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Say no to police state Britain The BBC says “According to Ofcom, platforms must not host, share or permit content encouraging use of VPNs to get around age checks.”
I encourage the use a VPN to get around all state abridgement of people’s right to access the internet, including age checks. Say no to police state Britain, not to mention a VPN enhances your security online.
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Recommendations?
I kinda want an anonymous free service too: I’d rather not give such a service my real identity…
Click the link above to learn about VPNs!
To actually ban VPNs? I’m sure the starmsi would love to, but the actuality would be another matter.
I suspect they will go the lie and propaganda (aka TV licence route) – lots of officious and threatening pop ups etc advising of “consequences” for VPN use.
It depresses me to think how many might fall for it.
My university employer insists that I use a VPN to access its web-based services when not in the office.
I wouldn’t recommend a free VPN service. You don’t know just how secure it is. That’s why I use a paid service, namely, ExpressVPN. It’s excellent.
I first started using it when the EU brought in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Many of the major newspapers in the US, which I read to keep track of things back there, didn’t see the use of making significant changes to their websites to comply with the EU’s law, so they simply blocked me. The VPN allows me to carry on reading them.
There’s also another benefit: what Netflix offers depends on the country it’s being watched from. Want something else? Just change your country setting.
@Clovis Sangrail
My university employer insists that I use a VPN to access its web-based services when not in the office.
Perhaps, but it is also quite possible that the UK government will do these things:
1. demand that all access through a VPN be logged, so that they can map from the virtual IP to your actual physical IP
2. demand that the VPN be compromised with a back door for security services allowing them to defeat the encryption
3. demand that VPN hosts are in the UK, so that your IP address, virtual or not, is always a UK one, and subject to UK jurisdiction.
All of these are quite simple things to do technically, and would neuter the use of a VPN to protect your privacy.
Fraser,
All of these are quite simple things to do technically
You are aware of the UKGov’s track-record on anything IT related? I wouldn’t trust those fuckers with a box of Cuisenaire rods.
@Fraser Orr
Well, yes.
I use Proton Mail’s VPN. Not sure how good it is but they have a good track record for privacy.
@NickM
You are aware of the UKGov’s track-record on anything IT related? I wouldn’t trust those fuckers with a box of Cuisenaire rods.
Two things:
1. Although I could not agree more on the general level of incompetence of the UK government, the security services technical people are actually quite competent. For sure they can do this sort of compromise work.
2. Most changes are more mandates that private companies are required to do, and subpoena demands that that do it correctly or else get it trouble (“subpoena” after all means “under threat of punishment”).
@Clovis Sangrail
I use Proton Mail’s VPN. Not sure how good it is but they have a good track record for privacy.
You mean Proton Mail that is used by kiddie pornographers and drug cartels to move their money? Or so their argument would go. It is very easy for the government to ban non cooperating VPN services — just block the IP routes at the international borders.
FWIW, Proton does seem to be excellent, but they can easily be excluded from the UK for not following the rules.
Best marketing for VPNs from ofcom, even I just got one and I don’t even know how it can help me in my case as I’m usually logged in to google. Nevertheless, I now have one.
Fraser,
Your first point. Yes, probably if the likes of GCHQ take on the job. If it’s Whitehall…
Your second point. Agreed. That is probably the path they will take and the companies will probably over-comply to keep on the safe side. The likes of MS Co-Pilot already acts like a pearl-clutching maiden aunt.
Going after VPNs was the obvious next step for the establishment – and it is what they are doing.
No one believes this is anything to do with protecting children from porn – the establishment have made it very clear that they do not care, and have not cared for many years, about the rape of children (let alone children seeing porn) – supposedly this is a price worth paying for the Cultural Enrichment of Diversity and Inclusion.
All these laws and regulations are not about “protecting the children” they are about political and cultural control. As is the mass immigration itself – which could have been stopped at any time by a government who wanted to (Hungary shows this), the mass immigration is a deliberate policy (it is nothing to do with the free market – there was NOT mass immigration in the 19th century when there actually was something like a free market in Britain) – pushed by benefits and public services.
The leftist establishment decided as far as the 1960s (if not before) that they did not like British society, or the society of Western nations in general, so they decided to SMASH these societies – that was the case in the United States, the United Kingdom and many other nations. With many “conservative” politicians, in many Western countries, either being puppets of officials and “experts” or just going with the flow.
The difference between the United States and the United Kingdom is that in the United States people are allowed to protest against leftist policy (although they may lose their jobs, and have campaigns of harassment directed at them) – and here in the United Kingdom dissenters wait for arrest.
