UK House of Lords Attempting to Ban Use of Vpns by Anyone Under 16
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The UK House of Lords is stirring up controversy with a proposed ban on VPN use by anyone under 16, sparking a heated debate about government overreach and civil liberties. Commenters are pointing out that this isn't just a UK or EU issue, with some noting that similar forces are at play across various countries, and others warning that if the UK succeeds, other nations may follow suit. The discussion is also veering into the UK's complicated relationship with the EU post-Brexit, with some commenters dryly observing that the UK's departure hasn't necessarily meant a divergence from EU-style policies. As one commenter ominously notes, this could be a harbinger of things to come in other countries, including the US.
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Very obvious incitement to violence - no.
I will speculate that you view yourself as a reasonably intelligent person; yet you're here, essentially arguing that a biological male can identify as a biological female--all while ignoring science; basic human biology: XX, XY.
But most people like you will turn around and say something along the lines of, "Well, that's sex, not gender." So gender is a social construct, and those that fabricated that construct are now going to force society to participate in their fabrication?
Get a grip, man! You're not convincing anyone of your non-sense. But keep coping; that's all you can do: cope.
Hitler didn't gas any Jews himself. He just gave other people mean orders by speaking and writing. Isn't that speech?
The recent arrest at London’s Heathrow airport of a noted Irish comedian, Graham Linehan, for the “crime” of three politically incorrect tweets
A few months ago, police arrested a couple for messages shared in a WhatsApp chat group as six officers searched their home.
Authorities arrested a grandmother for silently holding a sign outside an abortion clinic that said “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, if you want.”
The wife of a conservative politician was sentenced to 31 months in prison for what police said was an unacceptable post. In contrast, a child molester was sentenced to 21 months in the slammer.
And yet, something worse is happening that is being swept under the rug:
A glaring example of this “wokeness” was exposed earlier this year by Elon Musk when he put the spotlight on how British authorities have for years turned a blind eye to notorious rape gangs made up primarily of Pakistani Muslim men who prey on vulnerable young girls. Musk was pilloried by the woke crowd for making this an issue. If not for his prominence, he most certainly would have been prosecuted. Thanks to Musk’s pressure, however, the British prime minister finally reversed course and ordered a probe. An extensive investigation has already found the scandal to be uglier and more widespread than previously supposed.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...
Musk had bugger all to do with the rape gangs scandal, which broke literally years ago, and has been brought up with regularity by the newspapers here since. (For what it's worth there have also been plenty of non-Pakistani groups doing similar things and getting away with it. The main problem seems to be that no one in authority misses, or listens to, dropout teenage girls who have fallen off the radar - which makes them easy pickings for nonces.)
I don't know about the others. The sign holder was likely within the 150m buffer zone put around abortion clinics last year, though. Given the content of the sign (which just steps over the letter of the statutory prohibition not to influence patients' decisions while being entirely morally unobjectionable) I suspect it was a deliberate setup for arrest for outrage, just like the Palestine Action people. But I could be wrong.
It's perhaps also worth noting that Britain's traditions of free speech have never been as absolutist as the US (the last successful prosecution for blasphemous libel was as recent as the 70s and it's still technically a crime to advocate for a republic) but that raucous objections to government have very rarely been the target in recent centuries. The major difference in practice is that being grossly offensive isn't constitutionally protected. You're still not likely to get done for it, though.
I hope you're not a far-left hypocrite that demands more uneducated leeches get imported and then provided for by anyone but you.
Basically, there have been a string of anonymous secure phones designed and marketed directly to high-ups in organised crime. Encrochat, Sky ECC, Anom, Phantom Secure, probably more. Their plausible deniability is thin - an undercover government agent goes to the creators and basically says "I'd like to buy 30 of these for my drug-dealing empire" and the creator says "Sure, that'll be $2000 each." Later the agent calls them up and goes "Hey this guy cooking meth was busted by the cops, can you erase his phone?" and the creator goes "Sure." and erases the phone. That's not merely selling secure phones - that's joining organised crime (as the guy who makes the phones).
Someone in the French government basically said that if Graphene is another Phantom Secure, they should suffer the same consequences as Phantom Secure. That's what the comment was. It doesn't seem like Graphene is another Phantom Secure, but they're sure acting suspicious by running away from France because of this comment.
https://nordictimes.com/tech/grapheneos-exits-france-after-t...
When that's said, there are forces in the EU as well which try stunts like this, kind of, but in the EU there are at least lots of countries and lots of opposing voices. In the UK the situation is different.
