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Comment by DiscourseFan | Hacker News Reader

I wonder about this...sure there are plenty of people who are older and less knowledgable about government surveillance; but as these programs ramp up, so does VPN usage.

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The currently proposed "Online Safety Bill" will potentially put significant limits or ban VPNs. I suspect (if it passes) it will be a case of VPNs that don't collect ICRs will be band, or at least prohibited from payment services, in the UK.

https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/15101/

At least it would be difficult to enforce such things, with cryptocurrencies and all. I wonder if governments will try to convince their citizens that all VPN users are criminals and pedophiles as an excuse to make their use illegal, using it as prima facie evidence of wrongdoing in police investigations as a means of increasing the state of terror, surveillance, and control over their populations.

The UK already has a law that allows them to imprison you if you genuinely don't remember an encryption key and they don't believe you.

Just wait till they introduce a law that allows them to imprison people for using a VPN to get around some bs accusation and they don't believe your defense.

It's more likely they'll mandate that ISPs block traffic to popular VPN services

Harder to ban Tor outright. No payments and snowflake bridges run on many (often) residential IPs.

> there are plenty of people who are older and less knowledgable about government surveillance

IME, younger people have given up on protecting themselves.

There is a pretty decent chance some VPN providers are actually intelligence service, or other bad actor, honey pots.

It's part of VPN that most users these days don't even understand, as VPN providers are heavily advertised on the claim of improving privacy.

When in reality the VPN only shifts the party you have to trust from one to another, but the problem still remains the same.

I myself cannot encrypt my internet traffic or scramble it through a variety of IP addresses around the world. You're right, we should all be using TOR if we really want to be extra-secure, but TOR simply is too slow for most general usages.

I doubt if any VPN is truly secure, even ones that truly don't keep logs, because of the activities of Team Cymru and other actors as well. NSA and GCHQ have been known to trace through VPNs, as far back as 2013 in the Snowden leaks.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg84yy/data-brokers-netflow-...

As one of the original posters mentioned, the Internet itself, being so centralized, is the problem. We need a new network.

When did you last try Tor? The DDoS [0] has ended and it's now pretty fast again. I'm watching a 4k youtube video over Tor right now. Also the next version implements traffic splitting [1] which should improve performance even more.

[0]: https://status.torproject.org/issues/2022-06-09-network-ddos...

[0]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/blob/main/p...

You do realize that using VPN makes the company you're paying for that VPN gather way more of your internet browsing history than the UK's surveillance program?

VPNs grow the security target on their backs as adoption increases.

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