RE: https://mastodon.thenewoil.org/@thenewoil/115971195227745876
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@paul nice you found the loophole, us tech guys always win after all
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I think some are still missing the point. I’m not saying they’re going to lock up every single person who uses a VPN or watches porn.
Your government’s strategy is to make “crimes” like this as common and easy to commit as possible.
This way, if you ever do something completely legal which they *actually* don’t like, *which can be completely unrelated to VPNs or bypassing age verification,* they can pull up your internet history and easily prosecute you.
Organize a legitimate protest, and the government’s swift response will be to label you a child sex offender because they found you using evil VPN technology.
This is how free speech dies, not from a law that says “free speech is dead now,” but from draconian, authoritarian laws like this that give the government “plausible” reasons to go after anyone, which can’t easily be fought against.
This has always been the playbook to target innocents. In the USA, drug possession laws being created as a pretense for cops to raid and dismantle minority communities, for example. And now this is coming to the digital realm.
And so many businesses rely on VPNs to allow their employees to securely work from home.
It used to drive me batty if using a relatives network to upgrade OS, because bandwidth, then be considered suspect and having TFA thrown at you to prove you and your device is yours.
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@CosmicCactus @jonah I'd like to see any sort of regulation try to document exactly what a VPN actually is
Ban all VPNs? OK, but what about private VPNs businesses use for remote workers, or site to site VPNs for inter-office connectivity?
OK, ban "public VPNs"? well, OK, but someone could set up a basic wireguard tunnel to any server they have and that would be private.
OK ban any VPN that isn't on a list of approved VPN software? Ha, good luck with that.
It's an absolute mess of a regulation that would be impossible to enforce. And I have my popcorn ready.
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UK users complaining about vpn blocks.
That is The dream of Keir Srtalin Starmer and Shabhana Mahmood who dreams about total surveillance and knowing the thoughts of every citizen better than the person themselves.
Friends of israel Financed, genocide supporting Repressive Labour must go.
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I think some are still missing the point. I’m not saying they’re going to lock up every single person who uses a VPN or watches porn.
Your government’s strategy is to make “crimes” like this as common and easy to commit as possible.
This way, if you ever do something completely legal which they *actually* don’t like, *which can be completely unrelated to VPNs or bypassing age verification,* they can pull up your internet history and easily prosecute you.
Organize a legitimate protest, and the government’s swift response will be to label you a child sex offender because they found you using evil VPN technology.
This is how free speech dies, not from a law that says “free speech is dead now,” but from draconian, authoritarian laws like this that give the government “plausible” reasons to go after anyone, which can’t easily be fought against.
This has always been the playbook to target innocents. In the USA, drug possession laws being created as a pretense for cops to raid and dismantle minority communities, for example. And now this is coming to the digital realm.
@jonah everybody should stockpile opensource OSes and important software because it is the next thing that will be regulated…
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RE: https://mastodon.thenewoil.org/@thenewoil/115971195227745876
Next up will be a VPN ban. Many tech-y people will see that and think “lol yeah well that’s not going to stop *me* from using a VPN”
A VPN ban isn’t really meant stop you from using one. It means when they catch you doing so, they’ll use the fact you’re using this harmless technology itself as a *pretense* to lock you up without needing to do any “hard work” (i.e. an investigator’s job) like actually confirming whether you committed a real crime.
Don’t think you won’t be impacted just because you know how to outsmart an ISP filter! This is not a plan to protect children or stop you from consuming adult media. It is a ploy to eventually eliminate ALL freedom of expression and free access to information in the UK.
And the same goes for Chat Control and encrypted messengers, btw
#UKpol #VPNban #PornHub #ChatControl #Privacy #FreeSpeech #SocialMedia
@jonah Just to add: the motives of the lawmakers aren't even relevant. The question is: how will the government in 10 years use this power?
There is no question that "it CAN happen here" no matter where 'here' is. Unless you trust all politicians on both sides of the spectrum forever, you should not give them the power to investigate or jail you for using an anonymizing service.
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@CosmicCactus @jonah I'd like to see any sort of regulation try to document exactly what a VPN actually is
Ban all VPNs? OK, but what about private VPNs businesses use for remote workers, or site to site VPNs for inter-office connectivity?
OK, ban "public VPNs"? well, OK, but someone could set up a basic wireguard tunnel to any server they have and that would be private.
OK ban any VPN that isn't on a list of approved VPN software? Ha, good luck with that.
It's an absolute mess of a regulation that would be impossible to enforce. And I have my popcorn ready.
@paul @CosmicCactus @jonah you're missing that the vagueness is a *feature*. It's not that it would be hard to enforce, it's that it'd be *expensive to defend against* and the UK government has plenty of recent history of lying in court and railroading people (as do most governments to be fair)
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@jonah Of course, but you are missing my point on that they are failing in plenty of other metrics whilst going hard on easy crimes like trying to stay private and secure on the tinternet...
I know you know that, but just in case other didn't -
I think some are still missing the point. I’m not saying they’re going to lock up every single person who uses a VPN or watches porn.
Your government’s strategy is to make “crimes” like this as common and easy to commit as possible.
This way, if you ever do something completely legal which they *actually* don’t like, *which can be completely unrelated to VPNs or bypassing age verification,* they can pull up your internet history and easily prosecute you.
Organize a legitimate protest, and the government’s swift response will be to label you a child sex offender because they found you using evil VPN technology.
This is how free speech dies, not from a law that says “free speech is dead now,” but from draconian, authoritarian laws like this that give the government “plausible” reasons to go after anyone, which can’t easily be fought against.
This has always been the playbook to target innocents. In the USA, drug possession laws being created as a pretense for cops to raid and dismantle minority communities, for example. And now this is coming to the digital realm.