They both want to go back to the days of billionare-controlled media setting and driving the narrative, because they know how to influence that (or in Labor's case, think they know but they always fail to, despite sucking up to the media). So they dispose the Internet and social media.
So how long will we have to wait before it dawns on them that VPNs are also used to circumvent IP address blocks in the UK, and other countries of course.
I think the whole idea is that we don't have to wait, and that "it dawned on them" before they even wrote the draft law.
Passport and face has to be a video recording throughout the process, meaning the video must include the process of holding up passport to the camera, putting it down, and moving my face to the camera.
Nevertheless, they don't get my money. Willing buyer and willing seller as the saying goes.
Gotta hand it to them - "protecting the children" is a pretty good pretext.
The one from yesterday was discussing how australia is banning social media for anyone under 16. Most comments were supportive because they hate social media.
A few comments were discussing how it is just a way to propagate more KYC.
There are things that can have lifelong harmful consequences that we as a society recognize adults have rights to, and which they may be capable of moderating their exposure to, but which minors are simply not prepared to fully understand the consequences of.
Banning minors from social media does not ban their speech or access to speech. It bans their access to the gamified drug-like patterns of engagement surrounding the commoditication of speech for the gain of companies which know full well that the services they provide are built on hooking someone's eyeballs at the earliest age possible.
This is a problem with Australia's attempt to ban kids from it, where there's some surprising exemptions from the restrictions.
The voting public via their elected representatives, as with literally all laws.
None of this recent crackdown on social media is really about 'protecting the kids', is it?
There’s a bunch of benefits to an ad-tax too, beyond revenue generation: Users won’t be encouraged to use VPNs (and most VPN users probably also use ad blockers anyway). It’s difficult to evade, since an advertising business kind-of has to operate in the open; if nobody knows you’re running an ad business, your ad business has failed at the one thing it’s supposed to do. Advertisers are also purely profit-motivated, and so won’t hesitate to rat out their competitors if they’re using some loophole to gain a competitive advantage. It’s also very difficult for them to hide which country they’re targeting, since that information has to be available to their customers, so the taxmen can get it by subpoenaing customers or posing as them. And there’s not that many big ad-tech companies, so you don’t really mind if a few small-fries slip through the net.
Whenever I read these comments on Hacker News, on user-generated stories which are ranked in my algorithmic front page feed, written by other users posting comments and socializing, I wonder if the comments realizes that HN is also a social media website with millions of global users.
Or if they just get angry and yell “No that’s not what I meant” because they thought the government social media regulations would only target the sites they don’t like, not the sites they do.
Especially because it's gotten so bad. At first it was just 'making things popular in your network more visible'. But now it's to where when I use something like Facebook there is more 'algorithm spam' than anything actually happening with my friends. It's become something where the primary purpose is 'driving views' rather than communicating. [1]
A VPN is a bit different; it's a tool, and I will note one that depending on the specific definition has legitimate (or at least morally/ethically legitimate) uses.
[0] - e.x. unless it has been reversed in the last decade or two, in the US you still can't cut from a kid's cartoon right into a commercial for a toy/game related to said cartoon. I mean FFS that was a rule that got put in before 'attention hacking' was even a term.
[1] - TBH I'd love if we could get back to Myspace or maybe even early Facebook type social media. There's a lot of excitement lost when an algorithm feeds you shit versus a friend sharing it, and it was a lot less noise...
My point is more so that these are both approaches to push more KYC.
And many comments in here understand that this particular ban is using "for the kids" as an excuse, so why didn't the other thread have more comments recognizing this excuse?
> Social media platforms have admitted verifying user ages would likely involve surrendering personal IDs, as the Albanese government forges ahead with its under-16 ban.
[1] https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/privacy-a...
If you actually look at the suicide statistics, there's no epidemic going on...
https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/populat...
It's just parents who can't be bothered parenting looking for a quick fix. I want to hand my phone to little tommy and turn my brain off.
What's even more galling is that the quick fix with so many obvious negatives won't even fix anything. As a kid I had unlimited time to get around any blocks. It's so dumb.
4chan is perfectly fine, but reddit must be stopped! Just to be clear I don't think either should be blocked.
As I mentioned in yesterday's thread, an online API still allows the government to track and monitor residents, which is arguably worse. You no longer have plausible deniability when the government asks you to hand over your social media credentials because they now know that you have, or at least attempted to open, an account with that provider.
