We are seeing the end of the liberal illusion of freedom online. In order to stop anti-zionist speech, to control the proles, and to establish necessary blackmail capabilities against the population to be able to stop revolutionaries before they get started by threatening to release their porn preferences or whatever the boot is coming down very hard and fast.

This isn't just an EU thing or a UK thing (though they are a spectacular example of a fascist shit-hole whose boot-loving population hasn't seen an abuse against them they don't love yet even compared to subservient Amerikkkans).

Across the US laws of a similar nature are being drafted. The porn ban is just step one I'm sorry to say. They'll see people getting around it with VPNs, point out these VPNs are also used for piracy. Scream about the children and terrorists and evil foreigners and soon enough there will be VPN bans state by state and then nationally with the payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, etc) having a gun pointed at them and they and the crypto exchanges (the non-criminal ones normal people can access after submitting government ID, submitting to an AI or person-driven face scan and comparison to that, etc ,etc) will be forced to stop allowing these things. More pertinently they'll force hosting and bandwidth providers to drop them within the US and if necessary throttle all traffic that's uninspectable (though that would take years more most likely).

I predict within 5 years online privacy and public piracy both will be relics of another era. The public will obediently accept giving out ID to access their porn after some grumbling and everything after that will be smooth sailing that most people don't care about so easy-mode. Frankly the best place to stop these plans is at the porn ID phase because I'm sorry to say but it's what the largest part of the population cares about out of all these measures.

To be honest I doubt there's anything that can stop them at this point. The loss of control on the narrative about "israel" and the genocide of Palestinians has them freaked out as does the likely imminent loss in Ukraine. The level of mass mobilization and protest is simply not something you're going to get over porn and after porn ID laws come laws for other services tying them to your real identity and people have already accepted the government knowing their kinks so will roll over for that as well.

The reason why VPN ban exist in China is mainly to brew a home made internet system on top of filtering out foreign internet influences and political actors. The reason why a 3rd world country like the UK does it is purely to implement a compliance system to control the narrative

if you want to go to that route get ready to buy a shitload of chinese equipment because those are the only ones capable enough to block at least some of the modern VPNs, and it's not even that effective. in my experience the only real way to ban VPNs is to kill almost all outbound traffic.

ban porn, VPN sales goes up. ban VPNs, starlink sales goes up. ban starlink, then what?

I'm not confident but I will say this is very difficult to implement in practice with how many systems rely on VPNs to function, namely thousands of busineses that are the backbone of our information economy.

I know this usually gets legislated around in countries where they're applied, such as demanding that VPN providers forfeit user privacy or deploy censors, or allowing corporations to bypass certain restrictions.

However, I would also point to the number of users here from countries where western services are banned alongside VPNs. For example, we have a few Iranian comrades, where VPNs outside of backdoored options are banned.

Enforcing these bans is hard to do, if the govt's current record on enforcing bans on torrenting/copyrighting content is to be observed. We must do what we can to disseminate the tools to bypass our governments!

We should see about getting lemmy to stop rendering pages unless you're logged in. That would help stop crawlers from automatically flagging anti-Israel content. The next problem is going to be keeping AI agents out (hey this is just like that movie!). 2FA with a phone is tricky. I'm not sure if they can solve captchas yet, maybe a captcha on login would work. But then again, that's just helping google train their bots.

Every multinational company uses VPN for their Intranet, no? I assume this would break so many things, lets go. Just set everything on fire already.

Imagine banning VPN...

... for online safety.

called it

they will be using the surveillance apparatus they built. this is unprecedented, leftists better start caring about privacy.

China 2.0