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Comment by richjdsmith | Hacker News Reader

The UK is already there.

My VPN was blocked recently and I had to go to my network provider with my ID to prove my age(?!) so I could access my VPN again. I was not impressed.

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What ISP are you on? BT blocks libgen but NordVPN seems to work just fine.

Of course if they block the whole VPN list you can just rent a tiny instance in a cloud somewhere, though that seems like enough work to bother most non techies.

At that point it would be better to roll your own and use ports 22 or 443.

This is what I’m doing. Linode box.

Probably it's worth not blocking you for that, just add you to a list as a person of interest.

I guess this is the point where you leave the general public behind. Lucky you.

Which fits fantastically in the discussion over at the San Diego Streetlight surveillance and the "Software engineers social responsibility"[1] vs. the fact that it will get worse if you make it mainstream.

Interesting times.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19545668

Hopefully projects like Streisand [1] continue to be worked on - they automate a lot of the hassle of setting up services like this. Ideally they will eventually be easy enough for your grandpa to use.

[1] https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand

What ISP and VPN was that?

You’re probably on a major ISP. Only the major ones in the UK are blocked and regulated. The smaller ones aren’t deemed as important.

Unfortunately the minor ISPs are almost 3-fold slower in most places, while being just as expensive. My options are between Virgin, which has speeds of up to 362mB fibre for £42/month, and the next best BT, which is 67mB for £39.99/ month. At uni, unless I wanted 30mB for a 7 person household, my only option was again Virgin.

It's difficult not to be on a major ISP when the minor ISPs can't contest on speed and value for money.

I spent years with 5 people on 12mbit ADSL2. I'd rather have that than virgin and blocking any day. I suffered Virgin for a couple of years and it was hell.

Now I'm on ~64mbit VDSL with no blocking at all on Zen. We pull 500G+ a month through it. Costs £37.49 a month.

They just rolled out 300mbit fibre as well so that's going in next month.

Speed isn't everything for me. I can QoS those problems away pretty well.

> I spent years with 5 people on 12mbit ADSL2. I'd rather have that than virgin and blocking any day.

Try doing that today with 5 people all trying to watch Netflix. That wasn't a thing back in 2002.

I've got virgin at uni right now and while the headline speeds are great, it's absolutely useless at peak times. Not worth it IMHO.

I'm only talking 2 years ago. And we do have netflix and it's simply tough shit!

In 2002, I had 1mbit.

We switched service providers 3 times during that year. We started with a 30mbit connection through PlusNet, then 60 with EE, then 300 Virgin. The only one that was usable was Virgin Media. I wish that wasn't that case, but it simply was. Internet was a contentious topic in our house, but having 7 people either playing games, watching HD movies, or streaming simultaneously knocked most ISPs down swiftly.

plusnet and EE are turds. Total turds. The worst of all of them to be honest apart from possibly Talk Talk.

I've been with Plusnet for 4 years or so now, and I've nothing but good things to say about them.

Apart from their mobile offering - plenty of bad things to say about that!

To be annoying - milli Bels of speed? I've never seen anyone write it like this before, it's MB for megabytes, and Mb for megabits, mB is a different unit altogether.

Perhaps the poster has a new MacBook Air with butterfly keyboard? :)

Should be Mb. Project deadlines mean sleep deprived Hacker News procrastination comments.

I'm with Uno Broadband who sell BT fibre lines (so upto 70 down/20 up) for around £40 a month with no blocks or restrictions and a static IP. No download limits to speak of either as I can easily hit 2TB download a month.

They fix stuff quickly too, I'd recommend em.

On your mobile? I don't know anyone else who's had that problem so it'd be interesting to know who..

What VPN was blocked?

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