Cant force your legislation on businesses out of your country, simple as that. I hope those VPN providers just tell them to fuck off.
Why is the UK such a hell hole all the sudden? I’ve never had such a terrible opinion of the place until now with encryption and authoritarian fuckwitism against the last bastion of real democracy on the internet.
All of a sudden?
This is the country where 1984 was written, where they have more cameras than anywhere else, this sort of social surveillance and quiet, polite fascism is normal for the UK.
And almost all those cameras are privately owned and operated, and not integrated into any kind of centralised surveillance apparatus. More typically, they’re in place to deter graffiti or to keep drunks from pissing on the walls outside pubs. Police can and do request footage when investigating crimes, but if a camera owner’s retention policy means the footage has been deleted, that’s the end of the discussion. And such footage is useful if some arsehole has just jammed a broken beer glass into someone else’s face.
The worse forms of authoritarian overreach are the increasingly pervasive number-plate recognition cameras that track the movements of every vehicle, and the inane attempts to regulate the internet and to ban peivate use of encryption.
As for “quiet, polite fascism,” I’ve lived for extended periods in the US and the UK, and so far, despite the seemingly draconian laws, I’ve always found there to be more personal freedom in the UK. The police don’t kill people very often, people tend to ignore the laws and the government can’t be bothered to enforce the most intrusive of them, and there’s far less social pressure towards brainless conformity and mindless obedience than there is in the States.
When the Snowden Revelations came out, it turned out the UK did as much or maybe even more civil society surveillance as the US, and unlike the US it doesn’t even have constitutional limitations on surveillance of people on their own soil (in fact the UK doesn’t even have a written Constitution).
In the US they actually walked back on some of the surveillance (because of said constitutional protections), in the UK they just passed a law that retroactively made the whole thing legal, got the editor of the newspaper who brought out the Snowden Revelations kicked, fired a bunch of D-Notices around (the UK’s Press Censorship mechanism) out and nobody ever talked about it again.
As soon as the technology was good enough for that the UK created a Digital Stasi and it’s only gotten worse since.
and unlike the US it doesn’t even have constitutional limitations on surveillance of people on their own soil
- I’d argue the US doesn’t anymore either, or if it does, it’s only on paper. Shit, rights in general in the US are to the degree where they only exist on paper anymore, and I can think of some fascists that would get rid of the Constitution altogether and implement absolute, unbreakable rule if they could…
Trump…
- I’d argue the US doesn’t anymore either, or if it does, it’s only on paper. Shit, rights in general in the US are to the degree where they only exist on paper anymore, and I can think of some fascists that would get rid of the Constitution altogether and implement absolute, unbreakable rule if they could…
That’s always such an insane fact to me compared to how many China has. Their traffic cams are impressive
china has that too.
They over there looking at America being the absolute fuck up it is and are jealous.
To be fair, they were the OGs of a prosperous stable country spontaneously shooting themselves in the head because someone convinced them they could be doing SOOO much better aaaannd it’s gone…
Haha, good point! Us ‘muricans are just posers. :p
Tony Blair thought that the Labour Party would win if it were more like the US Democratic Party. That began an electorally successful period of unprincipled triangulation and petty authoritarianism. Eventually that momentum fizzled out due to the gloomy paranoid leadership of Gordon Brown, corruption of people like Peter Mandelson, and the loathsome hypocrisy of Blair’s lies in support of GW Bush’s second Gulf War.
Then the Conservatives got in for 14 years and fucked everything up even worse. Now the Blairite authoritarian-centrist faction is again running Labour, and so far has shown none of the political cunning that kept Blair on top. And the media fawns over the smarmy mini-Trump Nigel Farage despite his party having no policies.
Because they have to protect the children!! Oh why won’t anyone think of the children?!
Or the poor adults who can’t be bothered to parent their own spawn.
andrew does every night.
You should watch some Adam Curtis documentaries to get perspective on the UK.
It’s always been a bit like this, actually
Yep. Politicians creating tech policy on the fly without consulting people who actually know what they are talking about.
More referring to the technofascism
Don’t forget transphobia. They seem to have suddenly decided that’s a good idea in the last 3 years.
sometimes the french are right. the brits are indeed cunts.
so seriously, this i brilliantly evil. this is the way that will allow some police state level of oversight for both social media, chats, and even vpn data will be tied to your personal file. this is so dark in every possible way. any site can be labelled porn or harmful at this point. even wikipedia. how dare the young browse the open truth of the internet? and this is already the second phase, mind police.
