It’s like watching an online version of Brexit, without the referendum
“Many of these free VPNs are riddled with issues,” said Daniel Card, a cyber-security expert with the Chartered Institute for IT (BCS).
“Some act as traffic brokers for data harvesting firms, others are so poorly built they expose users to attacks.”
He told the BBC despite posing a range of potential privacy risks, such apps “end up in the hands of kids trying to watch age-restricted content”, or adults “trying to get round blocks”.
Ah yes, there it is: won’t anyone think of the children. I expected that argument higher up in the article.
So surely no corporations or governments will be using them to remote in, right?
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UK: from the EU to the Uzbekistan of the Atlantic.
EU is working on that, too
I can’t see anywhere in the article that says they may be ‘banned’.
They can try though. They can also try and collect water in a sieve.
Eh, a back bencher has called for a report on how VPNs interfere with ofcoms ability to enforce/regulate the online safety act within 6 months.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vpns-online-safety-bill-labour-champion-b2239810.html
"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.”
The likely conclusion of that report is that “VPNs circumvent the age verification requirement, so circumvent the OSA, so VPNs must be banned”
Yes, I read that. ‘Likely conclusion’ does not equal a ban though.
I’m just being a bit pedantic about the headline - this whole thing is crappy (and unworkable) enough as it is, without jumping to conclusions.
The only other solutions to “VPNs circumvent OSA” are:
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Licence/regulate VPN usage (which is essentially a ban WRT the OSA).
Extremely difficult to do. It’s fairly trivial to just tunnel your connection over SSH to a VPS in another country.
Also fairly trivial to get a VPN that tunnels over a websocket, making the traffic identical to website traffic.
The government is going to play cat&mouse with decades of legitimate infosec. -
Do something progressive, and drop the OSA (which isn’t going to happen).
They’ve literally just implemented these laws. It’s not getting repealed.
They are going to make consumer use of anything that changes the public source address of a packet illegal.
How they enforce that, I dunno.
Like the whole OSA, it seems really poorly thought out. I dunno how they completely overlooked VPN usageIt’s about time we banned CGNAT.
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Somehow I don’t see this being a popular move
The UK politicians who thought this was a good idea deserve a “ban”
Seriously, how did they not see this coming?
OOOHH yeah, let’s ban a standardized security system because we’re idiots
Politicians always look like that kid with a propellor cap on their head
“Keep calm and give up all and everything for your own safety”
Please do it
Why? How is any of this a good thing?
I just remember how Roscomnadzor started banning everything
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they’ve banned 127.0.0.1
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they banned all telegram IP ranges, downing card payments in the country
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they learned how to ban wireguard in the whole country, effectively ruining a lot of internal contours
So?
I want to see another failed attempt and the peak of human stupidity again
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It would make the public hate the politicians who came up with the online safety bill in the first place
