We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
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.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
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.