Oh you've got to be kidding me. We juuust managed to get free of the threat of breaking e2ee on Apple by the skin of our teeth... and now those idiot politicos propose a dumb, backfiring, dumb. dumb, dumb VPN ban. Do they even talk to people in IT?

Necessary hashtags, anyone?

The proble isn't kiddies using VPN, is people using VPN. The idea is to make ISP building infrastructure to block certain kind of traffic and then use it to block other unrelated kind of traffic.

By the way I remember when to connect to Internet I had to dial up to a VAX server and then launch ppp into the unix shell. And going back in the time I remember that as a teenager I got porn in pure analog form, on VHS tapes, and sometimes on TV. Either those politicians when they were teen, were too idiot to know how to get skin flicks, or they know their electors are so dumb that weren't capable to find porn, or they have an hidden agenda and fight terrorists excuse doesn't work very well nowadays.

They've already made it illegal for kiddies to access porn, now they want to make it illegal for kids to do things in order to access porn.

If you ban VPNs the entire NHS will collapse. (would you notice?)

"If you ban VPNs the entire NHS will collapse."

To be fair, the article is asking for age verification to use VPNs to stop children using them, it doesn't mention banning all (including NHS) VPNs. Not sure where you got that bit from.

Oh yes, just about anybody with two braincells to rub together.

May I be about the 87th to say - D'OH!

We should just shut down the UK's internet connection entirely until they're responsible enough to use it correctly. Stop trying to regulate everything.

Agreed. The UK is taking far too many pages from China's and India's internet playbook lately...

https://www.flubu.com/comics/DilbertHo.906.gif

From Jan 23, 1996, before we knew what Scott Adams was really like.

ALT text:

It's a three panel comic.

First panel: Dilbert sits in front of a desktop PC, typing. Dogbert looks on. Dilbert proclaims, "I'm inventing a new technology to prevent kids from seeing smut on the Internet."

Second panel: Dogbert replies, "So, you're pitting your intelligence against the collective sex drive of all the teenagers who own computers?"

Third panel: Dilbert angrily retorts, "What is your point?" Dogbert, tail wagging, responds, "Did you know that if you put a little hat on a snowball it can last a long time in hell?"

I was hopeful, when the Labour Party got in, that the kakistocracy would come to an end. Alas, Labour seem to be continuing where the Tories left off.

They haven’t even had the decency to reply to my emails about (amongst other things) the idiocy of breaking end to end encryption. Not so much as a pre-prepared response. No luck with paper letter follow up either.

They won’t listen to experts - but they will be persuaded by greasy orange turds in the states. That’s no way to run a government.

So you know what? F-em. Membership cancelled. They won’t be seeing any more of my money.

Just asking, emails to who? MP?

... and better still would more often than not agree with a sensible argument and get an answer from the correct minister (that's where the canned reply would come from). Then my MP got moved on to be a minister and had no time left for our constituency and so was dropped at the last election.

I'm sorry, but you're desperately naive to think that Labour would be strong on privacy considering the High Priest of the party, the infamous Tony Bliar, is very obviously controlling his puppet Starmer from the sidelines.

https://institute.global/digital-id-what-is-it-and-how-it-works

Alas, Labour seem to be continuing where the Tories left off.

No surprise, considering that when Cameron brought the Tories to power he just continued where Blair & Brown left off. The only difference these days is the colour of the rosette.

Indeed. Starmer's mob and the Tories are two cheeks of the same arse. And that also tells you everything you need to know about the sensible centrists who say they're positioned between the two.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

Governments come and go, the Civil Service stays. In this case the Home Office. Destroying privacy has been their policy for decades. Do not expect a change until we get a minister with technical nous prepared to resist their house training - and house training ministers is what they do best.

If you expected anything else you haven't been paying attention for the whole of the current century.

Hard to enact law that is risible both in legislation and avoidance.

Do you find it risible when I say the name "Biggus Dickus? ... He has a wife you know, her name is Incontinentia, Incontinentia Buttocks.

"Similarweb reported that Pornhub saw a 47 per cent drop in British traffic after the law"

When people use VPN's to access it from another country you will see such a drop. How have viewing figures been affected at all?

This gov is malicious. No way is there enough stupidity to accidentally act against their own country as much as they are achieving.

Never underestimate the capacity for stupidity

And the capacity of the Home Office to house train their ministers.

And how exactly are you going to manage that ?

First of all, you'd have to have the means to determine that it's a child using the VPN (because guess what ? Adults have professional reasons to use VPNs. I know that because I have a Swiss customer that requires that I join its network from Switzerland. I'm not going to drive 300km every time I need to connect to their network).

Then, you'd have to determine that "the child" is doing something that you have decided is "unwholesome". Who are you to decide what is "wholesome" ?

Who are you to decide what is "wholesome" ?

The parent, hopefully. This assumes they care and have the ability to rub more than two braincells together (obviously they could rub other things together to get to that issue...)

"rub other things together to get to that issue..."

Issue, a tissue, we all vpn.

The current one is FUBAR.

No force in the Universe will stop a boy from pursuing the sight of boobs. That being said, I fear for a future where boys (or girls) educate themselves sexually with the 'variety' of smut currently on full display and only one click away.

The future? It's been the norm for a long time. Kids were bypassing porn blocks in school in the 00s.

Who said kids don't learn anything useful in school?

Ah, the good old days, when you had to download your porn from alt.binaries.porn.insert-fetish-of-your-choice-here using a newsreader.

The entire development of the internet has been intimately entwined with pornography* since internet access became available to the general public. It's very unlikely that anything is going to change.

* And piracy. But mostly porn.

The stupidity of the UK government does now seem to be boundless.

