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Comment by tomxor | Hacker News Reader

This is due to the UK's new "Internet Connected Records IP" act (from the infamous snoopers charter that passed in 2016).

I'm holding Theresa May directly responsible for this family's hellish experience.

Previous HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26430266

The most complete solution I can think of to recommend to people to protect themselves from this insane law is to route all traffic over a VPN at the router. Otherwise you have to be worried about every single device that connects to your router - and you will just end up looking like a jerk when you don't let your friends use your internet out of fear of malware.

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A VPN isn’t a solution, it’s a workaround. A solution would be to change the law. Pressure your law makers and your fellow voters.

It’s worrying that every time there’s a problematic internet law, the response is “use a VPN”. I even saw that suggestion where it would be downright useless—the European law to require upload filters.

If the recommendation is always to use VPNs and otherwise keep quiet, those in power can calmly strip you of every right and ban VPNs at the end. What do you do then?

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They legally ban them. If you are catched using one you go to jail.

A VPN isn't a solution because it would only help the guilty. The innocent still fall victim to someone else jumping on their wifi and uploading stuff unVPNed.

There is also the highly probable case of the IP address being shared by many people or switching to a new user mid day which does happen.

Something as trivial as the police forgetting to check what timestamp their website file upload date is in could easily result in getting the entirely wrong customer from the ISP.

Did you mean to reply to the parent post instead?

Or police reading a timestamp from a website, not realising it's actually a non-local timestamp so offset by X hours, and then requesting based on the wrong timestamp. Fairly sure that's happened before.

OP said to route all traffic over the vpn at the router. If someone jumps on the wifi, they’re on the vpn.

I’d wager the majority of the population would have no idea how to do that. Even if they know how to use a VPN, all they probably know is to run the VPN program.

I agree that a VPN isn't a solution, but for a different reason: a solution needs to work regardless of the local laws.

If the contours of the internet are such that every local despot can change it, then it's not really an internet.

The act introduced a new power that, among many other things, could force ISPs – upon being ordered to do so by a senior judge – into logging the Internet Connection Records (ICR) of all their customers for up to 12 months (e.g. the IP addresses of the servers you’ve visited and when), which can be accessed without a warrant and occurs regardless of whether or not you’re suspected of a crime.

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