UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

An illegitimate underground scene running on life support, using old unlocked computers which are a finite resource they will eventually run out of. Utterly depressing... We used to be free...

If this passes, the only strategic move available is to somehow develop the ability to make our own computer processors in our garages. Billion dollar fabs are single points of failure and they will be exploited, subverted, regulated and controlled. The only possible solution is to democratize and decentralize semiconductor manufacturing to the point anyone can do it. We must be able to make free computer hardware at home just like we can make free computer software at home.

Anything short of this and it's over.

Sounds like the plot of "Big Brother" by Cory Doctorow

Don't worry, they'll make it a crime to open devices that don't have the rootkit.

Computers are too powerful, too subversive for us citizens to have access to.

Give citizens computers and they can copy at will, making a mockery out of things like copyright, they'd wipe out entire sectors of the economy if left unchecked.

Give citizens computers and they will have cryptography which can defeat police, judges, governments, spies, militaries.

They cannot tolerate it. They will eventually lock everything down. PCs were left out because everyone is on mobile these days, not because they are opposed to locking them down. They will close the loophole if it becomes an issue. Besides, with remote attestation they can just designate those devices as untrustworthy and ban them from everything.

It's a politico-technological arms race. They make some law, we make technology that subverts it. Due to technology, they must continuously increase their own tyranny in order to enjoy the same level of control they had before. The end result is either an uncontrollable population or a totalitarian state. We're heading towards the latter. I was hoping the government's limits would be discovered along the way, some set of basic principles it'd refrain from violating in its quest for control, thereby reaching the fabled "the ideal amount of crime is non-zero" state. Turns out governments know no limits.

Give it time. The natural end state is that all computing devices available to the general public are dumb framebuffers that are only capable of displaying a UI running in the cloud. No more privacy for anything; even if the cloud OS lets you run Linux in a VM, everything you do will be visible and constantly monitored for suspicious activity.

No, but Brazil can (and did) exercise strict import controls over what kind of electronics can get into the country. For the longest time the only game consoles you could legitimately get in Brazil came from Sega through special arrangement with Brazilian manufacturer TecToy—in particular, the Master System and Mega Drive. When the market finally did open up, import consoles were subject to stiff tariffs. Piracy was rampant. That's why the Brazilian gaming market is... weird to this day, and until recently was generally avoided by major manufacturers creating openings for also-rans like the Zeebo.

So while police arresting a kid for having an Ubuntu DVD is unlikely, the Brazilian government twisting the arm of PC manufacturers to prevent the installation of any but approved operating systems on hardware sold to the Brazilian market is highly plausible. Since this already aligns with Microsoft's eventual goals, Microsoft and the PC manufacturers will just hasten the rollout of Palladium 2.0 and nothing will stop it.

"Never let a good crisis go to waste."

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."

Fascinating that they're more worried about VPN use than about shutting down rape gangs.

In Britain in particular? The NSPCC, Molly Rose Foundation, IWF among a bunch of others. 70% of Brits are supportive of the online safety act[1], it's been supported by Conservatives, Labour and the SNP.

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. You think banning people from social media is an idea coming from big tech and shadowy three letter agencies? What kind of sense does that make

[1] https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...

> Engage with your children on topics that matter.

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?

Similar to the arguments about climate change and how we as individuals should tackle it. Not going to happen sorry.

"If only we would just self organize into communities to protect childen..." ok.

That's how EU's digital wallet is supposed to work:

> The selective disclosure of attributes will allow you to only share the specific information requested by a service provider, without revealing extra information.

> For example, with the selective disclosure of attributes you could choose to share your date of birth, but without revealing any other identifying details that could be used for profiling.

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EU...

You're totally right that it would be easy from a tech perspective to do that. it's a shame that:

(A) most people cannot grasp how it could be that "GovSSO" can attest "This person you just sent our way just logged into GovSSO [with biometric 2FA], and they are at least 16 years old" without the receiving system having any way of knowing who that citizen is or even whether they're 16 or 99.

(B) very real terrible government policies the UK has (like jailing people for speech, and like demanding encryption backdoors that compromise the security, at minimum, of the whole of every British citizen's devices, and at worst every device in the world) incline anyone who's paying attention to assume that the government will somehow use anything related to "ID" and "internet" to do idiotic things like figuring out who owns a Twitter account that committed some wrongspeak so the bobbies can come round them up.

You just described OpenID

Any ID has to reveal enough info to reasonably convince the other party that the ID belongs to that person.

These threads always bring up a hypothetical digital ID that simply says “over 21”, but it’s missing the key point that the ID needs to also give enough information to reasonably tie the identity to the user. Otherwise everyone underage would run around with borrowed or stolen IDs because there was no way to prove it did or did not belong to them.

In theory a digital passport could reveal age 21 or older with a photo and name, but it’s only marginally less info for a lot more complexity.

This is based on statistics for the Malicious Communications Act. That includes people sending, for example, threatening messages to an ex partner.

Not all of them are online posts, in fact probably a minority

I thought Daily Mail was close to tabloid status (or a bit above). Aren’t they banned from being a citation on Wikipedia?

arrests is not the same as imprisons.

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You mean folks choosing to protest under the guise of a proscribed organisation?

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.

This article really doesn't go into what the communication was about. They have some anecdata, but once you go into 10k+ of examples, you're almost guaranteed to get mistakes. Maybe the situation is bad overall, but that article really doesn't show it.

In England and Wales there are 85k people serving custodial sentences and 250k community sentences. 12k seems significant, if true.

