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UK government targets VPNs in new online safety consultation as Lords vote for ban
(www.techradar.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
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Someone eli5 please: how are they gonna know I’m using a vpn if I use port 80 or 443?
Edit: oh they are gonna require vpn providers to do age verification and force them to not do business with minors. That’s dumb
You think UK would be the first country to ban VPNs? There are thousands of talented and very committed computer scientists in authoritarian countries tirelessly working to enforce internet censorship. They discovered many wonderful technical solutions to this problem.
All the mainstream VPN protocols like OpenVPN and Wireguard don't even try to hide themselves and are easily detected no matter what port you use. They are useless if you country is seriously set to block VPNs.
There are different protocols specifically designed to circumvent censorship and they do so by masking their traffic to like something innocuous like HTTPS. However even they can be detected using advanced traffic analysis. For example, if a given machine only sends and receives HTTPS traffic to a single specific overseas server, it is safe to assume that it's not actually a genuine website traffic but a VPN masquerading as HTTPS.
There is special hardware that all users' traffic goes through that detects these patterns and automatically throttles/blocks these connections.
What if you were playing a browser game for hours? Wouldn't that also be HTTPS traffic to the same server all the time?
Maybe, depending on the game. But your OS and running programs will still be making http requests to various servers. Microsoft's, Google's, Steam's, etc. Modern devices and OSes phone home constantly. If you have VPN all your traffic will go through a single server (unless you configure split tunneling to use VPN only for certain sites) and that's easily detectable.
At this point it sounds easier to rsync our porn collections with each other..
Some P2P routing solution seems to be needed, along the lines of Tor or i2p but disguising its traffic. But no doubt they'll be after any P2P communications next.
China manages to figure it out using deep packet inspection.
Funnily enough, they don't fully ban them. Just randomly cut them off to inconvenience the user.
Presumably they'd learn the IP addresses the VPN providers are using and watch for connections to those.
Most of them do that too a degree anyway. Credit cards are only available to over 18s, so if you pay with one of those, that's your ID. I guess this is mostly for free VPNs (although I've never found one that was any good) and people paying with debit cards or crypto.
A lot of people in the UK don't have credit cards. Debit cards are fine and kids have those too. Dont Mullvad accept cash?