I have often pointed out (and make no apology for doing so) that you can-not-get the politics of the Bill of Rights (including the First Amendment) from the philosophy of Sir Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume and Jeremy Bentham – and these thinkers are the favorites of the British establishment, they do not need Dr Karl Marx (or even my half brother Dr Tony Marks) to provide them with the intellectual underpinnings of tyranny – they have them already.
@Paul Marks
The difference between the United States and the United Kingdom is that in the United States people are allowed to protest against leftist policy
You are right, I have often argued that this is the one remaining thing that is special about the USA, than and perhaps the second amendment. The courts take the first amendment very seriously and it has suffered endless attacks from all sides for years and has stood strong through them all.
Somehow I am hearing Lee Greenwood singing in the background of this comment.
What about Starlink? Avoid terrestrial hardware altogether, and just talk to the satellite.
There is a phrase in the cellars of my memory. What is it? Let me try to remember … Oh, yes I recall it now.
“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”.
Most famously used by the Gestapo but if the tine foil hat fits and all that …
We – you all, actually – can find fun and techie ways around this. The problem is, this effectively ends the MASS communication aspect of it all – bringing important news to the masses.
We might feel cool that we have our individual work-around for this outrageous situation, but if Joe or Mohammad Blow can’t easily and cheaply access news the government dislikes, the government has won.
It puts us back on “alternate media” status, where we talk to ourselves again, like during pre-Musk Twitter.
@Bloodwood
What about Starlink? Avoid terrestrial hardware altogether, and just talk to the satellite.
Starlink operates under a national license and so must follow the country’s rules both to broadcast into the country (violating this can get you in all sorts of trouble with international telecoms bodies) or, perhaps more relevantly, the right to buy starlink boxes within the UK, and similarly the ability of Starlink to charge British consumers for a license. So, unfortunately, I don’t think Elon is riding to the rescue.
@Phil B rightly points out the dishonest phrase:
“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”.
To which I reply: “The thing I fear, Sir, is you, the government.”
“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”.
But are you sure that what you don’t think is worth hiding is permitted by the Government? What the Government deems acceptable seems to be drifting further and further apart from what ordinary people think.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Frederick Douglass
Government vs. the people increasingly looks to me like an extended version of the Stanford “Guards and prisoners” experiment. Take a group of ordinary people, grant them the power and invulnerability of government, and they immediately set about making their fellow citizens as miserable as possible.
Fraser Orr – as you know, the First Amendment depends on the Second Amendment. Once Britain was an armed society – and the murder rate was NOT high (compare the murder rate in London in 1913, where there was no “Gun Control”, to the murder rate in Sullivan Act New York City in the same year) – George Orwell (a socialist) said that the sign of British liberty was the rifle hung on the wall of the ordinary workman’s cottage. But all this has been shoved down the “Memory Hole” – the British no longer know their own past.
The greatest enemy of the Second Amendment in the United States Senate from the 1970s (yes as far back as that) onwards was Joseph “Joe the Big Guy” Biden – Senator Biden was also an enemy of the authority of locally elected sheriffs – supporting bureaucratic (police-state) structures at State and Federal level – rather than locally elected sheriffs and volunteers.
Why? Because he understood that such things as an armed population (who must have ammunition which can deal with body armour – not legal for hand guns under the Federal 1968 Act, and not allowed in some States even for rifles) and locally elected sheriffs and volunteers are a barrier to tyranny – and it was tyranny that he supported, even then.
In 2008 the Marxist (and he was a Marxist – although of the modern “Critical Theory” sort) Senator Barack Obama (whose time at Columbia University is still a bit odd – neither students or academics remember him) looked around – NOT for someone who shared his Marxism, but for someone who shared his commitment to moving in the direction of tyranny – and Senator Joseph Biden (the smiling FAKE Irishman) was the obvious choice.
It was not senility – Joseph Biden was always rotten, he always wanted to undermine basic liberties, including Freedom of Speech, as did Senator Obama – who just appeared, as if by magic, as a key speaker at the 2004 Democrat Convention – which nominated Senator John Kerry for President, at-that-time the Senator with the most leftist voting record in the United States Senate – and someone who had worked as an Agent-of-Influence in both the United States and Paris as far back as the early 1970s – infamously lying, on oath, before he United States Congress whilst wearing an American military uniform – actively giving “Aid and Comfort” to the enemy, in time of war, whilst in uniform.
