You can get free VPNs. The Opera browser comes with one that you can toggle on and off almost effortlessly, although it's practically useless for any usual VPN purposes.
Why are Labour picking such terrible policies lately? I don't agree with abolishing the House of Lords either.
Why? What are kids doing with VPNs? Porn? Or are they cool enough to be torrenting stuff again? Whatever, I'm entirely convinced Keir Starmer will spend the whole of his first parliament telling people "now is not the time" while MI5 plot to have him killed anyway.
VPNs were originally designed for secure business communications, to allow people to remotely access a private work network over an unsecure public internet connection. They're still essential for that application and are essentially mandatory in a lot of industries for data protection reasons.
In their role as a means of evading censorship or monitoring, VPNs have managed to confound even the most repressive regimes with incredibly sophisticated and well-funded surveillance infrastructure. It's quite straightforward for anyone with a modicum of tech savvy to use a VPN in a country like China or Iran. Our civil service simply doesn't have the competence to implement a ban that would be anything more than a minor inconvenience.
The Tories were pressuring Meta to remove the end-to-end encryption on Whatsapp, until Meta explained to them in very simple terms that they use Whatsapp all the time for their own private communications. They're dimwits, but they did eventually twig when someone basically said "Remember the phone hacking scandal? Remember when all the tabloids were running front page stories based on the contents of Hugh Grant's voicemail? If we remove the encryption on Whatsapp, we can't guarantee that those front pages won't be filled with stories based on the contents of your Whatsapp messages".
>>28225 >Why are Labour picking such terrible policies lately?
Because Starmer is trying so so so hard to be a centrist, and appeal to both guardian and daily mail readers at the same time.
I obviously oppose it, but I also wouldn't really worry at all if they did.
I mean what are they gonna do? I use a VPN to access the torrent sites that are already banned to download the media I'm already not allowed to. Do they think there won't be another way around it?
I feel like this is a good place to ask: Are VPNs actually worth it?
I got one last month that offered 2 years for £44 but aside from switching it on for torrenting an episode or two I've not used it at all. There's a 30-day money back guarantee so I might just call it a day and get some beer money back. I've never had a naughty letter from my ISP about torrenting and even if I did most content can be streamed in HD these days anyway.
Meh. There aren't any consequences for torrenting in this country - in other parts of the world you can be fined or have your broadband cut off, but not here. VPNs can be useful for getting around georestrictions or getting cheap deals on subscriptions, but it's a fairly niche thing. If you need real anonymity, then you'd want to use TOR.
>>28735 >>28736 I remember we briefly went through a phase where they'd send you notifications if someone caught you. You'd get six letters with increasingly threatening tones, culminating in ... nothing.
The VPN providers are starting to get a little bit more honest about the actual uses and benefits of them, after years of people pointing out that most of their older selling points are either outdated or were never really relevant at the start. These days they're basically saying what used to be the quiet part out loud - they're useful for pretending to be somewhere else for region-locked content, or for getting to content that you're otherwise not being allowed to access. Outside of China, most censorship systems are in the nature of a "wet floor" sign. They don't try particularly hard, and the main leverage is the legal system.
>>28738 >Outside of China, most censorship systems are in the nature of a "wet floor" sign. They don't try particularly hard, and the main leverage is the legal system.
Kiwifarms has been inaccessable for a while now - assumably due to censorship. I can understand why, ofcourse, but it's annoying.
It was still up when last I checked (about a month ago). They had some hosting issues a while back but it didn't last long.
Either way they seem to have taken to the darkweb instead as a more permanent home, understandably considering their entire reason duh etter is borderline illegal, if not outright illegal, stalking activities.
>>28741 I think sometimes people forget that capitalism is a thing. Whatever money a host is going to take in fees is going to be offset by the effort in dealing with abuse complaints and potential PR risks. The latter is very much relative, of course. There are the "bulletproof" types who tout their credentials by demonstrating how they ignore complaints like that.
There's a whole outrage thing going on about Gumroad cracking down on certain content, which people are attributing to pressure from payment processors. The problem isn't that the likes of Visa and MasterCard are prudes or don't like porn, it's that adult content is just a higher risk all round. Besides some of the content types that were listed in the announcement being of borderline legality, fraud is consistently higher in the category than elsewhere.
Payment for adult services has long suffered from high levels of two particular forms of fraud, both arising from the same problem - nobody wants that on their statements, particularly if someone else is going to see it (whether it's just a spouse or someone doing a financial assessment). As well as the traditional type of fraud where someone uses leaked or stolen card details, there is also "friendly fraud" where the customer reports a legitimate transaction - the canonical example is a married man reporting the transaction after his wife sees it on the statement. The latter in particular is significantly higher with adult services than most other businesses.
We already have CleanFeed, where IWC can inject decent blocking. I'm no fan of public VPNs, they're mostly snake oil, but this would affect my several VPs and $other machines I run currently. Sometimes I route my traffic along them, not to get nefarious access just to see what's out there. Sailing the High Seas of the internet, as one might say.
It sounds bollocks, hopefully it will be bollocks.