I don’t know if it’s the root reason, but one gets scoffed at harshly by the average Tom, Dick, and Harry when suggesting that a Monarchy is an archaic and, frankly, insulting form of governance in spite of protestations that the role of the sovereign is purely ceremonial.
Simply put, they (mostly) seem to prefer political masochism, and are ruled by sadists. Sadly, in 2025, aren’t we all?
I wouldn’t underestimate the effect Brexit had on this. No there is no check for the national Government anymore.
knowingly leaking everyones medical information, fucking surveillance camerason every corner… my opinion didn’t meaningfully change by these, they are being a hell hole for a longer time
Turns out Liberals are Fascists.
Uhh no… Idiots are fascists. Some idiots may call themselves liberal but that doesn’t make it so. Liberals by definition cannot be fascist. The idiots are those that let fascists parade as anything but.
One thing is the Political self-proclaimed Liberals mainly in the Anglo-Saxon world, a very different thing is the Political Ideology of Liberalism.
“Liberals are Fascists” definitely applies to the mainstream politicians in at least the UK, US and Canada who say they are “Liberals” and have “Liberal policies”.
Strange how every Liberal does the things Fascists do. They must not understand Liberalism like you do.
Always have been, just with a better PR campaign.
UK is far from being liberal lol, they are closer to the US than not
There is no amount of blocking the Internet that will safeguard the children effectively. The real solution is this:
If this were actually done to children/teens surely their brains would not form any associations between being restrained and horny, right?
Right?
seems like a great way to train for hands free orgasms.
Wet dreams happen no matter what you can do at puberty.
They would definiyely want to employ that, if this bullshit actually had anything to do with protecting children.
Seeing this from the US scares me. I already have an elaborate system for tunneling my traffic out of the country without it appearing I’m doing so from my end devices.
But seeing this happening in the UK and knowing there’s a chance of it happening here, I really feel the need to get into China-style circumvention with shadowsocks and what have you, and I need to figure this out sooner rather than later.
21 states have laws for age verification on porn sites. 4 more states are in the process of passing laws for age verification. That’s nearly half the states…
Quite insane honestly
Where will you peer to once these laws are active everywhere. That’s where this is actually headed
Only commercial VPNs? So HTTP proxying, Tor, SSH tunneling, SOCKS tunneling, running your own VPN node, etc are all allowed? There’s plenty of VPS hosting companies that don’t need ID or proof of age to sign up. Even if the UK requires this, you can just sign up for a server outside the UK.
There’s also weird approaches that work but not many systems catch, like tunneling stateless data (like HTTP responses) over DNS TXT lookups.
When I was in high school in the 2000s, kids figured out how to bypass the internet filtering at school. Kids these days have way more resources available to them, making it even easier to do.
I used a server on my personal computer that would just echo back the raw HTML from a PHP call back in the day. Definitely not the safest or best way to do things but ebaum’s world had the best games. All fun til the principal wanted to talk about my friends putting porn on all the computers in the library.
CGIProxy / PHProxy were definitely very popular when I was in school. Some of the more tech-savvy kids would get free hosting accounts and install a proxy in them and share the URL.
You can easily make it a ton harder by blocking VPS IPs when serving certain types of content
If you have issues with IP blocks, get the AWS equivalent of a VPS (Lightsail). It’s expensive compared to other VPS services - $5/month for only 512MB RAM, 20GB disk and 1TB monthly transfer, whereas good deals usually have at least 8GB RAM for that price - but it’s difficult for anyone to block Amazon/AWS IPs because so many services use them :)
I literally have lightsail (not the equivalent) as well because it doesn’t have issues connecting to SK, but China throttles those addresses nevertheless
Why, does AWS use a different IP address pool than lightsail?
I fucking hate the UK, so much.
The MPs and Peers only fucking learnt about VPNs when this bullshit bill was being passed. They’re so fucking clueless about the whole thing. They don’t understand what a VPN exactly is and what it does and the fact their own government (hopefully) uses them, as do Banks (for security), Companies, and indeed, how it works.
This will lead to more bullshit.
Wrote a email to my MP for this exact reason.
The OSA needs repealing. All it’s doing is either teaching people to follow poor digital hygiene practices, or forcing people to follow more risky methods of bypassing the OSA controls.
Whole guise of child safety is laughable when they’ve made zero attempts to educate everyone (not just kids) on being safe online.
aaanddd did they respond?
Of course not. Implies they do their jobs properly.
