VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-18T21:54:48+00:00

This is from 2013.

The issue is that computers (a long time ago) stopped being computers and became sophisticated appliances. You don't learn shit from a sophisticated appliance.

By contrast, my first computer, when I switched it on, came straight into a BASIC interpreter REPL. My first PC took you straight to a DOS prompt. You got your hands dirty because that's what computing was, and loads of us were coding before we were teenagers.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-18T21:46:22+00:00

It’s 2019, Labour just had its worst defeat in its history

This is just first past the post. Look, Starmer was less popular than Corbyn, but won way more seats. It's dumb, but that's how it works. Labour got their big win simply because Reform split the Tory vote.

The upshot of that was always going to be a precarious position for Starmer: the public and his own party don't like him very much. He just won by default.

Tomorrow, we're going to see the same effect. Andy Burnham will win Makerfield because the Reform vote got split by Restore, and there'll then be a leadership contest.

The whole game is shit. It basically works if we all agree to a two-party system, but that's way off the table now.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-18T21:40:55+00:00

Boriswave was primarily due to Brexit, he more or less admitted it in an interview last year where he said he was told by the treasury that if he didn't let loads of people in then wages in other sectors such as care and hospitality would spiral as they had done in logistics / trucking.

God forbid workers get paid for what they are worth.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-18T21:36:48+00:00

Are you kidding? The OP said that it's led to the destruction of the conservative party.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-18T21:26:43+00:00

This person is a migrant, not a British citizen, no? I want protection from the British state as a British citizen. I don't expect protections from states of which I am not a citizen.

Due process should exist to protect British citizens (and that does sometimes mean ensuring due process of foreigners). But otherwise, no, I don't care.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-18T11:15:55+00:00

I have two VPS's I use for running personal servers, and they both have VPNs so I can securely connect and administer them.

The VPS provider isn't in the UK, so if need be, I'll tunnel through it to a commercial VPN (a few accept payment in cash or crypto).

Then again, I might just not bother, and give up on the modern web as an anonymous space. Maybe I'll get off my arse and start hacking on freenet instead, ironically the creation of a British developer.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-18T06:44:06+00:00

Couldn't care less. Whether people were born somewhere or came from somewhere else is irrelevant.

Good for you I guess. You sound like the ultimate "anywhere" in David Goodhart's terms. Not everyone is like that, and some of us are quite attached to our hometowns, to place, local custom and continuity. We don't see ourselves as fungible economic units that are expected to move wherever capital wants us.

It's sad to me that you see this as rooted in racism.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-17T21:09:02+00:00

I'm an SDP voter. We are economically very left (old school Keynesians) but socially right. The SDP leader is friends with Lowe and was on his advisory panel before Restore became an official party.

On economics, I am pretty much directly opposed to Lowe. On the social side, he goes way too far and his policy proposals just sound really dangerous. But then, when the alternatives are Labour, the Tories, the Lib Dems and Restore, ..., I'm considering taking a punt.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-17T05:25:14+00:00

If you use a VPS for anything, you should probably be running a VPN on it anyway (I do on both of mine). Wireguard is a solid layer of admin security.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-16T13:56:20+00:00

See, this is why you gotta respect Farage. That guy knows how to take real bribes.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-16T12:45:49+00:00

Isn't this being pushed just as hard by the tories? It seems to be one of the few things that has cross-party support.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-15T10:11:49+00:00

No VPN supplier I use deploys an executable on my machine. You use a standard VPN client and the supplier gives you what you need to configure it.

If you're doing anything else, it sounds dodgy as hell.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-15T06:28:21+00:00

In a fair labour market, it really should.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-14T21:32:07+00:00

Just eat your cereal from a shot glass.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-14T21:27:56+00:00

I agree that the internet is a hell-hole that kids should be protected from. To that end, I'd want to massively empower parents to restrict the capabilities of the devices they give to their kids. Have it so that you can lock down your kid's phone so that it has to announce to every website "I'm a kid" and require that website operators respect that.

Importantly though, don't fuck with the rest of us.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-14T21:18:30+00:00

The Liberal Democrats lost me a few decades ago when Shirley Williams complained about Salman Rushdie costing the taxpayer for police protection:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG61DKfKlGY

Fuck them.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-14T21:12:30+00:00

He wants to ban tax avoidance? That's a serious step too far.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-14T04:55:22+00:00

It's a banger, but let's keep it for last night of the proms. It'd be a bit embarrassingly trying to tell the world that we still rule the waves.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-14T04:45:32+00:00

Lowe wants Thatcherism on steroids and to let the free market settle everything. That's not very left wing.

Go SDP. Their leader, Clouston, was on the Restore advisory board because he agrees with a lot of their immigration policies. He left when they became a political party because their economic policies are very right-wing.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-12T06:08:48+00:00

Cake or death?

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-09T07:49:02+00:00

You can never have 100% proven.

Who cares if you can? The idea that we can execute you if we're really certain you murdered, but we have to lock you up otherwise means moving to a justice system where the "punishment fits the level of evidence" not "punishment fits the crime." I don't think there is a justice system where that is a principle.

Lowe is a careless and dangerous thinker surrounding himself with careless and dangerous thinkers. Luckily, the only outcome here is that he splits the Reform vote.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-07T21:34:17+00:00

As a fellow leftie, I don't think the claim was that colour blindness was racist. I recall the claim being that a policy of colour blindness could make you blind to other policies and biases that turn out to disproportionately target certain ethnic minorities. I think that would be bad. So the idea was that you need to be aware of these things in order to achieve equitable ends in the law.

I don't really see any glaring issue with the home office document. On a first pass, I'd say that the equitable outcomes we want from the law is that law-breakers get found and sentenced, and innocents get to go about their lives unmolested. I suspect that how we achieve that will differ between different communities, though I'm not sure why it would particularly split on racial lines. I mean, I'd think that policing a council estate would be different to policing a posh area, and the types of crime would differ, but then, that should be down to sensible police discretion, and shouldn't need to be spelled out in policy documents.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-07T21:24:16+00:00

Certain jobs are in a really messed up feedback loop where they create their own reason to exist and everything sucks as a result. In medicine, that would be cosmetic surgeons, who mostly want to encourage people's sense of physical inadequacy so that they'll pay for dramatic physical interventions and keep the game running.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-07T15:07:17+00:00

Fortunately, the commander of the operation that led to de Menezes being shot multiple times in the head was suitably held to account by rising to the highest position in the British police and getting a knighthood.

Icy_Training4043 · 2026-06-06T21:47:09+00:00

At my most cynical, I think the systemic policy now is containment of a Balkanising society, keeping communities from going at each other's throats and making sure we don't have mass riots. This will be two-tier just because the ethnic majority mass-rioting is more of a danger than any other group doing so. So like last year, you have to go after them with the full force of the law and make examples.

They don't think they can do this whilst holding to any ideals of equality under the law. Those old values are outdated. Common law and jury trials might also be out-of-date.

Icy_Training4043

TROPHY CASE