@mysticmartz@lemmy.world

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).

With the Tories soon you can't go online if your webcam is off. The UK has not longer something to do with the EU, it's more and more like the US. The UK always was very curious monitoring the nettraffic since a lot of years.

I'm already using the Shadowsocks bridge in Mullvad. If things get more serious, I'll do some research and consider switching to Tor with either obfs4 or WebTunnel on Tails, and Snowflake on mobile.

I hope they're dumb enough to just ban VPNs .... and completely halt half the corporations from working, because any WFH or remote accessing is built on VPNs.

Hell, it might just make using Zscaler illegal, one of the biggest cybersecurity tools in the corporate world!

Note: if you live in the UK, your government sees you as their possession. Make sure that they know you are not.

They can try, they can't effectively stop it.

Just use a VPN outside the country or lease a low end VPS outside the country with decent bandwidth and host your own VPN endpoint. They can't force ISPs to block all of the VPN protocols in general or they'll lose a ton of businesses that rely on it for basic security of remote/traveling employees.

Make good connections with people you trust internationally. If it really comes down to it, between friends, people who care could work together to set up SOCKS5 tunnels or some such to walk around it pretty cleanly, but you would really have to trust whoever you give credentials to since they would be using your internet connection for whatever. Could also straight up just install the OpenVPN server for this.

Once or twice I have opened a tunnel to friends on one of my servers through a bastion host - any outgoing traffic from the server goes through my own VPN, so it wouldn't matter if they couldn't access a VPN in their country.

For anyone who doesn't care to learn, which in my experience is the vast majority of all people, not much can be done. Even the people I meet who say they do feel that they care deeply mainly just like to be loud about that, but never actually put in the work to learn how to do something as simple as use ssh -D, let alone learn how a proxy actually functions.

I suppose the best those in the know can do is to make it clear that they do know. Should friends actually begin to care, then they will know who to go to for possible solutions.

If the UK is serious about blocking VPNs that don't comply they'll mostly succeed for the big ones. They'll get them removed from app stores which will prevent most normies from finding and using them. They'll apply network blocks to their entrance IP addresses (laughably easy, there are commercial vendors who sell data like this so they don't even need to invent the wheel here) and make it difficult. They wouldn't be able to prevent truly determined VPN providers from providing service but the days of $4/month for privacy/torrenting would be gone as the prices would likely be higher and you'd have to do things like mail cash.

Beyond the known IPs, VPN traffic is fairly easy to flag with DPI solutions and could be detected and blocked or dropped by ISPs acting under the law. This could also be used to stop people running tunnels to hosted VPS solutions outside of the country or run by friends from their homes. There are obviously ways around these, disguising traffic, various techniques but for most people they'd give up and either stop browsing porn or cough up their ID. Of course this would create a dangerous state of affairs where anyone using a VPN without being KYC'ed is clearly a criminal, at the very least a suspected video pirate, at the most a dangerous child predator or terrorist.

Additionally the UK isn't like Russia or China, lots of western CEOs and employees pass through and within its jurisdictions and if a particular VPN is providing service without this they could try and arrest c-suite people or engineering staff associated with it and slam them with jail time. So that's a problem.

You live in a bubble my friend. Not everyone will move to tor. Not even close. Linux has reached 3% in the steam statistics recently. Remove the deck users and you'll be lucky if it hits 1%. Of those 1% not even everyone will be able to give up the regular web. I'm sure there will be a surge in alternative browsing prorocols, but not enough to change the status quo.

How though? Commercial VPNs that simply function as proxies, sure. VPN as in the protocols themselves? Not possible without breaking too much stuff.

Get a VPN from outside the UK.