They are not the first country to ban vpns, those bans usually target 95% of individuals who are bad at tech not encrypted communications as a whole. Though I can see Britain ignoring that experience and just shooting itself in the face.
As is tradition.
Shithole country doing shithole things. The UK is acting like a red state, and their standard of living is dropping accordingly.
Uk is closer to US in ideology than to europe post-brexit. also russel vought is behind all the porn bans of steam recently too, i would imagine he probably is too on this.
UK was also closer to US ideology pre Brexit.
Republicans with nationalized health care and a monarchy.
Even pre-brexit. The UK was never part of the EU, culturally speaking
I’d argue that causation may be the other way around.
It’s recursive
You can just mail cash to mullvad and include a code that links it to your account.
This is how you get under-18s to use Tor browser
Until the go government starts blocking entry nodes, then there will be a whole new country relying on the snowflake protocol.
Also, this doesn’t affect only people under 18, any sane adult should never send a copy of their id to anything but the government, bank, insurance or employer.
a whole new country relying on the snowflake protocol.
That would put them in the company of China, Russia, and Iran. Getting unrestricted Internet to people in those countries is why I am among those who run a snowflake node on a dedicated VPS (the link also has a simple browser addon – it’s easy to support the network, everyone should)
Yes, these moves suck for UK youth. But, anti-censorship tools do exist, and volunteers like me want people who could benefit from them, to know about & use them.
any sane adult should never send a copy of their id to anything but the government, bank, insurance or employer.
100% agree, take my upvote
Just out of curiosity how does one connect to the snowflake in the event that normal Tor does not work? (in minecraft)
In general real-time games are not great for Tor, because it introduces lots of network latency – which makes you safer
For most applications, the easiest way to Torify is via using SOCKS from the Tor Browser Bundle, which would let you simply pick Snowflake when Tor Browser starts up. I asked Perplexity for directions on running Minecraft over Tor, here ya go
Does Snowflake still work in China? Thought I read they’re now able to detect and block it.
Yeah, the newer thing to counter that is WebTunnel which came out last year. There’s considerably more setup than just starting a snowflake proxy process, and I am ashamed to say I haven’t set one up yet
If they block entry nodes, just build an entry node. They can’t block stuff inside your own network.
Ofc they can, but they don’t need to, they just seize the server and jail the operator.
Like Idiocracy has been a manual for the US, V for Vendetta is a manual for the UK.
For fuck sake people, these are movies of worlds we DON’T want to live in.
Quick! Someone make a movie where the population suffers from affordable housing, free and universal healthcare, fair taxation, and a healthy planet!
You mean Star Trek? But where are the suffering people? It’s no fun when there is no suffering. Why would fascists want a world like that. I don’t understand why there are not more people willing to support the 1%ers. We might all be suffering, but their lives matter too you know! The world we live in right now, like in Don’t Look Up, is much more appealing. I mean, fuck poor people, fuck sick people, fuck hungry people. It’s their life choice. They just should have been born more fortunate. It’s their choice to have no life, no future, no opportunity. Might as well lock them up in prison (concentration camps) and use them for forced labor.
How about I get us started? To get the groove going;
AHHH! Look at my Bank Account! I have money left after paying rent! OHHH THE HUMANITY! 😨
Drugs are cheaper than groceries, also delivered within 15 minutes while groceries take 1 to 2 days. Guess what I’ll be consuming tonight instead of dinner!
1 grocery bag with food for 2 day: 75 euros.
Or:
5 grams of ketamine: 25 euros.
5 xtc pills: 10 euros.
3 grams amphetamine: 15 euros.
I just saved 25 euros expenses, with enough for 5 days! Yay!
Just get a Fent-a.
The only soft drink with the extra kick of terrible addiction!
I have nyl wishes getting addicted to that shit. I’m more of an upper guy. Gotta stay positive! The world is already full of downies, like diaper Donny the taco in chief.
You can get 5 grams of k for €25 ($29 usd)? Wtf!? 5 g’s would be like $400 in the us
I actually paid 1,30 per gram but only when I bought a larger quantity. But with my home dealer it’s 15 per gram, 5 for friends. Tested 86% pure needles. Perks of living in The Netherlands, cheap top quality dope with fast home delivery. Can be tested in every city. Yet there are only few homeless people and no dope crisis. The hard junky drugs like crack, crystal meth, opioids like oxycontin, fentanyl and heroin aren’t popular here. Mostly regular party dope and weird Chinese designer drugs for younger people like 3MMA and 4FMP.
