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
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.
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.”
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.
Are they gonna ban torrents next? Https? You can ssh to a remote server and wget files all day long, or setup vnc and have a vpn like experience.
Maybe not if you are thirteen years old…
It’s funny, because that’s exactly what I did around the age of 13 to bypass my school’s firewall. I had everything on a USB drive, including Ghostzilla and PuTTY so I could browse through an SSH SOCKS tunnel. Mind you, my home computer was the SSH server – but these days it wouldn’t be hard to get a VPS in a less restrictive country:
“Hey [parent], can I borrow your credit card to set up a server so my friends and I can play [game] together?”
It takes one kid in a group to set something like this up.
The neighbours’ seven-year-old suggested using a VPN to get around age checks. I don’t know if he knows what one is, but he’s definitely seen adverts for them.
they also thought oat meal and corn flakes would end masturbation, look how that went…
They hwat now?
I definately wasnt sneaking off to eat a bowl of cereal in my room when i thought nobody was around.
Don’t tell them you can buy a vps and run your own vpn in another country.
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.
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
Why aren’t these chuds fearing for their lives? Why aren’t they being dragged out into the street and strung up by their own intestines? I thought this world was supposed to defend freedom. Guess not.
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
Every british tech-literate person should participate in I2P. The Internet should be freedom.
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.
all of the sudden these goody two shoes politicians want to control porn for “the safety of the children”
what a bunch of tards
I demand total access to UK official’s private life then.
I see the louis rossmann in that answer
Ah yes “The Porn Loophole”, was one of my favorites , I should still have it on a DVD somewhere.
I’ve got one called the Porn Loopback Hole, wanna see?
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.
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.
I wouldn’t underestimate the effect Brexit had on this. No there is no check for the national Government anymore.
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.
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.
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
You should watch some Adam Curtis documentaries to get perspective on the UK.
Don’t forget transphobia. They seem to have suddenly decided that’s a good idea in the last 3 years.
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
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?
Turns out Liberals are Fascists.
Always have been, just with a better PR campaign.
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.
Strange how every Liberal does the things Fascists do. They must not understand Liberalism like you do.
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”.
UK is far from being liberal lol, they are closer to the US than not
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.
