Wow this is a tad controversial, can’t remember the last time I saw something with an even 50/50 vote ratio

Is the new official VPN project any different from Orbot? I don’t know much about it. I would assume not as anything more elaborate would require changes to the tor protocol. Either way you aren’t wrong. You can pretty much get by on the modern internet with TCP alone, it does mean no HTTP/3 but that’s not a big deal and outside of games very few other things in the wild use UDP. Never mind the other even less used L4 protos like SCTP.

Calling Tor a VPN is a bit scuffed. Yeah you can kinda use it as one but ultimately it’s really a TCP proxy and has a lot of limitations because of that which traditional VPNs don’t. There are some ways to make a VPN out of Tor but it doesn’t change the fact that it ultimately isn’t one.

Also I might add that in 2025 whether or not a VPN has IPv6 support should be relevant.

We have software marketed as a web browser, written in typescript running on a web browser…we’ve gone too far.

Adaway also has a no root mode that does this as well.

Webp has both a lossy and lossless mode so the first part of this meme is lost on me

I think the real problem here is politicians are some of the most technically illiterate people on the planet. They think they can legislate away problems that they can’t…while ignoring the root cause of the issue (I’m mostly referring to the age gating of services, banning porn and VPNs isn’t even trying to solve a problem, it’s moronic)

What would likely happen is VPN providers would be IP banned but people could still setup their own custom VPN solutions as that’s hard to ban without banning corporate VPNs? Of course my fear is as this idea spreads VPNs and even Tor will become increasingly useless as all exits will be age gated and censored as well. This is something where technical work arounds will only work in the short term, laws like this are a slippery slope that we seem to be sliding down.

I’d love to think you’re right but there are bills in blue states for age verification too. It’s nice to think that partisan politics will kill it in Michigan…and maybe it will but this is so much more than a one party problem IMO. Both parties seem complicit.

My fear is that even Tor won’t help, if every exit node is censored then where do you go? Also it’s not like you can’t fairly easily detect exits. Sure hidden services are exempt but the amount of services there are tiny compared to the internet. I really feel like we as the citizens have to convince the governments to not do this. Otherwise things will only get worse.

Huh, good to know…either way the UK seems to have restarted it…at least I hadn’t heard much about any of this until they did it and now half the states and a bunch of EU countries are doing it

Is there any country or jurisdiction that has come out against these laws?

The UK started it and now the rest of the western world is falling like dominos and the worst part is it’s both sides of the politicial isle doing it which means it’s even more difficult to shoot down

You’re from lemmygrad, everything looks right of center to you. Labour is literally described as center left, and the main opposition to the conservative party on Wikipedia. Like, no it isn’t hard left, but that wasn’t my point. My point was all governments across the political spectrum are doing this now and this is too important to be made politicial, whether you like it or not apolitical movements get the most support and these laws stand to completely demolish freedom of speech and put us into one hell of a dystopia across all western countries.

Why does it look almost identical to iOS, I hate it

Except in the UK where the government is on the left. This seems to be one situation where both the right and the left are universally looking to screw over their citizens and there has to be some way we can stop it.

NAT provides no firewall features and we can have a discussion about how wrong that statement is

Yeah, they should publish on f-droid or direct APK as well

EDIT: Just remembered the new android “feature” that restricts what apps you can install from off the play store to Google approved ones…still worth doing for those of us on AOSP OSes

Graphene supports running GMS in a sandbox like any normal app. That’s what I do as there are too many apps in the play store I need

Can’t disagree there. I don’t even use it, I just prefer when people take a stand