Hey, in less bleak news, it's Data Privacy Day! Spread the good word and make sure you're staying safe this year! https://mastodon.neat.computer/@privacyguides/115974133357241826
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I think some are still missing the point. I’m not saying they’re going to lock up every single person who uses a VPN or watches porn.
Your government’s strategy is to make “crimes” like this as common and easy to commit as possible.
This way, if you ever do something completely legal which they *actually* don’t like, *which can be completely unrelated to VPNs or bypassing age verification,* they can pull up your internet history and easily prosecute you.
Organize a legitimate protest, and the government’s swift response will be to label you a child sex offender because they found you using evil VPN technology.
This is how free speech dies, not from a law that says “free speech is dead now,” but from draconian, authoritarian laws like this that give the government “plausible” reasons to go after anyone, which can’t easily be fought against.
This has always been the playbook to target innocents. In the USA, drug possession laws being created as a pretense for cops to raid and dismantle minority communities, for example. And now this is coming to the digital realm.
The aim is to make committing crimes necessary.
Because that makes being in the in-group necessary.
Because that makes submission necessary. @jonah -
@LukefromDC @jonah As demonstrated by the entire country in the last few weeks/months, the second amendment is worth exactly nothing.
First things first: Trump is defying the Second Amendment because he is defying nearly all of the US Constitution. It is the First, 4th, and 14th Amendments he is shitting on the most, as well as almost all of the separation of powers language in the original document.
Specific to last week in Minneapolis: having a gun is no guarantee of WINNING an armed confrontation, but it means you at least have a chance to fight it.
Short version: this is not about a cop looking for an excuse for murder using having a gun as that excuse. It is about being able to obtain that gun in the first place.
The fact that Trump now opposes the Second Amendment as part of a constitution he repudiates does not make all the guns bought by trans folks, queer folks, people of color, and progressives since 2020 magically disappear.
The Second Amendment was never meant to apply to people of color or other oppressed groups in the US. Before the First Civil War, both arming an enslaved person and teaching them to read were felonies and SCOTUS had no problem with that. It is still considered a felony for an undocumented migrant to have a gun.
What the Second Amendment does mean however is this: the current gun control laws have been ineffective at disarming these social groups as the kind of broad control and muscular enforcement we see with European gun laws has been off the table long enough for the people Trump is fighting to arm themselves without having to turn to underground arms merchants who charge much more.
During the early 1990's in Washington DC, a semiauto AK-47 platform rifle that sold for maybe $400 in a Maryland gun store was reportedly worth at least $2,000 on the streets of DC, about 5x as much. To put it another way, the Second Amendment has lowered the financial cost of arming social sectors Trump has declared war on by 80%.
Whether those arms are effectively used or people are shot down without ever touching their guns has nothing to do with the Second Amendment unless they are ONLY a gun owner. It has everything to do with training. If you are first disarmed by a cop and THEN shot that is murder no matter what you were doing. If you intended to use that gun for defense, losing it to your attackers is a training issue (gun retention).
There is of course also training in disarming opponents, I myself learned how to do that as a child and to this day my automatic reaction to an enemy reaching for a weapon inside ten feet is to jump them before they can draw assuming we are not already grappling. If you are already in a grappling fight of course there is no need to charge, your enemy's gun is already in range. This is what the cops exploited last week in Minneapolis. Since ICE was acting illegally the 2nd Amendment can only speak after the fact.
Trump's regime is of course 100% lawless, so just as the First Amendment doesn't bind them neither does the Second. That however does not make all the guns in the hands of those who are not white cishet Christian conservatives magically vaporize into iron vapor. It's too late for that, and this is one of many factors being credited for ICE's morale cracking.
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I think some are still missing the point. I’m not saying they’re going to lock up every single person who uses a VPN or watches porn.
Your government’s strategy is to make “crimes” like this as common and easy to commit as possible.
This way, if you ever do something completely legal which they *actually* don’t like, *which can be completely unrelated to VPNs or bypassing age verification,* they can pull up your internet history and easily prosecute you.
Organize a legitimate protest, and the government’s swift response will be to label you a child sex offender because they found you using evil VPN technology.
This is how free speech dies, not from a law that says “free speech is dead now,” but from draconian, authoritarian laws like this that give the government “plausible” reasons to go after anyone, which can’t easily be fought against.
This has always been the playbook to target innocents. In the USA, drug possession laws being created as a pretense for cops to raid and dismantle minority communities, for example. And now this is coming to the digital realm.
@jonah They'll use the law to throw the book at you if they don't like you
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I think some are still missing the point. I’m not saying they’re going to lock up every single person who uses a VPN or watches porn.
Your government’s strategy is to make “crimes” like this as common and easy to commit as possible.
This way, if you ever do something completely legal which they *actually* don’t like, *which can be completely unrelated to VPNs or bypassing age verification,* they can pull up your internet history and easily prosecute you.
Organize a legitimate protest, and the government’s swift response will be to label you a child sex offender because they found you using evil VPN technology.
This is how free speech dies, not from a law that says “free speech is dead now,” but from draconian, authoritarian laws like this that give the government “plausible” reasons to go after anyone, which can’t easily be fought against.
This has always been the playbook to target innocents. In the USA, drug possession laws being created as a pretense for cops to raid and dismantle minority communities, for example. And now this is coming to the digital realm.
@jonah But VPN is supposed to protect your privacy. How do THEY know if your using one ?
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@jonah But VPN is supposed to protect your privacy. How do THEY know if your using one ?
@TerryDay they know if you're using one, generally, what they don't know is what you're doing with it. That's why they want to make using a VPN illegal all on its own.
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