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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

And now we'll watch the UK take the logical next step which is for the government to mandate that all ISPs in the country block 4chan.

CCP "Great Firewall" style.

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You'd be amazed at the times I've argued with people on HN that free speech infringement by the UK government has grown rampant, only for them to enact the next draconian law a month later.

UK is trying to be like Russia and China, where a minder will show up at your door if you post something the government doesn't like. Then people online will defend it because the investigation didn't turn into a full criminal charge or they say the people simply deserved it.

The reality is this will seriously chill speech broadly across the country regardless of either of those outcomes, and the technical costs of enforcement will be steep.

We don't have any pro-free-speech political parties, nor a written constitution unfortunately.

I mean there are parties that say they like free speech, but it never extends to the sort of speech they disagree with, or by people of the wrong colour/religion/gender etc.

"UK is trying to be like Russia and China, where a minder will show up at your door if you post something the government doesn't like."

The UK government has been openly doing this for a couple of years by now.

Same. The responses are consistently "but they only restrict bad speech"

We've had Hadrian's firewall blocking certain piracy sites for years.

Most Brits already have a VPN to beat off so the effect will be negligible.

"Most" is probably not accurate. I can't imagine the average middle aged individual in the UK has a VPN they use regularly. I'd be pleasantly surprised if that was the case.

The average middle aged individual probably doesn't read 4chan.

VPN take up in the UK is around 20-25%

And then they'll make VPNs illegal

I suspect they'll be harder (impossible?) to block, but that will probably deter the casual user.

Russia is leading the pack in banning VPNs, and they're, surprisingly, getting pretty good at it. They caught my naive attempts at trying to use Tailscale, WireGuard and OpenVPN immediately. People in government are laughing at the populace struggling to bypass their whitelists, blocks and slowdowns, directly saying that "you can have your VPN, it just won't work, and you will never access anything beyond our Russian sites again. Have fun.". Currently trying to find a way around it using some of the new VPN protocols that popped up trying to bypass the Roskomnadzor DPI, and maybe, I certainly hope, that I will even succeed, but either way they're showing that it's technically feasible.

I really hope for all the people in the UK that your country doesn't go down this route.

Just install 3x-ui or Remnawave and spend some time configuring them for security.

Already have the makings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_th...

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