And Britain? In Britain – Barack Obama (whose life is largely “sealed”), who hated Britain, was wildly popular and greatly honoured. Meanwhile Donald John Trump, who likes Britain, is hated in Britain – despised and insulted.
A nation, or at least the establishment of a nation, which loves the enemies of their nation, and hates the friends of their nation – can not stand.
VPNs have their limitations, alas.
https://unherd.com/newsroom/uk-doesnt-need-to-ban-vpns-to-police-the-internet/
To be fair – ammunition of a sufficient caliber, fired at sufficient velocity, will deal with most (although not all) body armour. It does not have to be specifically armour piercing ammunition.
The SLR (firing 762 NATO ammunition) – the British version of the Belgium FAL (designed way back in the 1950s) is not fully automatic – it is a “one squeeze, one bullet” rifle – it will do the job (at least mostly), whilst, I believe, remaining within American Federal law.
I am, of course, open to correction on these matters.
Johnathan Pearce – yes indeed VPNs have their limitations, but (as you know) people should not have to use them – this whole “I must hide myself” attitude is exactly what the state wants.
Isolation – atomized individuals, helpless (even if armed) when the state comes for them, for something they have have said.
A single person, even if they a George Orwell style “rifle in their cottage”, can not stand against the forces of the state – only the community standing together, “no you can not arrest them for what they have said – GO AWAY” can do that. And juries will not stand for justice if they are made up of people who are afraid – or have, themselves, been corrupted with “Progressive” doctrine.
Remember the giggling juries of New York and Washington D.C. (for this is in America as well) openly admitting (indeed boasting) that they gave verdicts on the basis of smashing reactionaries (regardless of what these reactionaries had done – or had not done). In such places many of the ordinary people have become as corrupted as the elite. “Trump burned Rome in 64 AD” – “yes – guilty! giggle-giggle”. “Mr John Smith, who was a thousand miles away at the time, “rioted” in the Capitol building on January 6th 2021″ – “yes – guilty!, rape his family to death, giggle-giggle”.
This is why the state (and establishment generally) in most Western countries, most certainly including the British one, has worked to UNDERMINE traditional communities – for many years (indeed for at least 60 years).
Isolated individuals can be crushed – united communities are harder to rule, harder to dominate and crush.
As far back as the 1920s and 1930s certain “advanced” thinkers (the Frankfurt School in Germany, Gramsci in Italy – and so on) understood that it was traditional communities, traditional culture, that was the “problem” for those who wanted absolute power – so subverting traditional communities, society, the culture, became their aim.
Indeed, at least in Britain, this can be traced back even further – to the Fabians (such as H.G. Wells) and the Bloomsbury Group (with the Cambridge establishment connections).
A very small number of people before the First World War – but working hard, their efforts started to bear “fruit” (of a Satanic sort) in our old friend – the 1960s, and things have marched a lot further since then.
And, yes, there were (and are) American “cultural figures” also doing the work.
Western civilization, Western culture and society, is not dying a natural death – via some sort of Hume-Hayek “social evolution” – it is being murdered.
“Social change”, of this sort, does not “just happen” – it happens because certain people want it to happen, and make it happen. Even if it takes them a very long time (perhaps generations) to corrupt society, to corrupt the public.
There can be no Res-Publica without a Public – a traditional people.
Re “What the government thinks is permissible” is no longer understandable.
There’s a recent (5 yrs old?) video of Elon describing how no matter what one of his companies did, they would be afoul of a law. Change to comply with “The Cute Kittens Act” and you are in direct violation of the “Dogs are Best Act”. The US Feds have over 200,000 regulations…that DOGE is still working to reduce.
After all, the government doesn’t know what the government thinks is permissible…how are we to know? And of course, for the government this is a huge feature!
Sigh. There’s nothing new under the sun:
“Did you really think we want those laws observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them to be broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against… We’re after power and we mean it… There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Reardon, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”
An ironic twist to all this is that age verification requires clear proof of being aged over 18. The government wants to give 16-year-olds the right to vote.
Cognitive dissonance.
A nation, or at least the establishment of a nation, which loves the enemies of their nation, and hates the friends of their nation – can not stand
Agreed Paul although I fear (nothing personal) I may be sharing a cell with you for saying it.
It’s not just US presidents though. Exactly the same can be said about their snivelling deference to the EU and the treatment (plus access to taxpayer funded housing, benefits and services) of non-assimilating immigrants when compared to the native population. They hate us as much as they hate DJT, the difference is that in America he was able to turn it to his advantage.
GregWA, The Pedant General, and Johnathan Pearce.
All excellent comments – and I can think of nothing to add.
