UK proxy traffic surges as users consider VPN alternatives amid Online Safety Act Amid the furor around surging VPN usage in the UK, many users are eyeing proxies as a potential alternative to the technology. A proxy server sits between a device and the internet – the most common type is a "forward proxy" – effectively acting as an intermediary and masking a user's IP address. It can also overcome geo- …
It's a Wankwall. Proxies are less well known, but will soon be popular in the UK. It's not really about security, it's about just getting your chick pics. Pissing off the government is a delightful bonus, as they have spent the last decade damaging our standard of living and our economy with their failure, incompetence and corruption.
Incidentally, visiting decodo's website only gave me a brief view of their services before the webpage went blank. Has Our Glorious Leadership blocked them too?
We talk about The Great Firewall of China. As The Great Wall is China's best known wall.
I guess Hadrian's Wall is Britain's most famous wall? So that's where Hadrian's Firewall comes from?
Alternatives might be Offa's Dyke, between England and Wales, or at least an older version of that border, and the Antonine Wall in central Scotland.
Labour could ban VPNs after online safety act surge
Sarah Champion MP: “My new clause 54 would require the Secretary of State to publish, within six months of the Bill’s passage, a report on the effect of VPN use on Ofcom’s ability to enforce the requirements under clause 112. If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems.”
As someone who works remotely from a relatively remote part of the UK (at least as far as the IT industry is concerned) I would lose my job if I couldn't use a VPN, and I suspect this situation is not uncommon.
Hopefully that alone would be enough to stop the government banning them.
Also as observed by David Allen Green, the law isn't a magic spell - banning something doesn't have any effect unless the ban can be enforced and with VPNs that would be extremely hard to do.
Right, for us it's not only a security measure, but also a compliance requirement, that all our devs and admins strictly connect via VPN only.
We are not based in the UK, but would not be able to allow our UK-based team members to continue their work on our projects or customer environments, if VPNs were to be outlawed in the UK.
And even from a security standpoint only: Proposing to ban VPNs is stupid beyond imagination.
quote: Proposing to ban VPNs is stupid beyond imagination.
Have you already forgotten - The British government's last signature policy was Brexit, taking Sterling down 25% overnight. Banning VPNs wouldn't be that difficult and would cost far fewer jobs.
We could bounce content off any site, encrypted. It would only take a bit of code, but they could go after that too. There are no limits to the stupidity of governments pandering to activists.
Lots of people refusing the obey the law is not a problem but an opportunity. The fines you can levy are an endless source of income.
I think 25% is an outlier of the amount of the decline attributable to Brexit. Also, it isn't always bad to have a decline in exchange rate, it depends on your trade balance. And ... some of the decline was, and still is, due to the psychological attack on Brexit. Much like Truss and Kwarteng's disaster much of the reaction is due to market sentiment fuelled by human actions and ignorance of potential reactions from the establishment and power structures. Truss actually thought she was in charge! They thought re-energising the UK economy would be welcomed. The real power doesn't want that because it represents a shift in power from them to the masses.
A VPN is pretty much required if you are a company that has travelling sales staff and a need for even a modicum of security, let alone something like CyberEssentials certification.
A government trying to ban VPNs is basically a government trying to ban it's own economy.
A government trying to ban VPNs is basically a government trying to ban it's own economy.
You assume they care about the economy! LOL. Do you think if the economy tanks (more) that the principal government actors will be destitute. No, they will still be rich and well fed protected by the real power and money.
If they wanted to do it, they could.
I would also like to add the following. A comment I made on an article many years ago that got downvoted for reasons: https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2017/07/31/china_russia_clamp_down_on_vpns/#c_3247919
The UK government can't play whack a mole Vs the whole Internet.
They can't realistically block overseas VPN providers
They can't realistically stop anybody firing up their own remote VPN on any number of overseas based cloud providers
They can't realistically stop anybody connecting to their employer's on premises overseas VPN.
They can't realistically stop anybody accessing their overseas mate's/relative's overseas VPN that's often available with about 5 minutes setup on a modern router.
Ahhh Sarah Champion the loudmouth wannabe Mary Shitehouse.....
