Cable Forum - Online Safety Bill Etc

Report that Ofcom are using a third party to monitor VPN's as their use has soared since the age verification began:

https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-pr...-act-heres-how

Is there a way to stop them being used to access porn sites, I can't see how they could be banned altogether as people use them to access their company websites when working from home etc.

Carth

11-11-2025 13:15

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc

quote from above link . .

Quote:

It's understandable that Ofcom wants to monitor the use of VPNs to determine if the new legislation is working as intended. The problem is that the method it's using may be inaccurate or actively threatening people’s privacy.

oh, bit of a catch 22 there I feel, especially as they'll be checking the useage by underage children . . won't they?

Paul	11-11-2025 16:24

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc

Sounds a bit like blustering to me, the point of VPNs is they are private, you cant just "monitor" them.

jem	11-11-2025 21:28

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paul (Post 36206230)

Sounds a bit like blustering to me, the point of VPNs is they are private, you cant just "monitor" them.

Does sound like a degree of handwaving is going on here - the lack of any specifics, the use of fairly meaningless buzzwords etc.

Since ISPs by law have to keep records of which sites you connect to and when, they will know that an individual home/account (they can’t say who in the house it was) connected to a known VPN endpoint; after that they are blind. As you rightly say the ‘P’ in VPN stands for ‘private’.

After connecting to a VPN, where you go from there, what sites you visit, what you download etc. is completely hidden.

At best, all OFCOM can say is, "we have noticed and ‘monitored’ an x% increase in traffic to known VPN endpoints all located abroad.” And that’s it.

Paul	11-11-2025 22:08

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc

Quote:

Originally Posted by jem (Post 36206245)

Since ISPs by law have to keep records of which sites you connect to and when.

On what do you base this ? Because as far as I can tell, its not true.

https://decoded.legal/blog/2021/06/m...sites-i-visit/

Quote:

The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 is the UK’s latest iteration of its telecoms / Internet surveillance framework. It includes rules around the retention of communications data by Internet access providers and other telecoms operators.

These rules have changed considerably since the Act came into force, thanks to ongoing litigation.

One thing which has not changed is that the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 does not impose a data retention obligation on all ISPs.

Also, again as far as I can tell, any that do only record Source IP/Port, Destination IP/Port, Protocol, and size of data transferred (this is pretty much all thats available to them anyway). VPNs do not all use the same protocol, they can use tcp or udp (or both), just the same as http/https/dns etc also use tcp or udp, so you cannot reliably tell if the traffic is a VPN or not - at best you could try and guess from the port numbers as some default to using specific port numbers.

mrmistoffelees

12-11-2025 14:05

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paul (Post 36206230)

Sounds a bit like blustering to me, the point of VPNs is they are private, you cant just "monitor" them.

Between the lines, I’d suggest they’re monitoring the connection endpoint rather than the traffic itself . So probably a dictionary list of known urls/Ip’s combining with ports , using ssl vpn on 443 reduces it to known ip or urls unless they’re mitm the traffic (which they’re not) sorry preaching to the knowledgeable!

https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-pr...-act-heres-how

Paul	17-11-2025 05:24

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc

The parents arrested for their WhatsApp messages have been paid £20k damages by the police who massively over-reacted at the time.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gz1qy30v5o

Quote:

.. police had accepted liability for unlawful arrest and paid damages of £20,000, plus costs.

Quote:

Police and Crime Commissioner for Hertfordshire Jonathan Ash-Edwards said:
"There has clearly been a fundamental breakdown in relationships between a school and parents that shouldn't have become a police matter.

Sirius

17-11-2025 21:32

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc

Interesting video that explains what i see as the flaws in the Online Safety Bill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F27n0kvBGfE

Damien

17-11-2025 21:47

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paul (Post 36206426)

The parents arrested for their WhatsApp messages have been paid £20k damages by the police who massively over-reacted at the time.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gz1qy30v5o

This is insane as well.

Seriously, couldn't one officer not review the messages and go 'actually, what the hell?'

Chris

17-11-2025 23:02

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc

Across the country, certain senior officers have clearly decided that hurty words on the internet are a priority and have instructed their subordinates to act accordingly. There doesn’t appear to be much consistency to how and where it’s applied. I wonder whether some of them hit on it as a wheeze for improving their detection rates.

RichardCoulter

18-11-2025 01:43

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc

Quote:

The father of Molly Russell, a British teenager who killed herself after viewing harmful online content, has called for a change in leadership at the UK’s communications watchdog after losing faith in its ability to make the internet safer for children.

Ian Russell, whose 14 year-old daughter took her own life in 2017, said Ofcom had “repeatedly” demonstrated that it does not grasp the urgency of keeping under-18s safe online and was failing to implement new digital laws forcefully

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...al-media-ofcom

Paul	18-11-2025 02:36

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc

About time he shut up, he's not the spokesperson for everyone.

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