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.

There is no amount of blocking the Internet that will safeguard the children effectively. The real solution is this:

Seeing this from the US scares me. I already have an elaborate system for tunneling my traffic out of the country without it appearing I’m doing so from my end devices.

But seeing this happening in the UK and knowing there’s a chance of it happening here, I really feel the need to get into China-style circumvention with shadowsocks and what have you, and I need to figure this out sooner rather than later.

Only commercial VPNs? So HTTP proxying, Tor, SSH tunneling, SOCKS tunneling, running your own VPN node, etc are all allowed? There's plenty of VPS hosting companies that don't need ID or proof of age to sign up. Even if the UK requires this, you can just sign up for a server outside the UK.

There's also weird approaches that work but not many systems catch, like tunneling stateless data (like HTTP responses) over DNS TXT lookups.

When I was in high school in the 2000s, kids figured out how to bypass the internet filtering at school. Kids these days have way more resources available to them, making it even easier to do.

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.

Shithole country doing shithole things. The UK is acting like a red state, and their standard of living is dropping accordingly.

You can just mail cash to mullvad and include a code that links it to your account.

This is how you get under-18s to use Tor browser

Like Idiocracy has been a manual for the US, V for Vendetta is a manual for the UK.

For fuck sake people, these are movies of worlds we DON'T want to live in.

Porn loophole? You can literally Google image search porn.

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.

Don't tell them you can buy a vps and run your own vpn in another country.

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.

VPN company: "Don't care, not in the UK, fuck off."

I demand total access to UK official's private life then.

Don't forget to donate to Tor Project and/or a relay operator if you use it, even $1 covers like several TB of traffic.

We did the year of Linux. Let's make this the year of Tor.

UK has a massive budget problem and they still keep increasing expenditure on surveillance. That social value is negative at this point as its taking money away from critical services. Well done to the Government continuing the worsen debt, health, and wellbeing of the population. A terrorist will kill 5-10 people, failure to protect the health & well being of population (who needs a roof over their head) it just pales in comparison.

Let's extend our unpopular law to more places! Soon, you'll have to verify your age to see boobs in real life. Which will be pretty unfortunate for teens trying to get busy in the backseats of cars.

Microsoft Banned Commercial

That's fine. We'll just use Tor instead

Good luck preventing someone from getting a vps in the another country and doing their own tunnel. It can be done in such a way is undetectable at the protocol level. Coming up next age verification for ssh.

Damn, what is going on there? This is scary even for 18+ users.

Use tor to tunnel to a more enlightened country

buy vpn anonymously

use vpn

Doubling down on the batshit. Everyone knew VPNs were going to be the low effort workaround to this authoritarian batshittery.

I get what the (well meaning, I think) people lobbying for this are trying to achieve, but everything from the lobbying to legislation to enforcement seems to be happening in the worst way imaginable. Almost like it's an intentional "You want to see how badly can we do this? Hold my drink! YOLO!!"

For me, the tell was UK PLC leaving it up to the sites themselves to decide who/how the verification would be done. Classic bad management "I don't understand the slightest thing about any of this, but HOW HARD COULD IT BE?!" response. It's like the "series of tubes" stupidity all over again.

I'm certain a lot of politicians and veterans are bitter over the lack of universal adoration they get in their own countries. Politicians certainly annoyed with how easy it is for victims of war and veterans against war speaking out against enlistment. Politicians and the rich want their populaces to be patriots whereas the Internet makes people jaded when learning their countries history and present in detail.

I'm certain that's the real reason internet censorship picked up steam. The Internet has poisoned the well for so many countries when trying to build out some unified national message of righteous action. Can't like how negative the public reacts to bills described as for child safety. Internet makes it real easy to call it another manipulative cry of wolf. It's got to be the #1 marketing trick for the rich and powerful. #2 being those foreigners are evil. But shit now people see people across the world are mostly just getting by not even participating in politics or don't even have any voting power and are just caught in the crossfires of the power hungry

Today there are no heros from the invasions across Asia west to east. In recent times you don't get a marketing bump for fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya, wherever. That's problematic for patriotism and public support for future war fighting. Every government leader now has a mixed legacy while alive that makes their memory mute in history compared to WW2 and earlier leaders who committed just as much or likely far worse terrors but enjoyed widespread domestic support while in power and adoration in retirement.

National anthems before sporting events are tacky whereas just like 15 years ago damn near everyone bought into those. I swear one day there will monitoring software and crackdowns on hitting the mute button during national anthems and commercials