I mean it's still a Virtual Private network between you and the VPS (which is rented by VPS provider)

So technically if you are from UK, they might come at your VPS provider if they find that you use them as a VPN (law's kinda vague from what I can gather)

Your VPS provider wouldn't really protect your privacy for 4 $ so a snitch.

My point which fucking scares me if I were a UK citizen is that they just have to do it once to scare you to your guts.

Maybe I am paranoid but I couldn't see this shit happen 2-3 years ago & UK is atleast moving at a very dystopian rate and I am not sure if other countries might move in similar direction too if UK experiment turns out to be helpful to the people in power or helps in curbing out protests/real change in any capacity.

I know the law hasn't passed but chances are unless osmething very unlikley happens, its gonna get passed

What's up with democracies trying to imprison their own citizens in such sense, whether digitally or in person. Some countries feel like prisons rather than free land now.

These were the best benefits of democracies over authoritarianism.

I genuinely question with such points if democracy actually just becomes a dual party authoritarianism. Sure people vote but just scare them for real change just once. If a person speaks online, even if they use a VPN, just catch one extreme and scare the moderates from even ever saying something different than what govt says

Say it with me, 2+2=5 (1984 reference)

It’s a lot more difficult to do this anonymously than it is to use a VPN. You almost certainly need to provide payment information and often also identity verification.

Probably about the same, there is a lot of VPS providers out there, and not a small amount accepts basically an email + cryptocurrencies without any further verification than that. And that's just on the clearweb, going beyond that you start having even more options.

Yeah, although the smaller providers, the sketchier they are. I'd rather use a VPN in a pool of thousands/millions of users. As a data point, I can signup for Proton VPN by downloading it to my iPhone and providing any email address. Without any payment, I can connect to VPN servers and browse anonymously ("anonymously"). This is certainly easier than provisioning a new VPS, not least because I need to pay for it.

As long as you don't offer it for others in exchange for money, it isn't a service and not what's covered here.

Untrue. F.O.C. is.not excempt. See https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3909/stages/20215/amendmen...

then you are not using any vpn service marketed or provided in the UK. if you were to sell access to your VPS to others then you would have to do age verifications on them maybe.

maybe it is still illegal, IDK, bu likely due to other laws (eg a generic "it is illegal to use workaround for X")

> then you are not using any vpn service marketed or provided in the UK.

Irrelevent. See:

must apply the child VPN prohibition to the provider of any relevant VPN service which is, or is likely to be—

(i) offered or marketed to persons in the United Kingdom;

(ii) provided to a significant number of persons

The definition section of the amendment defines a "relevant VPN service":

>“relevant VPN service” means a service of providing, in the course of a business, to a consumer, a virtual private network for accessing the internet;

I think it would be a significant stretch to say that a provider that provisions a VPS instance is a "business providing a virtual private network".

Just because you could run a VPN, it's not the VPS provider that is offering a VPN service.

I think it will successfully strech that far (especially after VPN provders move into VPS to avoid) not least because no-one but the provider could be held responsible.

I don't understand what "VPN providers move onto VPS to avoid" means? Can you clarify?

I can't see how they could apply it to VPS providers without meaning AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean, etc would all start having to do age verification checks. Can't imagine here would not be a massive push back against that.

I meant VPN providers offer VPS as a substitute.

I think they would include AWS and the pushback would be ineffective. Many AWS users could be immediately age-verified by existing payment card info.

By VPS, I mean a generic compute instance that can run whatever you want. Like a Linux instance. I'm not sure what you mean by "VPN providers offer VPS as a substitute" in that context.

Paying by card isn't enough to verify age. They'd have to specifically verify via passport or other ID.

> Paying by card isn't enough to verify age.

It is in UK.

Ofcom, the media regulator, has set out a number of ways websites can verify the age of users, external, including through credit card checks ...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1k81lj8nvpo

then you are not using any vpn service marketed or provided in the UK[0]. if you were to sell access to your VPS to others then you would have to do age verifications on them maybe.

[0] maybe it is still illegal, IDK, bu likely due to other laws (eg a generic "it is illegal to use workaround for X")