| > As far as the "dystopian" state of the UK goes. Even if the UK was a "distopia" the internet won't save you, even though people of a certain age like to think they can stop an authoritarian government from their keyboard. Take the US as a recent example, the bastion of free speech, but US citizens are being murdered by a government organisation. Posting memes from your VPN won't help. I understand what you mean but still, one has to realize that all the grievances happening in US (esp with Greenland) feels like something trying to distract from the Epstein files (Me and my cousin literally talked about this yesterday and these were almost his words not mine) Epstein files pressure got dialed up to 11 because of internet, was it not. If however the internet keyboard warriors weren't there or just the people who were aware from the internet (I mean I can't attest for you but I was reaware of epstein files from internet) Also yeah, Take the example of Nepal whose almost authoritarian esque govt. was literally toppled by internet protestors to get an anti corrupt person in power. Internet & anonymity still has power and to just give it up to a govt. would still have massive massive consequences man. If this law passes, anonymity & privacy is fundamentally ended in UK. > If you want to roll your own VPN go ahead. If my VPN would have an IP be arranged via a VPS they will just come knocking to my VPS Russians actually use a Russia VPS to connect to VPN but they are getting locked down. (Source: I saw some russian person in a forum doing exactly this) if we are comparing UK to Russia on a reasonable amount, then that would speak mountains too and we can move our conversation from there. Edit: perhaps I feel like I was also overthinking it a year back when I was worried about VPN's block (I have written it in Hackernews you can go read) and I figured that with something like UK, the tech wouldn't be enough to be uncensorable and we are still off to govt laws and I was worried about exactly this happening. I didn't want to be right then and I don't want to be right now but I am just telling what I have a reasonable enough suspicion of something happening in future. |
Just a recap how it happened in Russia:
1. First, year ~2015 legal framework was created under disguise of banning pirated media(specifically torrents.ru)(legislative push). State-wide DNS ban introduced. Very easy to circumvent via quering 8.8.8.8
2. Then, having legal basis, govt included extra stuff in banned list(casinos, terrorist orgs, etc)(executive push). IP bans introduced, applied very carefully.
3. Legal expanded allowing govt to ban specific media on very vague criterias(legislative push). IP blocks tried on some large websites. DPI hardware mandated to be installed by ISPs to filter by HTTPS SNI(executive push).
4. At ~2019 Roskomnadzor(RKN) created, special govt entity which enforces bans without court orders(legislative push).
5. ~2021 sites become banned if they are not filtering content by Russian laws by request of RKN(executive push). VPN services were obligated to also DPI-filter traffic(legislative push).
6. ~2023 Crackdown on VPN started(executive push). Popular commercial services were IP-banned, OpenVPN and IPSec connections selectively degraded by DPI.
7. ~2025 Heavy VPN filtering(vless, wireguard, etc) introduced(executive push). Performance of certain sites were degraded(youtube, twitter, etc).