The better solution would be an offline, cryptographic "wallet" (similar to the EU Digital Identity Wallet) that only exposes the age information and nothing else, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.
There is however the Salisbury convention which is that the HoL shouldn't block legislation that was a manifesto commitment of the governing party. That doesn't meant they can't amend it at all, but they can't substantively change it. It's also just a convention, not a rule.
> In the United Kingdom, section 1(1) of the Parliament Act 1911 provides that the House of Lords may not delay a money bill more than a month.
It's generally fine-tuning rather than another massive hurdle after getting it through the Commons that the Lords might not pass it at all, though.
You might be thinking of 'royal assent' which is pretty much just a rubber stamp, yes, post-Lords.
I, of course, was not one of those people -- so maybe I shouldn't presume.
At that point all the technical components exist to make this an ultra easy UI for parents. Require ISP WiFi routers at least to support VLANs and PPSKs, which ultra cheap gear can do nowadays no problem, and have an easy to GUI to "generate child password, restrict to [age bracket]", heck to even just put in a birthday and by default have it auto-increment access if a parent wants. Add some easy options for time-of-day restrictions etc, done. Now parents are in charge and no adult needs anything ever.
Now I highly doubt politicians are all being honest about full motivations here, clearly there are plenty of forces trying to use this issue as a wedge to go after rights in general. But at the same time parental concern is real, and non-technical people find it overwhelming. It'd be good if industries and community could proactively offer a working solution, that'd reduce the political salience a great deal. It's unfortunate the entire narrative has been allowed to go 100% backwards in approach.
... only to the degree it hasn't been manufactured by tabloid media and Russian propaganda warfare, that is.
With every little news about local shootings, robberies, rapes, beatings, thefts, whatever not just making national, but in the worst case international headlines, one might think that Western countries are unsafe hellholes of the likes of actually legitimately failed states - despite criminality rates often being on record lows. Of course parents are going to be afraid for their children, and it's made worse by many Western countries financially only allowing for one, maximum two children.
On top of that, a lot of the panic is simply moral outrage. Porn and "trans grooming" it seems to be these days, I 'member growing up with the "Killerspiele" bullshit after some nutjob shot up a school in the early '00s. My parents grew up with the manufactured fear of reading too much as it was supposed to make you myopic. Again, all manufactured fear by organized groups aiming to rip our rights to pieces.
Parents should relax and rather teach their children about what can expect them on the Internet, how people might want to take advantage of them, and most importantly, that their children can always come to them when they feel something is going bad, without repercussions. When children think that they cannot show something to their parents, that is where the actual do-bad people have an in.
And if that means that Discord has to shut down... well, okay, if that's the price? An organisation that doesn't care about the impact on its host society is nothing more than a parasite or cancer and should be treated as such.
What is making Discord different from the real world? Do we ban kids from going to school because they could get bullied there?
Yes, sure, some content we decide to age-gate in real life... but hell. Our parents perused the VHS porn stash of their parents. Their parents wanked off to Playboy magazines. It has all been bullshit from the start.
"everyone should just adopt my values and then all these political problems would just disappear. voila!"
The problems I mentioned aren't real, that's the point.
It hasn't just never been proven that Counter Strike et al cause amok runs, it's been disproven [1]. Consuming porn doesn't make people rapists, and consuming LGBT content doesn't make children LGBT.
[1] https://www.mimikama.org/mythos-killerspiele/
Can you possibly think that determining what is and is not a valid problem isn't a subjective evaluation?
Even looking at your examples, which are not chosen well for your argument. In each of these you're just shifting the burden of proof. "No one has proven counter strike causes violent behavior, consuming porn makes people rapists or people can become gay." All wide-open empirical questions. Maybe none of these gets resolved in the near future; they aren't even well-formed questions. Meanwhile parents, governments, policy-makers need to make decisions. If you are very concerned about your kid being violent, you will avoid videogames even as a precautionary measure.
"The fact that some organizations (particularly religious) "
Ah you found an even easier way to resolve the issue, just ignore religious values.
Spoken like a true groomer. Have some gold, kind stranger!
If you want kids to be healthier you're gonna have to deal with it on the device level at worst, and the healthcare level at best. Include mental health services and counseling as part of a single-payer preventative care plan if you really, really want to save the kids.
