The UK has announced plans to fast-track legislation requiring “age verification for VPN use”.

@lispi314 @mullvadnet @wojtek The infuriating part is that *no one* without an extreme level of expertise in mathematical logic understands this, so the peddlers of ZKPs can just wave it around like magic fairy dust and bamboozle policy makers and privacy activists alike.

@alexanderdyas @djstreethawk @hypolite @mullvadnet
"... a non-partisan, expert organisation ...."
you mean... exactly what the civil service is supposed to be?

I've seen some other problematic law recently, and it got me to wondering if the problem might be that the civil service has been hollowed out through years of excessive cuts, and has simply lost the people with experience and expertise to properly advise governments.

There may also be an issue of governments bringing their own people in, either because they don't trust the civil service, or more concerningly, because of outside influence.

I fear it may be a combination of all the above.

@ggrey As a Russian I should warn you that Wireguard wasn't designed to evade censorship — it could be easily detected and blocked by DPI as a whole protocol
@mullvadnet

@missnfranchised No problem, special whitelist for banks and organizations will solve this "problem". If some organization not in the whitelist — it is their problem, not the government one.

We, in Russia, already have this system and it works‍️

@mullvadnet

@somebody@tech.lgbt @dalias@hachyderm.io @mullvadnet@mastodon.online @wojtek@social.vivaldi.net

\1. Don't take notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy.

I've never liked that quote.

Good luck making any conspiracy that isn't downright trivial (there's a reason the glowies take notes only to destroy them as soon as possible) or so loosely coordinated it might as well be described as cooperative and/or like-minded independent actors.

Of course if you're the one who decides what's criminal, then those conspiracies may not be criminal.

\2. Keep your mouth completely shut about it in hostile territory.

Also, compartmentalization.

\3. The code exists only in the minds of you and your co-conspirators. It is a keyed system of triggers, euphemisms, or synecdoches which maintains full plausible deniability at all times.

That has some pretty harsh limits.

Humans are not good at remembering things exactly and proximate semantic memory may lead to deadly mistakes, particularly where stress is a factor.

Splitting the secret can serve to mitigate some of this, but at some point the sum total collection of necessary parts will essentially be the secret in plain form unless all the secrets to maintain were sufficiently trivial that dynamic reconstruction is always possible and sufficiently reliable.

@Equity7804 @mullvadnet
Yes. I guessed that was the case.

I just wonder why consumers don't question things like that, though. Why would age-verification be needed for VPN? Consumers should reject that requirement and switch to VPNs that don't do that.

@alexanderdyas @djstreethawk @hypolite @mullvadnet
This is true. It's made me wonder if the obstructionism shown by Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister was actually a feature, not a bug.