The living breathing wailing "WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN" - the sort who if they hadn't been a politician would have been a low-level manager (the sort who hinders not helps), head of some crackpot pressure group, career vexatious litigant or something else that allows for self aggrandisement on a daily basis.....
I suppose if the government really wanted to ban VPNs then the answer is pretty simple.
They create a law or court order that says it’s illegal for an ISP to carry any VPN encrypted traffic or protocols, heck let’s make it even better and say anything encrypted, as encryption must mean it’s hiding bad things right? Adding large fines for any breach of such a law/order, and job done. It’s then down to openreach or virgin media to figure out how to implement that on a technical level.
Of course we all know that technical specificity is not usually within the remit of the government, so the resulting law is likely to be so broad in scope, it would be pretty much unworkable, not to mention putting so much of our day to day law abiding activities in scope for surveillance, but since when has common sense made any difference to some of the laws to put on the statue books?
And think how good it would be to have such a law so we could protect the children.
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Whilst I'm not saying they won't try to ban VPNs, the article you link to is intentionally confusing the issue with a comment Labour made when in opposition, 3 years ago.
Indeed, that quote from Sarah Champion MP is three years old.
You need to research the honesty of articles, especially those posted on a heavily politically biased site such as that one.
It will be very interesting to see the contortions necessary to ban VPNs when all the world's corporations use them as a core element of security. I don't suppose all those American companies will be at all happy and JD Vance will be on the first flight to Blighty to threaten us. Then there will be some bizarre legal twists and turns to try to allow corporates to use them but not individuals while claiming children are still protected. Also remember that those big corporate leaders are key members of the WEF.
The online safety bill is a disaster all round. Not surprising since it is a lie and not for children, that was just an excuse acceptable to the normies to introduce id on the Internet. Something the media could be used to rouse the rabble over if necessary. But when you lie it usually snowballs into a plethora of lies required to support the first lie and eventually the truth becomes clear when the whole edifice crumbles as the lies become more non-sensical in attempts to maintain some sort of logic.
VPNs will not be banned outright as will lead to an arms race that will harm other industry and security interests.
The use of them could be more widely monitored and blocked in a targeted manner though.
Maybe ISPs could use this to differentiate their consumer and business offerings ◡̈
Even if the UK gov were stupid enough to ban VPNs because it enables people to get around age checks (which I wouldn't put passed those we have in charge) unless they implement the UK's version of Chinas great firewall to inspect all IP packets they wouldn't be able stop people signing up for VPN services based outside the UK. Or even just renting a cheap $5 a month VPS in another country and creating their own VPN.
The more barriers you erect to people being able to get access to the stuff they have been freely accessing for years, the more people will learn how to use tools to get around your barriers.
If it drives everyone to "dark nets" it might not be a bad thing. People will be exposed to all "truths" not just the establishment one. Of course it might be a disaster as their brains will detonate when a) their belief structure is destroyed and b) they have to use their brains to determine what is true.
This legislation punishes adults, who want to anonymously access adult websites. Not necessarily porn either, but social media and other sites with mixed content which may or may not be adult in nature. Expecting people to provide id to these sites is ridiculous and clearly people (including kids) have chosen to use VPNs, proxies, Tor etc to avoid the stupid legislation.
The only sane way the government could have introduced legislation is requiring domestic ISPs to offer filtering services and leave it up to age 18+ account holders if they want to enable the filters or not for the whole account or specific devices. The service could reside in the router, or as an app on the device, or in the cloud. It could filter by DNS, or deep package inspection (including https), or whatever. However it worked it would be at least as effective blocking porn to kids and without punishing adults at the same time.
The only sane way the government could have introduced legislation is requiring domestic ISPs to offer filtering services and leave it up to age 18+ account holders if they want to enable the filters or not for the whole account or specific devices.
Have you forgotten that the government already requires the major consumer ISPs to actively filter DNS and the contract holder has to specifically ask for filtering to be taken off? The latest online safety b̶o̶l̶l̶o̶c̶k̶s̶ act is an implicit admission that that was as effective as a fishnet condom. If you look at the ONS statistics for households, only 28% include minors (under 18s, no data on under 16s) so 72% of households got the hassle for no reason whatsoever. Governments (of any flavour) don't give a shit about the real world, they're only worried about halfwits shrieking in the papers, so "sane way" and "government" don't really belong in the same sentence.
