I’ve just returned to my parents house for the first time since finishing university and they’d changed their ISP since I was last here. I’m finding a lot of sites are blocked and was thinking about getting a VPN.
The problem is, at least from what I’ve gathered from reading, is the internet legislation in the UK has kicked ISPs up the arse and they’re coming down hard on proxy sites and VPNs. In fact, Vodaphone seem to be banning VPNs themselves. I don’t want to pay for a VPN only for it to end up on the Vodaphone blacklist anyway and be useless. Even reading up on it is proving difficult (I’m a newbie) as Vodaphone blocks sites like hidemyass.com and the actual websites of every VPN provider I’ve looked up.
Does anyone here have any knowledge about the current or future state of VPN use in the UK? Is there a better way to protect privacy online or are we all just fucked here?
ISP is probably the better acronym, especially in a networking topic where IP normally usually referring to an IP address.
I can’t believe Vodafone actually blocks VPNs and proxies, arseholes.
In any case, people in countries like Iran and China find ways of using VPNs even though you’re not really meant to. You could always use AWS EC2 and set up your own OpenVPN server. That would still get logged by Amazon, though.
I don’t believe we have anything in law banning VPNs for the moment, though. I have no idea why Vodafone is doing this when they don’t really need to. In any case, I’d like to hope that as anti-privacy as Darth May is, that she wouldn’t be able to implement such a policy into law.
Damn I’m shocked. Why in the UK are they censoring the internet, just like China and Russia? Anyway, as you may be aware, the internet as it is known in the West doesn’t exist here in China, because of the so-called “Great Firewall”. To survive, I use ExpressVPN on my PC, and Shadowsocks on my Android phone and everything is fine.
Since I was intrigued by how often this comes up in this subreddit, I just googled and got some info from Wikipedia, an article on a VPNs website, and from Vodafone’s own forums.
It seems that many Brits themselves do not know that since 2014 there have been default content filters on all mainstream ISPs and others. These default content filters seem to have been forced on ISPs by the government under “save the children” policies, but importantly cover a lot more and it is not clear who controls what is being filtered. It very often includes many mainstream VPNs according to a site mentioned in the VPN article (https://www.blocked.org.uk).
Whoever has access to the Internet service admin at a location has to opt-out of the default content filter to have as close to “normal” access to the Internet.
So, it is quite likely your parents are not even aware of the default content filter - the Vodafone forums called it “content control” - that may be enabled. It seems you can trivially disable it by calling or using some form of web access to the ISP account.
As for VPNs being viable, I do not believe it is possible to ban VPNs in any open society because not only are they critical to businesses (as in many businesses would not even operate in a country without them), but you can just use Tor, or any other hidden service, then a VPN or create your own via VPS.
At least for light browsing and researching VPNs, you can use the Tor Browser. With the blocking you’re describing, downloading the Tor Browser, but once you do, you can configure it on launch to bypass ISP censorship.
It’s important to point out here that there are no laws controlling access to the internet and no laws blocking VPN access. It’s important to remember that before we have people shouting about us doing a China.
As has already been pointed out, something did come into place to ensure ISPs offer a content filter of sorts, and some activate it by default. The likes of Sky require someone logging into their portal and clicking a button. That’s it, it’s off.
I was with Origin at my old house before moving back in with my parents - there’s a lot of that going on in this sub! - and was never even asked about the filter, and it definitely isn’t on, so I’m not convinced they are even forced to have one available. Wikipedia has been wrong before.
As for blocking VPN access, I know that Sky again was guilty of blocking some ports years ago but that seems to have stopped. A good job too, blocking VPNs stops people from working from home and when you are on-call, that’s a bit of a problem!
I’ll keep going with research as best as I can and look up what you mentioned. Applying it to Vodaphone is a real bugger though because I get the impression most people savvy enough to discuss VPNs don’t pick Vodaphone as a provider, there’s not that much discussion on their boards about it.
It’s to “Save the children” supposedly. Apparently too many kids have been able to access stuff their parents don’t like & the parents don’t want to take responsibility for properly monitoring what their kids are doing. Basically it’s just another way to block stuff the government don’t like - this government seems to have a weird obsession with porn.
Thanks for looking that up. I did know about the content filter, but even knowing about it there was a lot of consternation in the forums about VPNs being blocked, perhaps they’re simply mistaken.
Yeah sorry I meant to say downloading it will be difficult but you should be able to go somewhere with public wifi and download it once, then have it permanently.