• BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    Dame Rachel de Souza told BBC Newsnight it was “absolutely a loophole that needs closing” and called for age verification on VPNs.

    Saw that coming. Can’t have the populace living their lives without constant, repressive government scrutiny.

  • sunbeam60@lemmy.ml
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    8 hours ago

    Do the government ministers understand that setting up your own VPN is literally a 5 minute operation.

    Hire a droplet VM, pre-installed with a server OS. Log in with provided credentials. sudo apt install docker Copy/paste a docker compose file that sets up a wg-easy container. Create a peer. Take a picture of the provided QR code. Connect to the server via a wireguard app. Done.

    Are they going to ban VMs?

    • GreenShimada@lemmy.world
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      50 minutes ago

      If someone tells them to, they might try until a few business interests remind them that these are also fundamental components of business networks. Once money tells them to stop it, they will.

      VPN companies should just hire a lobbyist for a week and this will all go away.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      1 hour ago

      Do the government ministers understand that setting up your own VPN is literally a 5 minute operation.

      Of course they don’t. Most of them type with their index fingers and don’t even understand what a VPN is.

      • GreenShimada@lemmy.world
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        53 minutes ago

        Exactly this. There’s maybe 8 politicians in the whole world that understand what a VPN is. They’re told by a lobbyist and donor that it’s a thing that is bad, now they’re out to figure out how to make it go away.

    • buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Are they going to ban VMs?

      They will keep banning things until they feel they have absolute control over the internet.

  • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz
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    12 hours ago

    If they were really after kids watching porn (or even porn in general) it would be technically somewhat simple to force ISPs to provide filters on their end as a subscription service. I’m pretty sure I’ve even heard that kind of services in the past. Make it even opt-out if you really want to.

    That way ISPs would just ban everything from pornhub and others unless you spesifically want it allowed or even provide a portal where you could block reddit, twitter, tumblr or whatever you wish on your account. That kind of technology already exists and it’s used on many corporate setups.

    There’s obviously ways around that, but there’s no technical way to block every possible way to move bits between computers. Even if they would shut down the whole internet there’s still ways to build mesh-networks or even buy USB-drives from a shady alley.

    But as we all know, it’s not about porn and not about children.

    • x00z@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      You can’t block porn completely without blocking VPNs. If you connect to a VPN that’s all they can see. They can not see what you use the VPN for.

      • jim3692@discuss.online
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        8 hours ago

        You can’t block VPNs without blocking the entire internet. You can block known VPN services, but you can’t prevent people from hosting their own.

        Some known VPN protocols could be blocked, using introspection tools. However, this would just render corporate VPNs useless. VPN traffic is just bytes, and so is WebSockets. Good luck figuring out whether my HTTPS traffic is legitimate internet traffic, or masked VPN traffic.

        • piecat@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          Good news, we closed that pesky loophole by banning encryption without backdoors.

          If they can’t decode it, you better be ready to explain exactly what those bytes were!

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            1 hour ago

            Even if they go that route, and frankly I think they would get lynched before we got to that point, they can’t monitor every single connection. That just way too much traffic.

            That’s why China has a firewall, because that’s the best option they can come up with because monitoring every Chinese persons data is an impossible task. Their only option would be to go North Korea route, and just close the internet but that would basically end their economy.

      • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz
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        9 hours ago

        VPN, Tor (and similar, like I2P), every imaginable P2P network, proxies, all non-http protocols (smtp, ftp, nntp, xmpp and other instant messengers and so on) can all transfer any kind of data, porn included. And a ton of other things. Heck, I’m quite sure there’s a minecraft mod where you can assemble JPG-images out of the blocks and view them that way. And then you can use stuff like uuencode where you can use anything that can move plain text to transfer binary data.

        There’s no way to block all of that unless you shut the whole internet down. And even then you can still trade good old playboy-magazines with your friends. VPN in itself has very little to do with the actual problem, beyond that someone apparently noticed that their current “save-the-children” iteration had pretty large holes in it.

  • Baggie@lemmy.zip
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    13 hours ago

    Why are the kids technologically illiterate and undersexed until it comes to matters of government control? I’m not usually into tin foil hats, but this doesn’t feel like the kids are the primary concern here.

  • Gerudo@lemmy.zip
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    16 hours ago

    You ban something, and people will always find a way around it. Always.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      15 hours ago

      Yup, and that’s how the US got the Mafia. We banned alcohol, but people wanted to drink, so the Mafia made that happen.

      All a ban does is hurt law abiding citizens and businesses.

      • MynameisAllen@lemmy.zip
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        7 hours ago

        This is a fairly revisionist history version of the mafia, they were here for decades before prohibition. One might say that they profited greatly from prohibition, but to suggest they began with it is incredibly incorrect. I hate to be the actually guy but I find organized crime fascinating and I can’t let this one go

  • fluxion@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    Clearly it’s a parental problem to determine if the VPN they are buying for their kids is being used to wank off, but apparently this party of ‘liberty’ has an unhealthy obsession with monitoring our children’s genitalia these days.

    • AlpacaChariot@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      Unfortunately, neither Labour nor Conservatives are parties of liberty, although there are some individuals within both that see the importance.

  • Photuris@lemmy.ml
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    17 hours ago

    We didn’t see this one coming a mile away.

    Palantir execs and shareholders are buzzing with anticipation.

  • NGC2346@sh.itjust.works
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    13 hours ago

    When they effectively make the internet a dangerous place, Usenet will rise from the darkness. P2P will also always exist and these politicians dont understand computer math, so a lot of what they’re trying to accomplish is bound to fail.

    • 𝄞 Inkstain (they/them)𓆩 𓆪@pawb.social
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      8 hours ago

      As someone who just read the Wikipedia article on Usenet and doesn’t know anything else about it: Would this be pretty much the equivalent of the internet before search engines? Because if so I’m really intrigued

      • phar@lemmy.ml
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        6 hours ago

        Never mind search engines, Usenet was being used before people were using web browsers.

  • Lembot_0004@discuss.online
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    19 hours ago

    Stop ministers making laws to… why the fuck they even do this bullshit? They are a government, they know everything about everyone even without such primitive control methods.

    • Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      The people pulling the strings have obviously decided that internet freedom is a threat to them and they’re taking (global) action to ensure their supremacy.