I believe it's based on 'size' or 'number of customers' - not sure what the criteria are for these.
Any ISP meeting this requirement is obliged to enable parental controls or blocking via DNS (which of course is trivially bypassed) as on by default but the account holder can request they be removed.
Smaller ISPs are not obliged to do this on the grounds that it might be 'difficult' or 'too expensive' for them to do so.
"I'm aware of one ISP who doesn't offer any filtering and will not do business with you if you select that you want filtering during sign up." I suspect here that the ISP doesn't do filtering, doesn't want to, is small enough that they aren't obliged to and have decided that the cost of doing so for an individual customer is more than they will get from them. So hence they make the obvious business decision to not have them as a customer.
Look, no provider wants to do this, it's expensive and ineffective but is a legal requirement for larger ISPs. So they do the bear minimum required, they all know it's pointless, they all know that's it's as reliable as a tissue-paper condom; but it satisfies their legal requirements.
In the UK, elsewhere too, attaining political office has become an end-of-itself with little pretence of sacrifice (of time) for public service: 'career politics'. This applies to national, regional, city, and town, levels of administrative oversight and legislation. Each tier 'employs' its politicians: salaries, generous expenses, eye-watering pension provision at the higher levels and, at the top tier, meaningless baubles such as knighthoods, greatly valued by small minds, and expectation of enhanced first class seating for some on 'the gravy train' through 'ennoblement' to the Lords, and/or lifetime Privy Council membership.
Whereas in times past, people of some accomplishment - this ranging from 'standing' in a learned profession down to merely making a pot of money - during later life would take part-time unpaid service in political office, young folk nowadays set their sights on 'politics' even when still at school (e.g. the twerp William Hague and the walking disaster Boris Johnson); they pursue an easy course at university - one offering plenty of time for 'making connections' (e.g. the Oxford PPE), and later enter established pathways (e.g. in the City or in the trade union movement) for aspirants. They leave university with little in the way of 'transferrable skills' (e.g. for reasoning, especially quantitative and statistical), but via social activities (in the Oxford Union, or student bodies elsewhere) attain mastery of empty rhetoric, bombast, and 'gift of the gab'.
Given that parliamentary politics is full-time, ditto for representatives attending daycare centres for the otherwise unemployable established as regional assembly governments, its practitioners seek to be seen as 'busy'. Hence, a plethora of half-baked legislation. Ignoramuses veer onto topics they cannot understand. Worse still, those advanced into ministerial positions lack breadth of knowledge, and reasoning skills, to subject 'expert' advisors (and civil servants) to forensic questioning capable of revealing bullshit; this well exemplified during the Covid-19 fiasco.
Parliament's collective inability to understand technological matters should cause deep worry to that proportion of the population capable of independent thought (5%?). Witless nonentities easily dream up, or allow to pass, all manner of half-cock legislation, e.g. Section 12 of the Terrorism Act, and banning irritant (to them) but harmless movements of good intent like 'Palestine Action'. When it comes to computers, 'AI', and the Internet, their lack of nous is even more disastrous. We live during an era of greater opportunities for good and ill than ever before. Mr Starmer, Bad Enoch, and their followers, inhabit a realm of thought where the impact of Copernicus, let alone Darwin, Mendel, and Maxwell, has barely registered. Opportunities are lost, and dangers are unheeded.
One of the greatest missed opportunities relates to deploying the Internet as a means to engage the best minds in assisting the legislative process, and vetting the behaviour of ministers with respect to the closely interrelated economic, foreign, and defence, policies (conveniently residual powers of the monarch, i.e. deployed on his behalf by the 'deep state' which 'owns' contemporary politicians lock stock and barre).
In summary the people now attracted to and encouraged into political life are not those desiring to serve the people and country or put something back. The House of Lords was much more effective for the people when hereditary but ... jealousy was played on to remove hereditary peer control.
"A properly configured proxy, especially with SOCKS5 protocol support, can deliver stronger operational security for businesses than most commercial VPNs," he claimed. "SOCKS5 proxies mask full traffic paths without altering packet headers, reducing the risk of leaks or protocol issues."
Do businesses really need to circumvent the online safety bill? Worrying if the do.