Once the baseline is established, the playbook becomes simple: Shift that age bracket up to the very moment when someone can vote. Make sure that every new voter spends all their formative years unable to access even basic resources on the struggles that marginalized groups go through, and the history of their existence; set the bars for the "whitelist" so high that one must toe the party line in every bit of messaging, and thus is effectively a list of propagandists whose businesses can be fined astronomically if they deviate. Take away the parent's choice, and make it mandatory to use routers that block the non-whitelisted TLDs for any device that doesn't cryptographically authenticate as being operated by an adult. Find ways to impose this on groups other than children (for instance, by making it illegal for criminals to access the non-whitelisted web, then greatly expanding that definition). All in the name of peace and tranquility.
If you want V for Vendetta, this is how you get V for Vendetta.
I certainly agree. But its worth noting that only 92 of the 825 seats in the Lords are reserved for hereditary peers - the remainder are nominated by the (elected) leaders of the main political parties, or are appointed for non-political achievements (science, society, business, arts, etc.) There are also 26 Church of England bishops. Legislation to remove the hereditary peers is currently going through parliament.
There's plenty wrong with the HoL, but I think there's at least an argument to be made that the UK benefits from a parliamentary revising chamber that is less party-political than the Commons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...
However, I have many criticisms of the continuing undemocratic nature U.S. Senate (I think it should be dissolved entirely), but that reform was a good step.
It's true that the upper house will be less party political, but that is because everyone inside is very comfy with each other and aligned on policy that favors the wealthy.
Making it life appointments only makes things much worse. It is not possible to be depoliticized in a polarized environment; look at what happened to the US supreme Court, or the Polish one.
The idea of a House of Lords does strike me as a bit odd, but it's not really the big deal it used to be.
house of lords
The true issue lies in the fact that the Westminster style of government is de facto an elective tyranny, with no real checks and balances other than the misused ECHR
The commons may _eventually_ overrule them, but it takes time and costs political capital.
The majority of our population want more law, more rules, more restrictions : they don't see the value or enjoyment in doing something, so they don't think anyone should be able to do it.
Ask the average joe whether or not cars should prevent drivers from being able to "chose" to break the speed limit: You'll get a resounding "yes" 8/10 times - the value of freewill seems to be increasing lost on my country men.
My comment on elective tyranny comes from the fact that if a trifecta of: leader/party mps/house of lords are aligned there is little to stop them.
This done I think all of the debates around authoritarianism and censorship put too much blame on the government which seems to represent the views of the majority of people rather well. I think it also comes from the fact that the median age is older and older people are more conservative in their choices and thus more willing to put limitations on everything (and also the fucking boomers vote as a 25% bloc which imposes their choices on the remaining poplation i.e the infamous triple lock of retirements)
it's really not a problem, they're essentially a reviewing chamber
it works quite well
It is though. This is one of the few surveillance issues actually driven by grassroots organisations like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Shout) in particular when it comes to adult content who have been at this globally for well over a decade.
There's no shadowy cabal trying to age-restrict porn or social media, this is more like a modern day Carrie Nation. Puritanism always comes from the bottom up
There's simply no data in favor of the argument that this is a minority position or even some kind of conspiracy. Child safety is (not very surprisingly) usually a voter driven concern.
[1] https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...
The "think of the children!" argument has long been used by people in government to give themselves more power. In this case there's been a global effort to shut down unapproved speech. The government gains the power to censor and arrest for "bad speech" but it also gets to decide how the labels for the same are applied. There have been panel discussions and speeches on this at the WEF, and discussions of tactics for selling or pushing through this kind of legislation for at least a decade.
That's how we got that video of John Kerry lamenting the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.
So under the aegis of "think of the children!" (which may or may not have come from "grass roots" organizations) you get a committee with the power to decide what speech is badthink or wrongthink, label it as such, and hand out arrest warrants for it.
Disagree with policy: that's "hate" or "misinformation" or "inflammatory."
Voice a moral opinion: that's "hate" or "bigotry" or "intolerance."
Express doubt over a leader's actions: that's "misinformation" or "inflammatory."
> The Security Service Act 1989 sets out our functions and gives some examples of the nature and range of threats we work to disrupt.
> In summary, our functions are:
> to protect national security against threats from espionage, terrorism and > sabotage, from the activities of agents of foreign powers, and from actions intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means
Imagine you and I pay likely billions a year and these jokers just let asset managers like Larry Fink influence policies affecting fundamental rights of British people like it's nothing.
The country is corrupt beyond belief and soon we will wake up in corporate prison as slaves.