On the BBC news this afternoon, the person said she did not want kids on snapchat to accidentally be exposed to pron.

So how does banning VPN for adult use only stop this ?

If people (kids and adults) are using a VPN, then they are ACTIVELY seeking out pron.

No matter what the government does, they will always find a way.

What is never discussed, is the parents responsibility here.

I do sometimes wonder if the media goad the stupid politicians into these statements or paths.

There was someone on the BBC news who was a recovering porn addict, he suggested restrictions on porn were no bad thing, even not allowing "any porn" might be a good idea. By my reckoning that's an alcoholic asking for prohibition for all of us. Lordy Lord.

You mean a complete wanker.

"If people (kids and adults) are using a VPN, then they are ACTIVELY seeking out pron."

No. Sorry to be offensive but you're thinking like a government minister.

If people are using a VPN they're seeking a private internet connection. That's what the 'P' stands for. What they're using it for is not known - that;s the whole point of a VPN. Given that an awful lot of day-to-day commerce depends on the use of VPNs assuming otherwise is going to deliver yet another hit to the British economy.

Apparently she's never heard of proxies. Even if they did force VPNs to implement age verification, users can just use a proxy to access the VPN. The VPN won't know you're accessing it from the UK, therefore have no cause to subject you to age verification.

Another vote for proxies - that coupled with some thought on your wpad.dat and your home network can be in the UK for iPlayer and Ireland(!) for the smut.

We all know this has nothing to do with kids and smut, it's a deliberate invasion of privacy.

Free VPNs aren't much up to streaming pr0n, so that leaves paid-for VPNs...they normally require you to be 18 for payment (there are workarounds to this), so why do they need policing if kids can't spend their vbucks on removing geoblocking?

Mercifully a lot of VPN providers are in locations that are a bit loose with pesky details like complying with UK law.

So that leaves the fairly draconian step of traffic shaping/blocking all VPN traffic which is obviously problematic given how it's embedded within business, banking, healthcare etc.

None of that is not going to stop someone googling and finding croxy proxy (or similar), but it does erode privacy and polices the population which is deeply concerning.

Yeah, or forget VPNs altogether and just use the TOR browser.

"This could be achieved by amending the Online Safety Act to bring in an additional provision which would require VPN providers in the UK to put in place Highly Effective Age Assurance..."

Surely for this idiotic idea to work we would require VPN providers *outside* the UK to implement checks. Those of us *in* the UK will not be able to use a UK VPN provider to circumvent the Cornwall.

Yes, and they'll need to get ALL VPN providers everywhere in the world to follow their UK-only law.

They're also forgetting about proxies, and TOR.

So they'll apparently force age checking on VPN providers, and then what - the kids will use Tor instead, and by then you basically have the equivalent of Chinese / North Korean levels of censorship capability in place and you still won't stop the kids from accessing what they want.

And once you have the capability, watch the mission creep: want to scrutinise the green blob? - your sites are banned; want to point out that you can either have a green economy or wide-scale AI, but not both? - your sites are banned; want to protest small boats crossing the channel? - your sites are banned.- All for YOUR protection of course...

As per title....

Tell me you know jack shit about how technology and society works without telling me directly... etc. etc.

She's probably in her dream role...dreams it all up.

Advice: Go talk to some real IT people.

I suspect is more adults using VPN than children, since anyone with any thoughts of to their own privacy probably doesn't want to give over personal info to a random third party to verify their age before they can view some naughty pictures.

But tbh unless you're visiting pronhub or other such large site its not exactly hard avoid any age checks, type into a search engine what you are looking for and within a few clicks you find content based outside the UK who couldn't give a flying fsck about implementing some tiny island idea of 'protecting the children' age checks.

Sure Ofcom might tell UK ISP block these smaller sites eventually, but there are way more sites popping up everyday than Ofcom have the resources to block. And UK ISP block by DNS, so if you use DNS servers outside the UK then you can bypass any blocks quite easily. Eg The Pirate bay has been blocked by UK ISPs for a long time now, but because i use my own adguard DNS server not the ones of my ISP I can access TBP without any issue.

The Pirate Bay blocks are a good example of how ineffective this all is. For a few years there was a tug o' war between the ISPs and pirate sites just making new proxy domains. Now the ISPs have completely given up, and proxies have remained intact and accessible in the UK for years.

I speak as someone who built a transistor radio in a pencil box so I could listen to the pirates in class.

I've wanted to use that Pirate icon in context for ages - have a pint sir...

This is clearly a cunning plan to create an entire generation of experts in networking, IT and computer security, without increasing the public education budget.

So this government is just as stupid as the last government, they've had a big smackdown from Apple and the US Government on trying to put a backdoor in encryption, because surprise surprise the UK doesn't rule the internet.

But they're clearly not done with outright stupidity decided by people who do not have a clue about what they're doing.

Gove's "had enough of experts" line still echoes through this government, it seems.

HMG needs to appoint a minister for the internet who actually knows what they're doing with power of veto over every stupid idea. Given that there's not likely to be a suitable candidate in the HoC they would need to take the HoL route and offer somebody a life peerage to take it on. When I say somebody who knows what they're doing I mean starting at the top. I'd suggest asking TB-L and if he's not interested work down in very small steps until they find somebody who will.

I don't work in any IT related field. However, over the years, I think I have developed a reasonable level of understanding when it comes to online security. I was very careful about which VPN to use, then if necessary do TOR on top of the VPN. Also encrypted DNS. Script/Ad Blockers etc

What I'm more concerned about is phishing. These days, the internet is a swamp.

Advantages, I don't see adverts on YouTube, the only social media channel I use, and as long as I don't go to weird corners of the internet, I think I should be relatively safe as long as I don't accidentally click on a link of unknown origin.