The Government has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.

We, the Starlight Network Team, despise the government of the United Kingdom for setting back internet privacy and anonymity back many years, as well as abusing children and their safety as a talking point to make it happen.

effective immediately, we will make an active effort to push for and support campaigns that help UK users bypass internet restrictions and preserve their privacy. Same goes for activism against KOSA, ChatControl, and similar proposals all across the world.

That doesn’t mean we weren’t already personally interested, but we now officially declare it as one of our goals.

@the how long before a major data breach happens and a bunch of people realise how bad of an idea this is/how badly it’s been implemented

@the I give it a year at most

@rexo Personally, we are not expecting it to take long.

You’ll find lots of people that will want that data. Because of course the implementation isn’t private at all.

@the based :3

@the i am looking forwards to tools for bypassing this

@shroomie

Chances are that we’re not going to come out with our own tools anytime soon. The existing tools that are out there are already so good that we see no reason to create new ones, especially considering that we do not have the time or funding to invest into new protocols that might be able to circumvent censorship in a way that existing ones don’t.

We are, however, looking into having a couple of pages on the Starlight Network website for circumventing these kinds of censorship, recommending common tools that are already out there and that can already serve many different people in many different countries.

Do note, in the UK specifically, most websites that are implementing anything in regards to the OSA are doing so using relatively naive geo-IP location blocks. Those are very easy to circumvent by just using a VPN or any kind of other proxy to have an IP address that originates from a different area.

If you want recommendations from us, we recommend Mullvad simply due to the fact that it doesn’t require any personal information to sign up at all and payments can even be done in cash, meaning that in the future it will be very hard to trace back that you’ve used Mullvad’s VPN to your identity.

There is also public shadowsocks proxies than one might use though, but those can be a little less trustworthy and varying quality.

@the thanks. i wasn't expecting starlight to come out with anything itself and was just planning on suggestions. i've heard of mullvad before (and while me getting it is just a dream) and was considering it for this purpose. thank you(plural, idk who's writing for the starlight network account)!!!!!

@shroomie

usually it’s Alexia writing on this account, so, you’re welcome from me personally :3

that said, preliminary recommendations:

1. read https://privsec.dev/posts/knowledge/threat-modeling/ to catch yourself up on threat modeling

then:

• Mullvad [VPN] (https://mullvad.net)
• ShadowSocks <small>(supported by mullvad)</small> (https://shadowsocks.org)
• Shadowmere, public Shadowsocks proxies (https://shadowmere.xyz)
• Tor, obviously (https://torproject.org)
• Quad9 (https://quad9.org)

the page we’ll (hopefully lol!) publish soon-ish will have some more information and details on things that we believe are effective for bypassing the (very rudimentary) censorship of ofcom, but this will make for a good start

@the i have quad9 actually, but i don't fully know what it's useful for. anyways, this was bookmarked :3

@shroomie

Quad9 is a DNS resolver, reason we recommend it is that they support various forms of encrypted DNS which makes it impossible for ofcom to change which domains map to which IPs. It also keeps that info private from your ISP.

This means just using Quad9 encrypted can bypass some of the most trivial forms of censorship with no downsides.

@shroomie

You can find the setup guides here: https://docs.quad9.net

Look for those that mention Encrypted DNS, DNSCrypt, DNS-over-TLS (DoT) or DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH).

@the @shroomie fyi mullvad also offers a DoT/DoH service

@soop @shroomie We know, we just tend to recommend whatever provides the most options, and in addition to DoT and DoH, Quad9 also supports DNSCrypt.

But Mullvad’s DNS isn’t a bad option