I think we are living in the Star Trek universe, but we’re just getting to the Bell Riots shown in DS9. No word on if we get much past it.
You mean Star Trek? But where are the suffering people?
On the planets in the Cardassian/Federation neutral zone…
We were talking about earth. In Star Trek earth is nice.
V for Vendetta is a manual for the UK.
Add some 1984 to the mix.
Well both books were written to describe what british authoritarianism would look like.
Tap for spoiler
How long before we have a leak of the PM masturbating to state violence? Ugh V for Vandetta was so sexual in such an intentionally uncomfortable way
I don’t remember a scene like that was it only in the comic?
I didn’t watch the movie, but I can’t imagine an American movie getting away with what the comic did. Yeah, one of the major themes of the comic is the fucked up sexuality displayed by the fascists and the leader gets off on the concentration camps.
Really good comic, but it’s definitely a lot. Moore did a really good job of depicting the fascists as pathetic but dangerous. Though fair warning, if Moore could think of a slur a brit might possibly use it’s in that comic.
Honestly, the us is going full vendetta too. Our president is really reminiscent of Adam Susan
The US would be better off with president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.
Porn loophole? You can literally Google image search porn.
Yeah, I noticed Google had evaded the ban.
Would have thought they’d be all over the opportunity to gobble up even more data.
I wonder how they figure that’s going to work out.
I couldn’t imagine being this pants-shittingly stupid about how the internet works.
Don’t tell them you can buy a vps and run your own vpn in another country.
They probably know and don’t care because more than 99.99% won’t do it.
Shh, dont tell him lobotomies became mandatory on birth since Gen Z, and there are only few who still know how this magical phone they are using every day works, let alone know what an IP address is
Accessing the internet now requires age verification. Gg
In the UK we already have a law where isps block porn by default (blacklisting) the adult who took out the plan can contact the isp and ask them to opt out of these blocks. That’s been a thing for about 10 years. You can own a Pay-as-you-go sim as a minor but you have to send government id to prove you are over 18 to get the adult content filtering turned off.
That’s one of the things that made it clear to me that the new law is an authoritarian data mining operation and blatant power grab. Like… We already have these tools in place. If you don’t want your kid accessing porn, don’t opt out of the filters provided by your isp.
You could argue that putting the onus on the platform is more effective at “protecting kids” than having the isps maintain blacklists but there will always be small sites that don’t comply and enterprising kids who find a way around any block. Just like the law requires you to be 18 to buy alcohol or tobacco here but there are always dodgy shops who sell tobacco to underage kids. There are older siblings and relatives willing to buy cigarettes and alcohol for underage teens.
This was never about protecting the children. That was the Trojan horse used to justify these laws to the technically uninformed.
To the people of the UK:
What the hell is this authoritarian, pearl clutching shit? You’re fucking shit up for everyone. Can you get your people to please fuck off?
Thanks, from some guy on the Internet.
Yes I know I’ll write to my local MP and see what they sa- oh they didn’t respond. Ah, I’ll sign that petition that got over 400,000 signatur- oh they said no. You can be damn sure the “people of the UK” have nothing to do with this, we didn’t vote on it. Should just take a leaf out of the French book and just start burning shit.
The French get shit done. I can certainly say that. They’re a population that really won’t stand for being shit on. It’s why they made such good use of the guillotine, historically.
Taking a page from their book may not be a bad idea… Or you could reference the alleged works of Saint Luigi from America. He also made a profound impact. At least for a while.
VPN company: “Don’t care, not in the UK, fuck off.”
Mullvad vpn is probably gonna be safe from this demand from the uk because their account system relies on random string of numbers PLUS their website is also available on the tor browser
as long as they can accept GBP in the mail you’re good
They take crypto, wash a few satoshis through lightning and you’re as good as anonymous.
sure, xmr would be better, but 🤷🏻♂️
edit: well shuck my corn!
“We accept cash, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Monero, bank wire, credit card, PayPal, Swish, Eps transfer, Bancontact, iDEAL, and Przelewy24.”
That’s a niiiice tip.
Deleting my account and re-joining under TOR when my lapse comes around. Might as well hide my use entirely.
Next step would be requiring UK ISPs to block traffic to the VPNs. They’ve already made it so you can’t go to some sites based on DNS lookups, so there’s precedent. Making it by IP address from a continuously-updated list would make it exceedingly difficult for regular users to access a public VPN, and while making one yourself from a VPS is straightforward, it can get expensive very quickly if you want to watch videos or download lots of stuff through it.
