VPN - Virtual Private Networks

The UK's Online Safety Act seems to have generated a lot of interest in the use of a VPN. Well, at least in the minds of those that are writing articles about the Act and those commenting on them.

Way back when I lived in Canada I used a VPN to access the BBC as it was geo-blocked. Initially I had worked out a way to watch the BBC using the TOR network but this proved to be painfully slow. The VPN that I used in Canada was a service based in the UK and as such it gave me access to the Internet as if I were located in the UK.

An additional benefit of the VPN was that it allowed access to SMTP email in locations where servers required authentication, this being the case in hotels where the Internet provider was concerned about spam originating from their servers.

Making a search for who has implemented age verification on their services it was not clear that many platforms had. Reddit was one, but when I looked it seemed to be wide open.

Extra Security

One of the selling points that the suppliers of VPNs will tell you is that the use of their services will give you an extra layer of security in that all you traffic will be encrypted. However, most communications over the Internet already are encrypted such as web browsing (https://) and messaging systems pretty much all provide "end-to-end" encryption, much to the frustration of law enforcment.

There are naysayers that will tell you that the use of a VPN is less safe in that all your traffic is routed through the VPN's servers and therefore can be intercepted. This does not make any real sense as the traffic is encrypted anyway. Services such as The Onion Router (TOR) will also "exit" to the Internet in a somewhat random manner, thus making the determination of your actual location pretty difficult to determine.

PCMag's - Who Are You? Online Age Verification Starts in the UK: Here's How It Works