Didn't Germany just make it illegal to insult politicians?

OK, but the order of "importance", as stated by the government, was:

- easier access to the services - remember this is supposed to be STRICTLY digital only, so presumably on par with government gateway ID? - control of illegal immigration - with scale of the problem wildly blow out of proportion - presumably by helping control the border? how? And ostensibly by making impossible to work without right - which is a check mandatory already based on the existing digital-only online check -- once again fake non-solution

Certainly after experiencing multiple problems with the existing eVisa (Digital only) and reading multiple horror stories of faults and errors it proves to me the government is NOT taking ANY of the best practices into consideration while unfairly using parallel to the (like Estonian ID)

The only thing it would do is to cut the fraud a bit, but the impact would once again be limited because it would be a physical document (which, I must repeat from the abundance of caution, might bear a certificate or a chip that makes it incredibly hard to make a fake version of it).

I'm sorry but the government made it a fight for the souls of the rightwing voters once again, it didn't show the awesome project. It showed the stick it want to introduce to conduct the same checks it runs already :)

Just VERIFY and examine their claims. It's been discussed so many times, not only on HN.

>Certainly, calling the UK "ultra-authoritarian" is incorrect.

It's Russia level. They're prosecuting people for holding up signs protesting a genocide.

It's only scary to Americans (maybe reaching hard because of Trump?) and those who live off Twitter and Daily Mail headlines. For the rest us it's marginally better than when the crazies where screwing us over with Brexit.

> The UK is actually a scary place right now, if you are paying attention..

It has been the most authoritarian country in the West for decades already, this is nothing new.

British people are the most apathetic people in the world, so it's really easy to abuse them.

> 12,000 arrests per year

Arrested is not the same thing as being charged. The latter is what would lead to a trial.

> So they are currently trying to get rid of juries, which they will do

Huh

> a leader that has styled himself as a more extreme Nigel Farage

I’m sorry, what?

> The UK is actually a scary place right now

It is?

Good Lord, Jeeves! Do you mean to tell me that a gaggle of elected coves can simply override the peers in the Upper House? It seems a distinct inversion of the natural order, what? Rather like the oyster overruling the walrus! It makes one feel the foundations of the Empire are trembling a bit, like a jelly in a high wind.

Are there any limitations on what can be proposed in one of the houses? For example in Australia our upper house (senate) can't adjust or propose bills to do with money.

I would personally simply heavily tax ad revenue rather than banning social media, as while a blanket ban is ironically less of an infringement on free speech than banning it for children, it’s still something of an infringement.

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.

And who gets to decide which platforms count as 'social media'?

This is a problem with Australia's attempt to ban kids from it, where there's some surprising exemptions from the restrictions.

> It's way easier to justify banning social media entirely

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.

Really? There are plenty of things that are considered harmful to minors but okay for adults. Should all those be banned too?

> Why not set up a government api where a site can get a yes/no answer about age using tokens, so the site itself gets no information but if the age is ok?

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.

Completely fair.

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?

There is a theoretical difference, but in practice they are the same thing, and we all know it [1]:

> 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...

> all these political problems

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 (although I do concede: the ethical aspects particularly around studio-produced porn do require discussions), and consuming LGBT content doesn't make children LGBT. People are, to the extent that we reasonably know, born LGBT.

The fact that some organizations (particularly religious) have framed these issues as "political" doesn't make them political either.

[1] https://www.mimikama.org/mythos-killerspiele/

Maybe go after Discord then for doing nothing meaningful against abusive, should we not?

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.

(Besides: if you're aiming at stuff like groups of kids bullying other kids into suicide or self harm - guess what: that existed in times where there was no Internet. It just wasn't widely reported, other than maybe holding a vigil for a classmate who had "passed away")

Have you read 1984? This sounds like something leading up to the situation in the book, certainly not the worst parts.

You are a boiling frog, "oh it's minor, it's minor, it's just jokes, it's just a little bit"...

For anyone like me who is not up to date with this news:

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/07/uk-palestine...

> “The decision appears disproportionate and unnecessary. It limits the rights of many people involved with and supportive of Palestine Action who have not themselves engaged in any underlying criminal activity but rather exercised their rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association,” the High Commissioner said. “As such, it appears to constitute an impermissible restriction on those rights that is at odds with the UK’s obligations under international human rights law.” > > Since the UK Government’s ban came into effect on 5 July, at least 200 people have been arrested under the UK Terrorism Act 2000, many of them while attending peaceful protests.

So it seems you're also missing important context when you wave the whole thing away because "it's a proscribed organisation" - that proscription is in fact another example of government overreach.

> proscribed orgnanization

That doesn't change the context. A different justification doesn't change the practical effect. The curtailing of speech is discussed as problematic by many of the residents openly. I certainly have had an earful touring across the entirety of the isles.

That proscription being done by that same government. I don't think that context paints them in any better light.

We've banned this account. Users who comment like this are instantly banned, no matter who or what it's about.

For what it’s worth the SC happened in the US because there is too much agreement between parties. The republicans are the bad cop to the democrats more presentable bad cop. They feel they are losing control of things so capitalism is taking a turn towards increased repression. There wasn’t opposition to the packing of the court, both parties have the same masters.

It's also the same problem with the European Commission. If anything, it's worse than hereditary peers. At least the peers are obviously illegitimate.

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Mean tweets - yes.

Very obvious incitement to violence - no.

Of course, I agree. The UK has nothing to do with the EU, though.