What happens if the UK requires age verification for VPN’s
Hello ,
As the title says what happens if theUK requires age verification for VPN’s or makes it illegal to use them?
Does that mean everyone will move to tor or I2P?
It seems if the UK gov keep pushing their agenda under the guise of protecting children people will increasingly go dark .
I guess what I’m asking is how does everyone think this will unfold?
M
You're viewing a single thread.
First and foremost, it's not something limited to UK. Maybe it's because I'm watching things from "outside" the so-called "first world" (I'm Brazilian), and I can't help but notice how it's something that have been spreading throughout the countries: Canadian bill whose number I forgot, EU's "Chat Control", some Australian laws, etc... It's getting everywhere! It didn't start yesterday, also: I remember SOPA and PIPA back in 2010s (or was it 2000s? I'm getting old).
It's worldwide, and it won't be long before there are no more countries where "nothing to fear, nothing to hide" is the official motto via some kind of global treat/pact. It won't stop in adult entertainment: eventually, it'll cover every online activity. In this sense, "children" are just the frogs being morally leveraged by scorpions to cross an Orwellian river.
That said, VPNs are someone else's computers sitting between latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates delimiting some geodesic convex hull we know as "country/nation" ruled by an entity who happens to have the monopoly over asymmetrical forces ruling over that very someone. Even nodes from Tor, I2P, Yggdrasil, Hyphanet, GNUNet, Usenet servers or grand-old SOCKS4/SOCKS4a/SOCKS5 proxies are someone else's computer sitting inside some "country".
And if all countries end up agreeing, out of shared dominance interests (even the so-called "inimical" countries, because even those "inimical" countries agree on certain treats such as the Global Treat regarding Antarctica), to some kind of "Online Kid Protection Global Treat" or whatever frog they can take any moral advantage of, there will be no computer proxification left for circumventing the new KYC requirements for accessing the Web, because there'll be no more alternative countries left... Not even micronations such as Principality of Sealand.
Yeah, future doesn't seem good, and the majority of global citizens won't fight against it (we, privacy-conscious and tech-savvy people, we're not the majority), so it's kind of a Cassandra curse going on right now.
Maybe we must go back to radio communication? Radio mesh networks? Perhaps well-hidden geo-treasure pen-drives for exchanging and archiving files? Creating our own novel ciphering methods, steganography and security through obscurity, becoming able to physically speak through coded language on a daily basis? Even carrier pigeons and smoke signaling (I'm not joking) feels "safe" and out of the Orwellian reaches for now... For now.
(I guess they could still be spotted by LEO satellite imagery. And god-forbid a smoke pattern is caught modulating and transmitting the original uncropped Lena picture over the atmosphere /s).
Those LoRa devices like meshtastic look good. I don’t like the idea of TOR and I2C because it’s known to hold disgusting and concerning stuff. But the original principles of the internet and a Cipherpunk approach is on the way .
Those LoRa devices like meshtastic look good
Yeah, tinkering with radio and Open-source hardware in general is funny and awesome. I did some personal projects in this regard, not exactly meshtastic, but experiments using a cheap RTL-SDR and some transmission-capable things such as Baofeng UV-5R and remote controllers from some of my childhood toys. I wish I could afford to experiment more with hardware, electronic and, especially, radio equipment.
Unfortunately, it's like @dubyakay@lemmy.ca said, radio equipment can become targets, too.
In reality, this is already happening in EU: recently, I saw something about EU passing a law requiring all radio-capable devices to be, as far as I can recall, "tampering-proof" or something similar, and this is threatening alternative mobile OSes (such as GrapheneOS) because this law requires bootloaders to be unlockable or something. So, in practice, governments are already targeting radio.
Not to mention how "easy" is to triangulate a signal and how telecommunication regulators often do "wardrive" scanning in order to seek "irregular transmissions" (not just those disrupting others' transmissions, but anything they could deem "irregular" because they're the authorities in charge of allowing or refusing others rights, and this deemed "irregularity" could easily be using Briar through Bluetooth, or meshtastic nodes, during a strike/protest).
This takes me to another point from your reply:
I don’t like the idea of TOR and I2C because it’s known to hold disgusting and concerning stuff
It's worth mentioning that disgusting and concerning stuff isn't exclusive to Darknet, Clearnet also has such stuff, especially mainstream social media.
I mean, you're not wrong, Darknet is indeed used for that, not because it's inherent to Darknet, but because people who do concerning stuff also seek anonymity just like legitimate, well-intentioned privacy-concerned people, and Darknet happens to provide such anonymity for both uses in a double-edged sword manner.
Problem is: there's no way to differentiate two anonymous actors without breaking the very fundamentum of anonymity.
And this very argument you used unfortunately can be twisted by authorities to justify breaking anonymity and, by extension, privacy.
For authorities willing to control everyone's lives so badly, it just takes a small leap for the phrase to be reshaped and re-adapted as...
"private content/people's intimacies must be scanned/watched because they're known to hold disgusting and concerning stuff"
This is almost the argument behind EU's "Chat Control". And the majority of people end up joining this bandwagon unaware of where this bandwagon leads to: something that makes 1984 feel like a sugarcoated documentary.
Unfortunately, there's no easy solution regarding "disgusting and concerning stuff", but we should be really careful lest to throw the baby out with the dirty bathwater.
Just wait until they mandate embedding some sort of hardcoded device identification into LoRa devices.
I don't think I2P can hold anything. It's just anonymization through multiple hops, not a network within the network, no?
I don’t know. I’ve not used I2P before but I heard it was a decentralised internet just on a smaller scale like a WAN
Reading about it further, I was completely wrong about it. I2P is entirely self contained and exit proxies are not really a thing.
Your concerns may be warranted.
I wonder if Tor and I2P's other hops could eventually be obfuscated like bridges are now, so that a network could entirely exist within plain sight without being as blatant.
I've been having the same thoughts recently. Your mention of carrier pigeon and smoke signals now had me thinking that embedding data inside a birds sing like the recent jpeg someone tested could be our future soon.
Which species of bird was that? Time to raise them en masse and genetically breed them to sing more and also adapt to any environment on the planet to propagate. We need to widen coverage and bandwidth!
How tf would you control that? Pigeons are only one-way already, you need to deliver those to the person you're communicating in advance. And songbirds would just be wherever they want, so seems pretty useless for info propagation.