this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill (www.birminghammail.co.uk)
submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
335 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Prominent backbench MP Sarah Champion launched a campaign against VPNs previously, saying: “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.” And the Labour Party said there were “gaps” in the bill that needed to be amended.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 347 points 4 days ago (27 children)

Just to fast-forward this dumb cat-and-mouse thing, the next step is people go back to torrenting their porn and deeper down the rabbit hole of garbage "free" websites skirting the rules.

As always, the UK is useful on the international stage because sometimes you need to be able to point at some idiot trying dumb stuff to explain to people why dumb stuff is dumb.

[–] neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Then, we move to the socks proxy, or tor, or other options I haven’t even considered yet.

[–] Saleh@feddit.org 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

I am pretty sure they would consider tor as using a VPN.

Probably they would demand ISPs to run lists of known VPN addresses and if you connect to them, they will forward the information to the anti-terrorism unit and you will get SWATed.

[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 24 points 4 days ago (2 children)

If Russia, China, and Iran cannot stop tor usage, there's no way the UK can do it.

[–] Tiger@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 days ago

I believe China can stop any kind of access at any time, they just choose to allow a certain percentage of folks to get through above a certain bar of sophistication and need.

[–] Saleh@feddit.org 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Don't the people in those countries use a proxy to access tor first? probably that means cycling through the proxies regularly as they become known. I have no doubt that it is impossible to prevent truly tech savvy people from access. Also Russia, Iran and China all run state sanctioned hackers, so the governments have a vested interest in allowing these groups to obscure where they are coming from.

But i am not sure how much that transpires to a broader public.

[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 12 points 4 days ago

That's what things like snowflake and bridges are for. Because, at least with snowflake, it just looks like a webRTC phone call. But it's actually tor traffic. And snowflake proxies are ephemeral, since you can just run them in your browser and help anyone connect.

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