”After the UK implemented its Online Safety Act the country’s VPN usage surged as teens sough [sic] to skirt age checks on social media platforms and pornography websites.”
The report they link to presents no evidence that the surge was from “teens”.
Practically, it’s also wrong to categorize all popular sites that opted into the geo-block as being social or adult. For example, imgur.com is by all sensible definitions a general purpose image upload site with 3M DAU worldwide. It is as much a “pornography website” as YouTube or Reddit.
I would suggest this article be corrected to instead say “usage surged as netizens sought to avoid online ID checkpoints and mandatory facial recognition”, but that’s bordering on inflammatory in the other direction.
Out of Imgur, YouTube and Reddit, Imgur is actually the most prudish. Reddit is full of hardcore pornography; YouTube still allows some "people being naked for non-sexual reasons" videos; Imgur is right there with Facebook, automatically deleting anything racy.
I wish these articles would highlight the very real dangers these types of laws present to children. How they often create the very harm they claim to prevent. Surveilling children only makes it easier for the creeps to track them too.
This has been one thing I've liked about how Benn Jordan has been handling the Flock issues. How he shows that the very cameras used to protect children can also be used to harm them. And uses this to walk into the conversation about wider privacy concerns and authoritarian turkey tyranny.
But with the article, we've been using the same rhetoric for decades. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, but we need to iterate on it if we're to communicate these dangers more effectively. Those trying to get that authoritarian control are iterating and they're effective. The dangers are only becoming more real and the current rise in global authoritarianism should make many realize how dangerous it is
>> a considerable chunk of the market — including three of the six most popular VPNs — is quietly operated by an Israeli-owned company with close connections to that country’s national security state, including the elite Unit 8200 and Duvdevan Units of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).”
Does this impact people who work from home and connect to the corporate VPN? I have to do that to access production servers, as I assume most people here who WFH do as well.
Reading TFA it seems that use case would be allowed, but would I be a criminal for checking social media on my work PC when connected to the corporate VPN?
They are after the personal use VPN clients, but corporate users will follow soon.
Using the corporate VPN for personal purposes, including social media, is generally against corporate policy and is frowned upon (at least officially) in most businesses and organisations. It is also fraught with complications and could lead to disciplinary action or other unpleasant consequences. Just because the policy is not enforced does not mean it won’t be in the future.
If governments start targeting personal VPN's, it is only a matter of time before businesses crack down on unauthorised corporate VPN use as it will increase their risk of legal action stemming from employees’ missteps or misdeeds.
I imagine it's referring to anonymous VPN traffic through providers like Mullvad. Your internet traffic through your corp VPN is likely already at Orwellian-levels of surveillance, and that traffic can at least be tracked back to a asingle identifiable business.
Would a child have access to a paid VPN like Mullvad anyway, I wonder.
If they ban OpenVPN and WireGuard through what I can only think is something akin to the great firewall of China, then what is the next step, making ssh -D unlawful?
Maybe encryption too? Maybe they need to ban booting Linux and filter access to open source software as well? Running unsigned code? Might as well just shut down the internet.
They can't do jackshit. They are totally clueless and run by a bunch of extremely incompetent boomers. Next, they will try to ban Tor but guess what that can't happen as Tor is censorship-resistant!
I'm not sure that's actually accurate. Using Tor or even many VPNs you get hit with a lot of block lists or bot detectors. I also heard that Tor is blocked in China. I mean isn't the list of entries and exits public?
Of course these groups are also shooting themselves in the foot. Tor was invented by the Navy after all and they like spies to go through it because connecting to "totallynotNSA.com" is a great way to get yourself found. But Tor also only works for those purposes if non bad actors make up the majority of traffic
Tor bridges allow people to bypass blocking of Tor entry nodes and look more like normal traffic and less like Tor traffic, here is an example of how to set one up.
I'm sure the Chinese, Russians, and other adversaries of the west will welcome any intentional weakening of network security to "protect children".
Any back doors, crippled encryption, etc, is a way in for their intelligence services. I find it baffling that politicians are so careless with their national sovereignty. It's especially worrying that a lot of populist support for this nonsense is indirectly supported by the before mentioned adversaries. There's a well documented history of especially Russian and Chinese propaganda aimed at supporting fringe populist parties. The agenda with that is complex but it isn't necessarily with friendly intentions.
Both Russia and China have isolated their own populations from the normal internet and effectively their countries run on centralized infrastructure where private VPNs are no longer allowed and traffic is monitored, filtered, and analyzed. Additionally, especially China has long targeted academic and enterprise network security for industrial espionage reasons. Weak government security has caused a few embarrassing situations across especially EU governments (e.g. Germany) with scandals related to over reliance on Chinese technology for telecommunications (huawei) and components for energy, auto motive, etc.
The point here is that those countries calling for this the most are also the most at risk of being compromised like this.
in Michigan there is a recently proposed piece of legislation that aims to ban content that "corrupts the public morals“ (which includes pornography, manga, and talking about trans people). It labels VPNs, proxies and encrypted tunneling methods as "circumvention tools" and would make it illegal to use them to access such content.
I hope people will start to see these blatant censorship proposals for what they are, but honestly I'm not too optimistic...
Pretty sure a ban on VPNs would simply collapse society overnight. I think lawmakers vastly underestimate just how prevalent and necessary they are to ordinary business functions, including by ISPs themselves.
”After the UK implemented its Online Safety Act the country’s VPN usage surged as teens sough [sic] to skirt age checks on social media platforms and pornography websites.”
The report they link to presents no evidence that the surge was from “teens”.
