Aside from "the dark web," are there any efforts to create an impossible-to-censor parallel version or subset of the internet?
The reason the government is full of decrepit dotards, blustering fanatics, and greedy criminals is because nobody else seems to want to participate anymore.
Mastodon and the fediverse are close, maybe, but many instances refuse to "speak" to one another because of their users.
I think it will be a cat and mouse game, where people will be finding more and more creative ways of exchanging keys and disguising encrypted messages in seemingly normal conversations or images.
It will be again something that won't affect serious criminals, but will give government an insight into who is committing wrong think of the given year (as these things change over time).
I can also imagine, given the wages in the UK are pretty bad, especially for engineers, many of those working on the necessary infrastructure would be tempted by the ideas of insider trading, leaking company and private secrets to the highest bidder and so on.
It feels like this government just doesn't give a flying toss and they just want take a dip into people private lives and see what they can get out of it.
What is even more worrying is that the opposition also supports this bill.
My perception back then was that people who used VPNs were generally dodgy people who wanted to illegally download things online or mask their identity while doing various other illegal things.
But in recent years geo-restrictions, ISP blacklists, and data collection have forced more and more users to use VPNs to the point where their use today is fairly common.
Obviously I'm not in favour of this legislation, but I would hope that the more the governments seek to censor content and attack encryption online the more people will use services that are un-censorable and encrypted.
Short of requiring spy-ware on all of our devices there's fundamentally very little governments can actually do to prevent this. In fact, the harder they fight the more they'll push people out of their reach.
This is not true, this is slander. Child pornographers use whatever is available to them. Censors, however, spend all of their time trying to associate people who wish to speak, listen, and associate freely with child pornographers.
Politicians being censors?! no way in a democracy(rollseyes)
They say
As they cart you off to the gulag.