gambling and a few other categories. Obviously, the filtering won’t be perfect but will cover the majority. Obviously, on first registering the SIM to blocks can be altered as at present.
Ok. So now you Brits have rules that require mainstream porn sites to create large databases of personal information to make sure that a lot of people will be embarrassed when those sites have data leaks. All that to prevent children from accidentally stumbling across harmful material.About 93% of all porn sites seems to leak personal information to Google, Facebook and the likes. So users of mainstream porn are already open to that embarrassment with there Google bulb or Facebook suggestions.
But what about sites that actually have content with child abuse? They're illegal anyway, so why would they bother to conform to this act? Perhaps to create an opportunity for blackmail, but that's it. The same goes for other sites with illegal content.
But the luckily, we have VPNs. A child that is using a VPN to access porn is not likely to stumble on porn by accident. In that, the stated purpose of the act is not undermined. So what's the problem? Anyway, at some time in the future, Great Britain will introduce a law for key escrow, so VPNs will then no longer be a problem.
And I say this as a card-carrying member of the Labour Party. In terms of their collective understanding of technology, creativity, ability to think outside the box, and simply play the game of politics, I suspect we have the least able government in generations. Take energy, for example. We live in a country where, in some months, most energy comes from renewables. Have they introduced measures to vary bills (e.g., via a green rebate) to reduce the overall cost to households and promote the green transition? Nope! Just over a year in, the government appears to have already resigned itself to a single Parliament. So, yes, an attempt could be made to ban VPNs simply because we have a cohort of politicians who don't understand the technology and broader issues around the decisions they make around it.
I have to laugh when I read people here debating if this was a Labour or Conservative idea.
It simply does not matter which grouping of clowns you vote for. The agenda is set. It will be implemented by whoever is the supposed party in power. The idea of political sides is something which has served well to ensure that the people can be set against each other on the basis of taking a perceived side. A divided people cannot rise up and overthrow the ruling class.
Sadly, my laughter is not that of joy, it is the bleak laughter of someone who knows it's far too late to escape. The fact that supposedly intelligent people indulge in party politics and perpetuate the lie is one of the saddest things I've seen.
Ministers might discourage the use of VPNs, but HMG won't ban them. They can't. They'll instead declare victory saying that they've made it harder for children to be accidentally exposed to harm online. Children using VPNs know what they're doing and what they want. The harm is already done.
So having recently traveled for work purposes to one of the countries on the list in this article, VPN's work.
The free ones, (and possibly cheap ones) were blocked, but my work one worked without issues and also a private openvpn server that I run worked flawlessly.
My experience was that many sites worked, but some sites operated a WAF which blocked the county in question.
Hoping for a unified governmental policy but...
if the OSA legislations is enacted to protect under 18s from pubic postings and dangerous thought ,how will the 15, 16 ,17,year olds learn about democracy and free speech when only organisations
that are approved but UK gov AND can afford to enact the financially onerous costs of meeting the obligations of the paperwork are available.
the OSA act makes it impossible to access any website that allows content posted by the public to be accessed unless they meet the expensive "for a tiny group or Individual" stipulations and this will be required .I have seen a number of sites withdraw from the uk now (and are only accessible via VPN) wereas porn hub will still open for you if you can trick the software ,As i mentioned 15 year olds as some may be voting just after their birthdays and MUST be free to do research .
I don't have the answers for this thorny issue but then i am not paid to have them others are.
With banning Vpn is like letting hackers and criminals steal our data and also our sensitive information, that is what they're doing. Like frick our privacy, our information that can be stolen, frick thst we gonna get robbed, etc. It's for sake of children right? Our privacy doesn't matter our sensitive information like bank details, etc doesn't matter. Right?
The nanny state complains the kids are watching harmful content, whilst the same nanny state insists kids have access to iPads and computers so they can do their schoolwork. I know, lets throw the parents of kids caught viewing harmful content into prison. Maybe parents would start taking responsibility for what their kids our doing, or making sure they vote sensibly next time... their choice.
"it was only a matter of time before tech-savvy under-18s figured out how to bypass the rules and regain access to adult content"
I'm sure that's true, but I'm very much over-18 and I will still rely on my longstanding VPN account to bypass giving my sensitive data to access legal content that I am very much old enough to consume. I'd be interested to know how many people signing up to VPNs after the act kicked in were actually under-18.
I see a Tor-nado on the horizon, (though as in the article, banning VPNs gonnae no happen.)
Tor also has other "above board" uses such as testing or checking websites from "elsewhere" (and switchable to other countries in a click, by "new circuit" rather than at the VPN settings.) And most recently by me for bouncing off half of Europe to access my webmail. My hoster had an internal network routing problem after an upgrade, causing emails and web content to only come down to my IP at snails pace. (It got fixed eventually)
Please let the parents be responsible for their children.
The government could help by offering parents of school age children a FREE copy of whatever software they use in schools for filter networks. Far less obtrusive for everyone and much cheaper for those that run a website (porn or otherwise).
Well, that's obvious in the name of the "Computer Driving License" qualification. It will eventually cease to be a misdescription (a license is *permission* to do something, without which you are breaking some law, regulation, or contract; a CDL qualification is *NOT* a permission to perform an action, it is an assessment of skills) and become reality.
A lot of people say they support the law in that it protects chldren from accessing inappopriate adult material. Most adult sites did provide age verification before and now they must. A large proportion of those polled say they support the measure - but probably most of those asked don't view these sites or have no problem age verifying. BUT the big exception is Twitter/X - account holders must be over 13 but there's no check. They aren't doing age verification at all but are just blocking adult material as well as, apparently, some anti-government material, not just in the UK but in the EU and some other countries. Error messages say the material is blocked until your age has been "estimated" by AI, however that may work, or manually if that isn't possible. I think they are deliberately causing as much trouble as possible to support Trump/Vance claims that the UK is censoring free speech. Months ago, I would have said that was near nonsense but with Twitter/X version of suppression, it seems very like it, as does the UK government contacting US media companies in respect of riot protests and two-tier justice in the UK. Twitter/X's suppression is easily and simply avoided by using a VPN, as kids have done to access US Netflix for ages. There has been talk of concern in government at the 1400% increase in VPN use this week - to band or restrict VPNs would be a true sign of a repressive regime, such as we decry in China or North Korea and, as the article states, there are always going to be workarounds. Our prisons are too full to be able to accommodate mass jailing of those who use them.
So just had a quick thought and google. 21 miles across the channel. Publicly available hardware.
Fixed point to point connection across the channel. VPN or other private/tunnelled connections to the kit on the south coast from other parts of the UK. Link to France. And you have a service which for all intents and purposes only shows up as an "in UK" connection providing outside of UK service. Sure there's some bits and bobs to work out... But hey. Just a thought.
Ready for when the government slides further down that slippery slope.
China has the Great Firewall of China which stops its citizens accessing the regular internet.
I was in China in 2019 and everyone I met (admittedly the circles I was rolling in are somewhat tech savvy) had a VPN on their phone which connected out to the real world.
So, if China can't effectively ban and control the use of VPNs, what hope does the UK have?
There was one site I went to where they flat out said access from your jurisdiction was no longer available followed by information and links to use tor along with their .onion address.
BTW - socks5 proxies (and I'm sure others do as well) work, so no need to install any additional software :-)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
