It’s no use. “VPN” means gateway/MITM service, just like “crypto” means digital tulip mania.

Today’s episode brought to you by our friends CoinSkank™ and EchelonVPN.

The article does not explain the primary design purpose of a VPN – providing an encrypted tunnel into or between two private subnets.

For example, your home subnet is typically all 192.168.nnn.nnn addresses – a class of addresses which the wider internet does not route, and which your router/modem does not allow the wider internet to access unless explicitly permitted.

Say you have a NAS on your home network, and you want to access it from your laptop while at a cafe; you could set up a VPN between your laptop and your home router, and it can make your home network appear as your local network to your laptop, giving you access to your NAS.

Or between two office locations of a business – their database servers, accounting systems, printers, etc can all be freely accessible between offices without being exposed to the wider internet.

The ban and age verification requirements apply to pretty much all services which allow communication of information between people, unless an exemption is granted by the minister.

There is no legislated exemption for instant messaging, SMS, email, email lists, chat rooms, forums, blogs, voice calls, etc.

It’s a wildly broadly applicable piece of legislation that seems ripe to be abused in the future, just like we’ve seen with anti-terror and anti-hate-symbol legislation.

From 63C (1) of the legislation:

For the purposes of this Act, age-restricted social media platform means:

• a) an electronic service that satisfies the following conditions:
  • i) the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end-users;
  • ii) the service allows end-users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end-users;
  • iii) the service allows end-users to post material on the service;
  • iv) such other conditions (if any) as are set out in the legislative rules; or
• b) an electronic service specified in the legislative rules; but does not include a service mentioned in subsection (6).

Here’s all the detail of what the bill is and the concerns raised in parliament.