zlacker

>>mmaria+(OP)
The VPN trick potentially won’t last long. We’ve seen it go stale already in the world of intellectual property rights. For at least the last ten years Netflix et al have been well aware of which AS numbers / IP netblocks correspond to people sat at home in front of the TV, and which correspond to servers in a rack somewhere (including those hosting VPN endpoints.)

One tweak to the rules and all of a sudden not only do porn sites have to verify the age of their UK visitors but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP.

The more troubling thing about these laws is enforcement. The threat of fines only works against websites that map to a business entity. For anything else there will surely see a ramp up in the size of The Great British Firewall Ruleset, edited by the courts, and distributed to the Big N (5?) ISPs.

What will become of the smaller ISPs that refuse to block illegal sites?

>>gorgoi+Em
I don't know. A lot of countries in the Middle East block all sorts of stuff and yet VPN usage is ubiquitous, but the governments appear to turn a blind eye. Like "we've done our bit and made the law." So it remains to be seen how far they'll go with this.

>>qingch+0v1
A lot of countries in the Middle East throw gay people off the roofs of buildings as punishment, let's assume for the sake of argument that anything we do that moves us closer to the Middle East is the wrong thing to do.

>>pc86+0l4
I don't know that "a lot" of countries in the Middle East are regularly throwing gay people off buildings, but I agree with your second point that we shouldn't look at their censorship as an example of something great to follow.

I would add that from my experience with the Gulf, at least, the ME has created one of the gayest places on Earth. The separation between genders has led to a disproportionate number of women and men semi-openly sleeping with their own gender in a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" way.

It feels like the "punish them for being gay" is used, like the poster below you mentions, as a way to turn the screws on you when they need something to use against you for another reason.