The UK on its way towards becoming like China. I thought I would never have to use VPNs again after leaving but oh well.
Notes from my 5 years in China:
- Use a protocol like trojan-gfw over cloudflare. It 1: hides the fact that you’re using a VPN and looks like normal https traffic, 2: Is open source and the Trojan-go/v2ray repositories are well tested in nightmarish environments like China. 3: Cloudfare obscures the IP address of your server from the government.
- You can have your server use something like Mullvad so that your traffic blends into the crowd (of customers)
- Always have an emergency protocol that is unlikely to get blocked. I wrote my own custom implementation of HTTPS over DNS for when they decide to cut off general internet access to sites outside the country. (Happens every month or so for a few days)
- For messaging, use a fully open source & end to end encrypted & federated protocol that you can self host. Matrix.org is blocked in China but self hosting still allows you to contact people on the main server.
My concern is that they are logging traffic and will retroactively enforce new laws. This is concerning for someone born in an Islamic country and having lived in China (both somewhat enemies of the UK occasionally - I don’t actually know if there is/will be discrimination). Better safe than sorry.
Until government orders ISPs to to send details of all customers who connected to known VPN services and then issue everyone a fine as a warning or worse.
The thing is, currently nothing works in the UK, so if you think you'll be able to dispute anything...
What safety mechanism? Can they elaborate, especially when they're asking for backdoors/tools that will enable them to view private messages of anybody using the platform?
This is just a complete violation of individual privacy rights. Hope there's other apps and platforms out there that will operate just out of the governments eyes that will still offer encrypted messaging.
I'm not an encryption guru and I don't know the specifics about how they want to add a backdoor to these apps, but can't we generate our own keys to share between people we want to communicate with, removing the need to have these apps provide encryption?
Never trust your government (at least in the western world! Some european countries do actually care about their people). They don't care about you one bit other than your ability to shut up and pay taxes. You are a resource to them and if they can control you by reading your messages and punishing you if try and go against their rules, they will.
Hanlon's razor is a bad heuristic. It ignores the very basic fact of human existence that Power is more addictive than heroine and more alluring than the Ring. Assuming power hungry fiends are just stupid is at best naive.
He is not saying they are malicious in their intent. The policy can still be attributed to stupidity/ignorance. The issue is that once given the power, it will be abused. Never trust anyone to point a gun at you or string a sword above your head. It will be abused at some point.
Yes, of course this'll only be used for child exploitation and abuse, like how those anti-terrorism laws are only ever used to combat terrorism. Oh wait.
This safety mechanism is just the usual quickly-self-destructing-promise. Did they just say it can only be used for some teens sexting or smoking weed? See! Its all for the kids!
Just like terrorism (abusive) laws can only be used for "terrorism" but then suddenly any type of dissent or criticism of the government is considered "a terrorism investigation" so your rights are removed in one quick swoop.
But hey, "they must have done something, that surely won't happen to me, if I stay put and say yes to everything". Such freedom.
"Low level" crime is essentially legalised because Police has been defunded and demoralised. If someone reports abuse, most likely it will be dismissed until the risk for reaching tabloid headline is too high. Then they'll need evidence, ideally case completely "solved", before they even start doing anything.
So that tells me the purpose for this law isn't protection of children, because the government couldn't care less about children welfare, as government is engaging themselves in abuse by running down the economy and forcing thousands of children to go hungry.
Why not ban children from Internet and messengers instead? We don't allow them to have alcohol, why should they have Internet? Probably because it won't give a King an excuse to read his subjects's private conversations.
We could start with locked devices (laptops and smartphones), that allow to use Internet with restrictions (e.g. visit only whitelisted sites, use whitelisted apps that support "kid mode", all contacts must be approved by parents or school, all chats should be moderated). The lock should be on a physical level and unremovable. All applications installed should support "kid mode", e.g. browser would refuse to visit unapproved sites.
Bringing unlocked devices to school should be not allowed, they should be confiscated.
This way kids will be in a safe, fully controlled environment.
The problem that Microsoft, Google and manufacturers do not want to invest in this. Meta doesn't want to create a kid version of Facebook, Microsoft doesn't want to make a locked version of Windows, Samsung doesn't want to make a locked phone, etc. You cannot show ads to kids, you cannot collect their data, so they are an unwanted audience, a nuisance.
Proposed ban on encryption doesn't prevent teenagers from typing "adult video" in Google. On a locked phone, a locked version of Google would show an educational video about an international economy for this query. Also, ban on encryption won't prevent a criminal from abroad from interacting with children.
I just think it’s laughable that they think encryption is the constraint.