See:
https://thewinepress.substack.com/p/tokenization-blackrocks-...
https://www.cityam.com/reeves-and-starmer-meet-blackrocks-la...
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-digital-id-scheme-to-...
But yes in the last ~20 years are so it's somehow become a top EU goal as well.
Far more people strong support it than strongly oppose
The idea it's not the will of the British public is just not true
The concept of free expression basically doesn't exist in most of the UK/EU today and that's scary.
And what do we do for the children who have parents who fail them. How do we even detect it in time to help those children?
"If only we would just self organize into communities to protect childen..." ok.
Just because you are afraid you can't win arguments doesn't mean you should get to impose your view by violence. Which is what you advocate for, when you say the government should impose your views on the population.
Not trying to win an argument, I just haven't really got a solid answer. People just get passionate about how they should have a right to secret communications online, yet can't really give a good reason as to why that is. Yet on the other hand, those same people probably want to live in a world that is relatively safe from terrorism, sexual abuse etc.
I just said I can understand why to some people, wanting to stop children having access to a VPN doesn't necessarily have to be this big secret government overreach conspiracy?
Do I think we should have to have government surveillance software running on everyone's computer? No. I just understand all perspective, rather than just tying to sound like some middle age edge lord.
> The Commission presented a proposal on preventing and combating child sexual abuse[1], looking in particular at detecting child pornography. In this context, it has mentioned that support could be provided by the software of the controversial American company Palantir, which has close ties to US intelligence services.[0]
Note that the actual impact assessment report does not 'mention' that Palantir could do this job. Assuming Mathilde is not lying, the commission has 'mentioned' this verbally only.
Power-trip-tech-billionaires like Thiel, Larry Ellison, Altman, Musk, have had this realization that politicians are effortlessly quid pro quo'able. With the added bonus that they can make the path to their messiah power trip of tech feudalism extremely profitable.
[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2024-00016...
(That is, none at all)
The UK went culturally off the deep end a long time ago.
God I'm sick of the constant attacks against online freedom.
God forbid anyone should ever have a private conversation.
LORD NASH [Tory, contactholmember@parliament.uk] BARONESS CASS [Crossbench / 'independent', rivisn@parliament.uk ("staff")] BARONESS BENJAMIN [Liberal Democrat - which particularly disappoints me – benjaminf@parliament.uk]
All three can be contacted by sending an email to contactholmember@parliament.uk using the proper form of address as detailed in https://members.parliament.uk/member/4270/contact
If you're reading this website and are either living in the UK or are a British citizen I strongly urge you to write a personalised and above all polite email stating with evidence why they are misguided. The "think of the children" brigade is strong – you may well be able to persuade these individuals why it is a bad idea.
Her final report uncritically used transgenderist language, such as claiming sex is "assigned at birth" (it isn't assigned, but observed) and describing males who desire to be the opposite sex as "trans female" (they are not female).
It is clear that Cass has bought in to this sexist, harmful and absurd ideology, and that her review was a mechanism to continue its infiltration into the NHS.
don't you remember 2010?
They're pretty close to completely de-anonymising the internet for UK citizens. Say they introduce an Australian-style social media ban for under 16s, then requires all social media to link their accounts to digital IDs for this verification.
Naturally the only remaining loophole is if a UK citizen manages to avoid being flagged as British ever by using a VPN, so I expect they will focus on that going forwards. Keep in mind the UK already arrests and imprisons vast numbers of people for speech offences, there's no slippery-slope argument here because the UK is already at the bottom of the slope as an ultra-authoratitarian anti-speech nation.
I think you’ve been spending too much time on Twitter
Protesting in favour of Palestine remains legal, doing so under the name of a proscribed organisation is not.
Admittedly, the reason for them being proscribed is rather idiotic.
They broke into a military base. If that was sanctioned by the organisation, they should be shut down.
Especially given that the US is increasingly unstable and seems like it may stop responding to calls from assistance from anyone else in NATO, and the UK isn't in the EU any more and therefore can't ask the entire EU for help either just the bits that are also in NATO…
They should consider themselves lucky they did it in an enlightened country like Britian. Many places in the world that would be a death sentence.
It explicitly doesn’t do that, folks are still very much free to protest in support of Palestine.
or look at their personal data
or use behavior analytics to target minority groups as "risks" sending law enforcement to harass or kill them.
or store all their personal data on a 3rd party companies insecure servers
You have to start surveillance young, get them used to it early so they don't realize how bad it is!
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