John – I am very sorry, but I sore (perhaps because of my COPD).
However, perhaps nature will take its course before I am arrested.
I wonder if the people who send me death threats (I get them from time to time) understand that there are good reasons why their threats cause me no real alarm.
For people with a lot to lose (a family and so on) things are very different – I have to remind myself that other people have good reason to be alarmed at what the state, or private individuals, can do to them.
I don’t know what the folks running the Stanford Prison Experiment were originally trying to test, but whatever it was either they didn’t get the data they wanted or somebody looking to make headlines didn’t care what it took to get them.
You see, the guards weren’t test subjects. They were confederates of the scientists. They were briefed and given scripts on how to act; they didn’t ‘spontaneously’ start abusing the prisoners; that was specifically their job.
And since the published results were mostly about the guards’ behavior, which was scripted, it’s a bogus study.
And it’s been used as a demonstration of how people are shit for decades.
Boobah – thank you for the information, I did not know that.
As for what is happening in Britain – it is indeed not some universal corruption of the human soul (although, yes, we all have evil within us – I certainly do, indeed perhaps MORE than most people), it is the result of a specific set of ideas – and it is not even Marxism.
It is the idea that people have no rights AGAINST the state (that rights are things from the state) – the position of Sir Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham…….
The establishment elite do not really need Karl Marx (although yes some of them are Marxists – or influenced by Marxism), as there were plenty of British thinkers who pushed tyranny.
Yes there a pro liberty British thinkers – but who in the establishment elite supports Chief Justice Coke or Chief Justice Sir John Holt, or philosophers such as Ralph Cudworth, or Thomas Reid?
At university we were presented with John Locke as the alternative to Thomas Hobbes – and the more one looks into Locke the more statism is there, and we were presented with J.S. Mill as the alternative to Karl Marx – the Mr J.S. Mill who denied free will, supported local and national government doing more and more, attacked private land ownership (on any large scale), attacked the idea of an individual owning a large manufacturing enterprise and employing people, and…….
Get the picture – the “alternatives” were not really alternatives at all.
There is much to disagree with, in Paul’s comment, but i only think it worthwhile to disagree with his university teachers.
It all goes back to the distinction that i have often made, between freedom from coercion and freedom from arbitrary power (of coercion). This is closely related to Samuel Finer’s distinction between substantive constitutional constraints (as opposed to totalitarianism), and procedural constitutional constraints (as opposed to absolutism).
— John Locke (whom i regard as a Prophet) did not have much to say about freedom from arbitrary power, or procedural constraints: his focus was on freedom from coercion, and substantive constraints. As such, he was not opposed to Hobbes, but to Plato, Aristotle, probably the Stoics & Francis Bacon, and prematurely to Bentham, Marx, and modern “progressives”. (Nozick MIGHT be the most important thinker on Locke’s footsteps — but i have not read his output.)
— Hobbes was not an advocate of totalitarianism but of absolutism. As such, his real opponents were advocates of freedom from arbitrary power, and of procedural constraints; such as Machiavelli, Algernon Sidney, Montesquieu, and especially the US Founding Fathers, who thought perhaps more deeply than anybody before or since about how to constrain government.
Snorri – as Gough (Oriel Oxford) pointed out more than 70 years ago, John Locke deliberately confused individual consent with majority consent (the fudging is deliberate) – so much for him being against coercion.
When I first read Locke I thought that by a right to life he meant a right not to be murdered (as you say Snorri – Freedom of Coercion), but then Karen Vaughn and others pointed me (and others) to the lesser known works of John Locke – where what he means is made clear. It turns out that he really did mean a right to life – at the forced expense of others, again he is not opposed to coercion.
Then there is John Locke’s “Lockean Proviso” – based on his false reading of the Book of Genesis. Locke holds (incorrectly) that God gave the land of the world to be IN COMMON – your fellow man of the Netherlands Hugo Grotius could have corrected Locke on this point, so if “as much and as good” is not left for others, private property has to come with some sort of compensation payments (for ever) for those who do not have land.
Locke even says that someone who does not sell food to people who are starving and, instead, sells for higher price is “guilty of murder” – which shows he had no grasp of what the “murder” means.
Of course, under such a system the price of food would be bid down to zero, and so would clothing, housing and so on.
Then there are his lesser known political writings – such as plan for a constitution of the then colony of Carolina – with its “leet men and leet women”, serfs for all generations (for ever) and other awful stuff.
Snorr says that Thomas Hobbes did not advocate totalitarianism.