If one could make the argument that the police force was 1)staffed with smart, moral, motivated, and well trained individuals, and 2) had adequate capacity and resources to pursue these crimes, and the only thing standing in their way was encryption, I’d at least be willing to entertain the conversation, but since little emphasis seems to be placed and 1&2, it’s hard to take this line of argument seriously.
It's certainly been sad and eye-opening to realise that while the rest of us who read George Orwell's 1984 considered it a worst case scenario, those attracted to careers in the government have found it heartwarming and inspirational.
There's nothing in that book you couldn't justify with "think of the children".
It seems that, as usual, the only way to escape tyranny is emigration, but I worry one day we'll run out of freer countries to emigrate to.
I wonder how we ended up as a society where democratically elected representatives are allowed to gaslight the public like this. Yes - the freedom on the internet is under threat. But we have a bigger problem when principles of democracy are under threat.
It's occurred to me that UK isn't lying about protecting children, but what's meant is protecting children of the royalty from peasants who will need secure communication methods to organize.
It really boggles my mind though why these 'peasants' (not my word) keep voting for the Tories. They basically represent the top 1% which in a normal democracy is a non-starter to get a majority.
Britain now has a whole ruling class where even labour leaders have gone to rich private schools.
Ps: here in Holland it's not much better but I understand better why people vote for the party that doesn't actually represent their interests. With Britain I'm too far away to understand this.
Because for a while they were the only party who supported a free market. Labour wanted to nationalise all business until new labour arrived.
The Tories are shit, but if you believe (like me) that free enterprise is the best way to lift humans out of poverty , they were the best we had. Unfortunately now they are more interested in banning things and meddling in our personal lives.
Unlimited free markets have failed every time they've been tried. But the trees kept voting for the axe, because they thought its handle was one of them.
Market failure is a thing with insufficient oversight/regulation. But it's just as easy to cripple something by nationalizing and over regulating it.
Take the housing market, when there was no regulations we ended up with inadequate housing and the poor being housed in terrible conditions. Now we brought in all the wrong regulations and it's no longer just the poor who are struggling. Next we'll vote for universal rent control, do nothing else and sooner or later nobody will be able to move.
Edit: and if we completely nationalize it we might end up with inadequate commie blocks for everyone.
well.. I have no issue about ugly on the outside if the quality of the accommodation is adequate.
If you actually knew anything about soviet buildings this was pretty far from the truth. Multiple families were often assigned to share kitchens/bathrooms and often just one or two rooms per family to live in. They were not well designed, poorly heated and ventilated and generally pretty miserable places to live. It was not uncommon for the entire family to sleep huddled around the single kerosene heater.
They did get better as time went on but it wasn't really until the fall of the soviet union when a lot of these inadequate accommodations were demolished. Also i'm totally on board with having cheap to build ugly accommodation - so long as it's not 100% of the housing stock, By all means throw as much up as possible until we've housed all the poor, but what if i want something different?
The irony is that voters thought of free market for SMEs and regulation for big corporations* and the Tories did the opposite - big corporations have essentially a free reign and SMEs are crippled with high tax and regulation (e.g. IR35 to stop small service based business from operating, while exempting big corporations from it).
*(with the focus of getting them to pay taxes - HMRC even today literally has no idea about the scale of tax avoidance, because they don't audit big corporations).
Cause all the other ideologies got to implement their ideal world and it all lead back to the imperial great game board and caste system the Tories always proclaimed the natural order?
What evidence do you have that the "VPN will fix it" crowd isn't also involved physically in opposing what is going on? Do you have anything to base that assumption on other than the stated opinion?
It's possible for "VPN will fix it" to exist with "Do things to actively resist government overreach" in the same individual.
How long until they ban VPN, perhaps using the same justification? We have the unfortunate habit of working around political and social problems with technical solutions. But there's a limit to how far such solutions can stretch.
Notes from my 5 years in China: - Use a protocol like trojan-gfw over cloudflare. It 1: hides the fact that you’re using a VPN and looks like normal https traffic, 2: Is open source and the Trojan-go/v2ray repositories are well tested in nightmarish environments like China. 3: Cloudfare obscures the IP address of your server from the government. - You can have your server use something like Mullvad so that your traffic blends into the crowd (of customers) - Always have an emergency protocol that is unlikely to get blocked. I wrote my own custom implementation of HTTPS over DNS for when they decide to cut off general internet access to sites outside the country. (Happens every month or so for a few days) - For messaging, use a fully open source & end to end encrypted & federated protocol that you can self host. Matrix.org is blocked in China but self hosting still allows you to contact people on the main server.