RE: https://social.vivaldi.net/@LonM/115966748145817371
UK PEOPLE: this is REALLY IMPORTANT. If the government bans under-16s from using VPNs, then logically they must intend to REQUIRE AGE VERIFICATION FOR ALL VPN USE. Which will affect adults too!
*Your* privacy and right to anonymous web browsing is at risk!
@cstross Reason number "a zillion and some" why privacy, etc. is better served using something decentralized like Tor, rather than VPNs companies that can be forced to ID-check UK users.
@cstross I have a fleet of devices in the field that communicate back to my infrastructure over VPN links. Do those devices now have to prove they're over 16? Do both ends? Does anybody in charge have any fucking idea what they're doing?
@cstross There's no way they can possibly enforce this for existing VPN users.
The assumption is that the govt needs to implement age verification for an ostensibly sensible reason (in this case preventing under-16s accessing unsuitable material), but in reality age verification is often no different to identity verification and so by extension the govt ends up verifying the identity of the user of every mobile device, which thanks to the general dependency on Apple and Google phones would give the govt the ability to identify and track anyone with a smartphone.
@cstross It's impossible to restrict access to VPNs.
They could perhaps persuade some of the big providers to add access controls, but that would only result in more people using smaller or even self-hosted VPN services.
You can't un-invent encryption algorithms.
@david_chisnall @cstross But it's almost impossible for a government to detect a VPN service that doesn't have age restrictions. Unless it's one of the big well-known ones.
A foreign entity could set them up, or someone aged less than 16 for themselves (and perhaps also their mates).
You need:
1. A cheap server, anywhere in the world, connected to the internet.
2. VPN server software, available for free from lots of places.
3. Some instructions, easily available.
@Fonant @david_chisnall Doesn't matter: if the law goes on the books then at any point where your phone/laptop/etc is seized for other reasons it may be discovered to have an illegal VPN and then you get prosecuted.
Unless I misunderstood the proposed law, it's the VPN operator that would be prosecuted in this case. They may lose their ability to take money from people in the UK.
If I'm over 18, it is not illegal for me to use the VPN, so someone would have to prove that I am using it but no one checked that I was over 18. If I am under 18, then the provider is at more legal risk but they could claim that they did age verification and this user managed to bypass it somehow.
The simplest way of doing age verification is to require a payment from a credit card in your name. The easiest way of bypassing this is to use a parent's credit card. If a company takes payment for VPN use via credit card, and makes a minimal effort to not accept debit cards or pre-paid cards for folks in the UK, they're probably okay.
Which doesn't mean that this is in any way a sensible law.
@david_chisnall @cstross The government has to discover that there is an illegal VPN being used in the first place.
It is quite possible for millions of VPNs to be made available to UK children, hosted all over the world. Perhaps hosted by children, sharing the small monthly server costs. Quite secret, extremely difficult to find.
The proposed law could only ever hope to apply to a few big VPN companies. Which just moves the VPN usage by children underground, where other dangers lurk.
@cstross @david_chisnall That assumes that I do something that is bad enough for government to seize my computer.
Unless they do, there is no way (without GCHQ spending a lot of time and effort) that a VPN ban could be enforced.
If I did do something that got the attention of the security services, having a VPN without age restrictions is going to be the least of my problems!
It's the same as the Online Safety Act. It makes a lot of noise, but is almost entirely unenforceable (see: Ofcom's fine for 4chan).
@Fonant @david_chisnall You Are Wrong. The government can seize your computer and *then* search it, if you did something else. Consider why rape prosecutions in the UK collapsed since 2018—cops routinely seized and searched rape victims' phones for evidence of contact with the alleged rapist before or after the incident, so they stopped coming forward.
@cstross They don't even know what a VPN is or does. They tried to do this with e2e encryption key escrow, to include vpns in about 2017 and then quietly dropped it probably because someone has pointed out that businesses use them extensively for commerce comms and b2b services. Regardless of whether or not the positive effects they want are achieved (they won't be) the negatives will far outweigh them, and it still won't protect kids any better.
@cstross It would be nice if the government would encourage parents to do the actual parenting, instead of trying to force their idea parenting down everyone's throats.
@cstross you can run your own VPN, I’ve automated the process in https://github.com/fazalmajid/edgewalker
At that point, *you* are the VPN provider and in compliance. Until the next brain dead decision the parasites descended from thugs in the House of Drolls come up with.
@fazalmajid Right, so that would require me to learn and install OpenBSD and a full stack. (The last BSD I used in anger was SunOS 4.1.3.)
@cstross there are others, like Argo, or Streisand
For those who don't believe that an ordinary commercial VPN service can improve your privacy, here's a simple experiment you can run at home: Get two similar computers, one with a VPN and one without. Use them both to download Hollywood movies through bittorrent, and see which one results in notifications of incoming lawsuits from movie studios.
Fortunately, there's no need to do this experiment yourself. Millions of people around the world have already done it for you.
I know a bunch of people who did this without a VPN and didn't get any legal notices. The worst that they got was bandwidth throttling from their ISP.
If you have a VPN, then it's trivial for someone in the right jurisdiction to subpoena the VPN provider and require them to provide data on which account was responsible. Asking an ISP and asking a VPN provider for this information are no different, and both may have legal obligations to keep the information to be able to answer this kind of question (and, even when they don't, may have commercial incentives because their choice is often something like 'tell us who was using your service to attack Google's servers, or the entire Google infrastructure will block or severely rate limit every IP range that you own').
If you use something like Tor, no one has this data, but last time I heard of someone torrenting over Tor they were getting MODEM levels of speed.
@cstross Ethical issues aside - how are m2m VPNs expected to validate their age?
"hi, I'm an environment monitoring device and was born barely 6 months ago, but I swear I'm old enough to use my built-in VPN to access my MQTT server"
@cstross just to point out that Linux, Android and other things have a VPN built in so the results will actually be even more idiotic.
It will also stop trans kids using Tor to get info, something I am sure labour think is a huge win
@cstross I sort of wonder how my extremely risk averse, security conscious employer who depends on VPNs is going to react to this
@capriciousday Like banks and other financial institutions who require their employees to use them when working out of the office, or over wifi *within* the office.
@cstross @capriciousday Lawyers likewise. Working at home or in a court building, using confidential & legally privileged data on the office server...
I agree this is bad...
But anyone who thinks browsing via a VPN is anonymous needs to learn more.
@oschonrock Obviously it's not automatically anonymous, but it's a useful first step. And look who else is banning VPNs! (Hint: Iran, before they shut down cross-border internet completely. China. And so on.)
@cstross it's really not that useful a first step.
It's just what the VPN industry has drummed into us with ubiquitous marketing.
Just install the "tor browser". It's free, cross platform and provides much more privacy than any VPN.
If you need true anonymity then use a privacy focused OS like "tails".
Even better, these tools cannot be blocked or gated by governments.
VPNs are largely useless things sold by people who want your money.
Which is cleary the _actual_ intent behind suggested legislation.
@cstross once more parliament doing a thing because it is something, and it is mistaken that it is better than doing nothing. How would this legislation work with parental control VPNs? They have no idea, most likely because most of them have no idea they even exist.
