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Comment by jfk13 | Hacker News Reader

Ah, the familiar HN bubble, where people instinctively think of "simply start using VPNs" as the solution.

No; some tiny minority of UK users may do that, but the overwhelming majority will just use whatever services are "approved" (follow whatever rules they have to, to stay in the market) and remain available by default.

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Loads of people in China use VPNs every day to bypass the great firewall and access foreign sites. They even rotate among many different VPN services when the ones they’re using get blocked.

I see no reason UK users couldn’t do the same. All it takes to get grandma on a VPN is for an enterprising grandson to set her up.

>Loads of people in China use VPNs every day to bypass the great firewall and access foreign sites.

For what it's worth, in my experience when I was in China it was trivial to bypass the firewall using a VPN service.

My twelve year old son told me very casually a few months ago that he had installed a VPN to bypass the schools internet filters. It was clearly no big deal to him, it sounds like that is what all his friends are doing. At home they are of course doing this to bypass any parent filters to allow them to look at certain content.

I suppose this is the new "google dorking for open CGI proxies."

Are there any YouTube users who still haven't heard of a VPN? They seem about as niche as TikTok at this point.

Funnily enough I had to explain what a VPN is to one of my kids this weekend.

But... if the need's there, people figure it out (as he's doing right now - for him it's something gaming related).

A VPN is a service that people who are not privacy conscious (which is most people) tend to only use if they have a particular need for it, such as circumventing a region block for some service they want to use. This isn't a very common problem for the average person living in Britain right now, but it's about to be. So I think it's pretty fair to assert VPN usage is going to become more common, as it is a pre-existing, ready-made solution to the problem millions of British people are about to have.

There are literally network television commercials that advertise VPNs now, and they've written software to make setup trivial.

I don’t think that’s the case. I know someone who has no involvement in anything technical in his entire life and is using VPNs and torrents fine. He can surely work it out if demand requires it.

Are you living under a rock? Do you not see whats happening in China? Go checkout youtube... You can see clearly what happens when the gov finally has total control... (after a few years of everyone bypassing, they will make using a VPN the punishable by death). First they did it with illicit drugs, created a wide wide laws to control the social classes, now the socail classes are easier to target more wholistically via the internet because everyone is dependant on it.

> If there is any hope, it lies in the proles.

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