I had intended to put out this series of posts on @bitcoinpolicyuk’s Privacy Toolkit on a more regular basis, but I hope you’ll realise that I’ve been rather distracted on quite a relevant subject this week. I was intending to review the section on VPNs, and if you’ve been paying attention to what’s been happening in the UK, you will know that VPNs are right in the cross hairs of the government and Parliament right now. Since the Censorship/Personal Data Mining Act (aka the Online Safety Act) has proved to be an abject failure in either of its aims – preventing access to pornography and collecting data on anyone who tried – the government is now taking aim at the very tools which have been responsible for this failure, namely VPNs What is a VPN? Short for Virtual Private Network, it is quite simply a service that creates a secure tunnel between your device and the internet, hiding your IP address and routing your traffic through a remote server. Why should you use one? As you can choose the geographical location of that remote server, you are easily able to circumvent geoblocking as in the case of adult material accessed by people from the UK. Additionally, they should as a matter of good practice always be used when connecting to public wifi, to prevent bad actors from intercepting or viewing your traffic, and they improve your privacy even at home, by reducing the ability of your ISP to log the websites you visit (and then sell that data). What’s been happening in the UK? Quite a lot - @leicesterliz let us all know to expect VPN sanctions soon (details as yet undisclosed) and lawmakers are already tabling amendments to legislation that if enacted would require all VPN providers to age verify aka ID all their customers to ensure that children don’t get hold of one (see relevant posts in the thread); effectively banning kids from using one and requiring providers to identify you before you get one - something many providers do not do. Details in thread. What can I do? I strongly suggest that if you don’t already have one, you research, download and install a VPN on all your devices today, while you still can. I personally favour @mullvadnet, but there are many good alternatives – h/t to @roxananasoi for the very interesting comparison table that is linked below. What if the government do ‘ban’ them or age gate access? In short, don’t panic. Anyone is now able to code their own rudimentary VPN, as I did with my @openclaw agent as demonstrated in the thread. If you are able to go to the next level, you can even run one on your own router at home, so that all your family’s traffic is automatically protected – post from @ben_dewaal in the thread. What does all this mean? I am very much afraid that what we are seeing at the moment are symptoms of a system that is losing control of its ability to control what its populace thinks and says, and is lashing out like a wounded animal in response. Governments across the world do not, bluntly, want a highly-informed, articulate and intelligent population, as such populations are harder to control and to coerce. Thus the global attempts to fetter access to the internet, to platforms that support free speech and open dialogue, to monitor, track and analyse the behaviour of every single one of us This may seem like a dark time, but I have never been more confident that they will not win. Those of us who believe, like @halfin, that the computer can be a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them, are many. We are motivated, and we will not give in. And neither should you.