Practically, it’s also wrong to categorize all popular sites that opted into the geo-block as being social or adult. For example, imgur.com is by all sensible definitions a general purpose image upload site with 3M DAU worldwide. It is as much a “pornography website” as YouTube or Reddit.
I would suggest this article be corrected to instead say “usage surged as netizens sought to avoid online ID checkpoints and mandatory facial recognition”, but that’s bordering on inflammatory in the other direction.
Out of Imgur, YouTube and Reddit, Imgur is actually the most prudish. Reddit is full of hardcore pornography; YouTube still allows some "people being naked for non-sexual reasons" videos; Imgur is right there with Facebook, automatically deleting anything racy.
I wish these articles would highlight the very real dangers these types of laws present to children. How they often create the very harm they claim to prevent. Surveilling children only makes it easier for the creeps to track them too.
This has been one thing I've liked about how Benn Jordan has been handling the Flock issues. How he shows that the very cameras used to protect children can also be used to harm them. And uses this to walk into the conversation about wider privacy concerns and authoritarian turkey tyranny.
But with the article, we've been using the same rhetoric for decades. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, but we need to iterate on it if we're to communicate these dangers more effectively. Those trying to get that authoritarian control are iterating and they're effective. The dangers are only becoming more real and the current rise in global authoritarianism should make many realize how dangerous it is
Sadly, I think the unspoken point is never to protect children but to control them.
If you look at the many “think of the children” arguments from this angle it becomes a lot more consistent
>> a considerable chunk of the market — including three of the six most popular VPNs — is quietly operated by an Israeli-owned company with close connections to that country’s national security state, including the elite Unit 8200 and Duvdevan Units of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).”
What are those VPNs? Asking for a friend...
Fully HTTPS traffic can bypass that damned Great Firewall. Greetings from inside the Great Firewall.
Does this impact people who work from home and connect to the corporate VPN? I have to do that to access production servers, as I assume most people here who WFH do as well.
Reading TFA it seems that use case would be allowed, but would I be a criminal for checking social media on my work PC when connected to the corporate VPN?
They are after the personal use VPN clients, but corporate users will follow soon.
Using the corporate VPN for personal purposes, including social media, is generally against corporate policy and is frowned upon (at least officially) in most businesses and organisations. It is also fraught with complications and could lead to disciplinary action or other unpleasant consequences. Just because the policy is not enforced does not mean it won’t be in the future.
If governments start targeting personal VPN's, it is only a matter of time before businesses crack down on unauthorised corporate VPN use as it will increase their risk of legal action stemming from employees’ missteps or misdeeds.
I imagine it's referring to anonymous VPN traffic through providers like Mullvad. Your internet traffic through your corp VPN is likely already at Orwellian-levels of surveillance, and that traffic can at least be tracked back to a asingle identifiable business.
Would a child have access to a paid VPN like Mullvad anyway, I wonder.
If they ban OpenVPN and WireGuard through what I can only think is something akin to the great firewall of China, then what is the next step, making ssh -D unlawful?
Maybe encryption too? Maybe they need to ban booting Linux and filter access to open source software as well? Running unsigned code? Might as well just shut down the internet.
They can't do jackshit. They are totally clueless and run by a bunch of extremely incompetent boomers. Next, they will try to ban Tor but guess what that can't happen as Tor is censorship-resistant!
Of course these groups are also shooting themselves in the foot. Tor was invented by the Navy after all and they like spies to go through it because connecting to "totallynotNSA.com" is a great way to get yourself found. But Tor also only works for those purposes if non bad actors make up the majority of traffic
Tor bridges allow people to bypass blocking of Tor entry nodes and look more like normal traffic and less like Tor traffic, here is an example of how to set one up.
https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/webtunnel/
I'm sure the Chinese, Russians, and other adversaries of the west will welcome any intentional weakening of network security to "protect children".
Any back doors, crippled encryption, etc, is a way in for their intelligence services. I find it baffling that politicians are so careless with their national sovereignty. It's especially worrying that a lot of populist support for this nonsense is indirectly supported by the before mentioned adversaries. There's a well documented history of especially Russian and Chinese propaganda aimed at supporting fringe populist parties. The agenda with that is complex but it isn't necessarily with friendly intentions.
Both Russia and China have isolated their own populations from the normal internet and effectively their countries run on centralized infrastructure where private VPNs are no longer allowed and traffic is monitored, filtered, and analyzed. Additionally, especially China has long targeted academic and enterprise network security for industrial espionage reasons. Weak government security has caused a few embarrassing situations across especially EU governments (e.g. Germany) with scandals related to over reliance on Chinese technology for telecommunications (huawei) and components for energy, auto motive, etc.
The point here is that those countries calling for this the most are also the most at risk of being compromised like this.
It's always the same pattern. Point to a genuine evil and then use that as justification to strip everyone of their rights.
in Michigan there is a recently proposed piece of legislation that aims to ban content that "corrupts the public morals“ (which includes pornography, manga, and talking about trans people). It labels VPNs, proxies and encrypted tunneling methods as "circumvention tools" and would make it illegal to use them to access such content.
I hope people will start to see these blatant censorship proposals for what they are, but honestly I'm not too optimistic...
The scary thing about that is who gets to say what public morals are. And how this would normally be next to impossible to prove.
Seeing as how the US government recently said anti-capitalist and anti-christian opinions are a threat, well... hold on to your collective hats.
Pretty sure a ban on VPNs would simply collapse society overnight. I think lawmakers vastly underestimate just how prevalent and necessary they are to ordinary business functions, including by ISPs themselves.
Corporations and military of course will have a way to exclude themselves from this.