But it does not matter what he advocated – what matters, politically, is what he is prepared to fight against.
And Thomas Hobbes makes it clear, again and again and again, that he thinks only in terms of a person trying to save their own life – that someone has a moral duty to risk their own life to defend the liberty of others.
Such a system of thought can only lead to tyranny – whether you call it totalitarianism or not. Proto totalitarians like the Emperor Diocletian would have met no opposition from Mr Hobbes. Nor would Louis XIV (he
And as soon as the ruler or rulers felt like it (for amusement) – they would kill Mr Hobbes, after all who is going to fight for him – as he makes it clear (very clear) that he will never fight for anyone else.
Thomas Hobbes even cites, in the Leviathan, the First Book of Samuel, Chapter Eight – yet he seems to think that the warning of Samuel is not a warning, that what Samuel describes (the danger of tyranny – plundering and slavery by the state) is a good thing.
To those who are baffled that John Locke’s philosophy could have been badly influenced by his misreading of the Bible “what has this got to do with philosophy or political philosophy?” – the Bible was taken a lot more seriously in the past than most people take it now.
So a more accurate understanding of the Book of Genius, for example that of Hugo Grotius, could have helped Locke.
I doubt anything could have helped Thomas Hobbes.
By the way – James Buchanan (Scotland 1500s) and others who advocated representative government before Locke (in the sense of arguing that the people had the right to remove a ruler who ruled unjustly – and in the sense of supporting representative assemblies) do not seem to have confused this with welfare rights (by coercion) as Locke did.
Perhaps this was because most of Scotland did not have a Poor Law tax till 1845 – in France there were no taxes for poor relief till the 20th century.
In England and America the influence of the “Brownists” (late 1500s onwards) should not be forgotten – their belief that a congregation should pick their own minister of religion.
In England just giving someone a book with that idea in it, could result in execution – even under the relatively mild Queen Elizabeth, but the idea kept coming back – and had deep political (not just religious) importance in America.
The great divide between Scottish and “Scots-Irish” (Protestant Irish) culture seems to have come in 1712 – when Scottish local communities lost the right to pick their own minister of religion, this had political implications.
Indeed it is not just 1776 – local communities having control over who is the minister at a local church, AND individuals being able to choose between different churches, is at the root of the culture of ordinary Americans of the Patriot sort – the despised “Rednecks”.
I did not finish my point about Louis XIV – the Sun King.
Under his minister Colbert – craftsmen and merchants were forced to undergo examinations and get permission before they could could go into business. Louis would have done the same to farming – if he had not been scared of armed revolt.
Absolutism was leading to Totalitarianism – which should surprise no one.
An absolute power, King or Parliament, will always, in the end, try and control all aspects of life – even how people dress (sumptuary laws).
In Australia, and some other nations now, even using a non lethal pepper spray against people trying to break into your home (most likely to rob and murder you and your family) is a “crime”.
Perhaps even Thomas Hobbes would have had a problem with this level of tyranny – “this could happen to YOU Thomas”.
There is too much open to argument in Paul’s latest comments.
I’ll limit myself to insist on the importance of the distinction between procedural constraints and substantive constraints.
First, there have been philosophers who advocated the one but not the other — or the other but not the one.
EG the late Plato advocated procedural, but not substantive constraints; while Hobbes, as well as our own Shlomo Maistre, advocate(d) substantive, but not procedural constraints.
Second, there have been at least a couple of societies which, to the best of my understanding, had procedural, but not substantive constraints: ancient Israel, and ancient Sparta.
Third, there have been societies with “enlightened rulers”, ie absolute rulers who were not subject to procedural constraints, but respected substantive constraints.
This last point is what Paul Marks objects to, not unreasonably.
His objection is that, eventually, the lack of procedural constraints leads to the erosion of substantive constraints — in other words, it leads to the growth of the State.
I agree — but the fact is, the growth of the State is as inevitable as the growth of entropy in a closed system. Procedural constraints can slow it down, but cannot stop it.
And procedural constraints are themselves eroded over time.
So, in conclusion, the distinction between procedural and substantive constraints is still useful.
Correct. The heaviest military body armor will stop 7.62×51 … a couple of times, if you’re lucky.
And, yes, you can buy a variety of .308 [what we mostly call the round, in its interchangeable civilian form] self-loaders, in a variety of platforms, with nothing more than an instant-check form, no tax stamps or waiting.
(I think the most popular overall is M-14 style, but there are a variety of FAL/SLR/Stg-58 and G3/CETME and AR-10s, AK variants, the SCAR and other modern new designs …)