Online Safety Bill Etc

[jem]

Originally Posted by mrmistoffelees

When are you going to give me my orange back ?

Not 100% sure how many will get the reference.

[Pierre]

Originally Posted by mrmistoffelees

When are you going to give me my orange back ?

When I get my bin liner.

Ok ...... back to the topic please.

[RichardCoulter]

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]

quote from above link . .

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?

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

[jem]

Originally Posted by Paul

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.

Originally Posted by jem

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/

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]

Originally Posted by Paul

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