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Comment by shakna | Hacker News Reader

Every corporate I know of, uses VPNs. Especially when workers connect from home. Is the UK government really interested in going up against the majority of their business partners...?

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Laws don't apply to corporations. It'll only be used to punish individuals.

How do you tell the difference between someone working from home, and someone just at home?

The government use VPNs. The ban will target individual use.

It's not about a technical capability to encapsulate packets, it's about whether people use it to bypass censorship or not.

If the capability is used... How do you tell how people are using it?

Many ways. You could ask them. You could watch how they behave. You could look at how the product is advertised. You could try the product yourself and see what it does.

There is nothing in this article that suggests the UK government are planning to ban VPNs.

There is lots in the article that suggests they want to ban them for minors though. How the hell is that supposed to work without at a minimum a severe curtailment of VPNs in general?

So no, not a ban for all. A ban for minors, and a severe curtailment in general. The parent post might not be 100% accurate, but it's close.

A lot of corporations use crappy VPN-like MitM services like Zscaler.

It would not be hard to write laws to restrict one use but not the other. They may be the same tech but the use-cases are quite different.

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