Stop fucking but make children.
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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Dame Rachel de Souza told BBC Newsnight it was "absolutely a loophole that needs closing" and called for age verification on VPNs.
Saw that coming. Can’t have the populace living their lives without constant, repressive government scrutiny.
But it’s for the kids what kind of psychopath could be against that!!!!???
Do the government ministers understand that setting up your own VPN is literally a 5 minute operation.
Hire a droplet VM, pre-installed with a server OS. Log in with provided credentials. sudo apt install docker Copy/paste a docker compose file that sets up a wg-easy container. Create a peer. Take a picture of the provided QR code. Connect to the server via a wireguard app. Done.
Are they going to ban VMs?
Moronic bit is atlast asking parents to be responsible
How much you wanna bet the ministers use VPN to watch porn as well?
Who needs to watch it when you can live it
You joke but people who live porn still watch porn.
Market research?
If they were really after kids watching porn (or even porn in general) it would be technically somewhat simple to force ISPs to provide filters on their end as a subscription service. I'm pretty sure I've even heard that kind of services in the past. Make it even opt-out if you really want to.
That way ISPs would just ban everything from pornhub and others unless you spesifically want it allowed or even provide a portal where you could block reddit, twitter, tumblr or whatever you wish on your account. That kind of technology already exists and it's used on many corporate setups.
There's obviously ways around that, but there's no technical way to block every possible way to move bits between computers. Even if they would shut down the whole internet there's still ways to build mesh-networks or even buy USB-drives from a shady alley.
But as we all know, it's not about porn and not about children.
You can't block porn completely without blocking VPNs. If you connect to a VPN that's all they can see. They can not see what you use the VPN for.
You can't block VPNs without blocking the entire internet. You can block known VPN services, but you can't prevent people from hosting their own.
Some known VPN protocols could be blocked, using introspection tools. However, this would just render corporate VPNs useless. VPN traffic is just bytes, and so is WebSockets. Good luck figuring out whether my HTTPS traffic is legitimate internet traffic, or masked VPN traffic.
Good news, we closed that pesky loophole by banning encryption without backdoors.
If they can't decode it, you better be ready to explain exactly what those bytes were!
Depends on the VPN
VPN, Tor (and similar, like I2P), every imaginable P2P network, proxies, all non-http protocols (smtp, ftp, nntp, xmpp and other instant messengers and so on) can all transfer any kind of data, porn included. And a ton of other things. Heck, I'm quite sure there's a minecraft mod where you can assemble JPG-images out of the blocks and view them that way. And then you can use stuff like uuencode where you can use anything that can move plain text to transfer binary data.
There's no way to block all of that unless you shut the whole internet down. And even then you can still trade good old playboy-magazines with your friends. VPN in itself has very little to do with the actual problem, beyond that someone apparently noticed that their current "save-the-children" iteration had pretty large holes in it.
Ban paper.
Kids could draw boobies on it.
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Why are the kids technologically illiterate and undersexed until it comes to matters of government control? I'm not usually into tin foil hats, but this doesn't feel like the kids are the primary concern here.
They aren't.
Almost like you didn't think this fucker through.
Clearly it's a parental problem to determine if the VPN they are buying for their kids is being used to wank off, but apparently this party of 'liberty' has an unhealthy obsession with monitoring our children's genitalia these days.
Unfortunately, neither Labour nor Conservatives are parties of liberty, although there are some individuals within both that see the importance.
You ban something, and people will always find a way around it. Always.
Dead drop USBs for file sharing?
Yup, and that's how the US got the Mafia. We banned alcohol, but people wanted to drink, so the Mafia made that happen.
All a ban does is hurt law abiding citizens and businesses.
This is a fairly revisionist history version of the mafia, they were here for decades before prohibition. One might say that they profited greatly from prohibition, but to suggest they began with it is incredibly incorrect. I hate to be the actually guy but I find organized crime fascinating and I can’t let this one go
When they effectively make the internet a dangerous place, Usenet will rise from the darkness. P2P will also always exist and these politicians dont understand computer math, so a lot of what they're trying to accomplish is bound to fail.
As someone who just read the Wikipedia article on Usenet and doesn't know anything else about it: Would this be pretty much the equivalent of the internet before search engines? Because if so I'm really intrigued
Never mind search engines, Usenet was being used before people were using web browsers.
Stop ministers using VPNs to watch child porn.
Told!
We didn’t see this one coming a mile away.
Palantir execs and shareholders are buzzing with anticipation.
It’s a bit like “my kids will only eat chocolate” and the therapist’s response “where are they getting the chocolate from?”. If the kids are using VPNs then where are they getting the money for the VPN from? Is this parental consent?
Most likely they're using "free" VPNs.
Which is an anticipated problem too. Because those free VPNs are harvesting all of your traffic to sell; If you’re not the customer, you’re the product being sold. Almost as if opponents of the ban said this would happen, and would only work to push kids towards sketchy sites…
Stop ministers making laws to... why the fuck they even do this bullshit? They are a government, they know everything about everyone even without such primitive control methods.
The people pulling the strings have obviously decided that internet freedom is a threat to them and they're taking (global) action to ensure their supremacy.
Banning Pornhub makes them use the VPNs in the first place.
Dame Rachel told BBC Newsnight: "Of course, we need age verification on VPNs - it's absolutely a loophole that needs closing and that's one of my major recommendations."
If this fucker had any idea what VPN even stood for they'd realize how fuckin stupid this statement is...
Ya! Let them watch all that violence on Netflix instead!
I've always been fascinated by the lengths puritans will go to prevent kids from seeing mammary glands, while simultaneously being ok with them watching blood and violence.
Seriously though. We'll legislate anything to keep them from seeing stuff they might reasonably expect to see and do one day and glorify things nobody should ever see or experience in person.
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Yeah, it's just all these children with their bank accounts paying for their VPN subscriptions doing it all... Do they think we're that stupid? Don't answer that. 😔
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