It's kept me safer in Turkey for a long time. The built-in VPN from pixel devices (7 and later) does the trick for me.

No.

It also makes all of your browsing information private, so your internet usage cannot be directly monitored, so even if your location is not changed, what you are doing with your device cannot be discerned.

Pretty much. I do hope it won't last.

I'm in Turkey right now and a VPN is essential. When I'm back in the UK I think it will be on all the time.

I often forget how useful a VPN can be.

Even here it's not great.

That's just noise coming from a face.

I hope that dragon is well trained 😊

And this is exactly why we need to reject the "embrace AI" rhetoric.

it isn't AI
it's a glorified autocomplete
it's predictive text
it isn't intelligent
it does not think
therefore it does not make things up
it just posts text slop that pattern matches the ones & zeroes it sees that the user posted based on other ones & zeroes it scraped from its plagiarism library

IMMEDIATELY* going into my collective action lecture

*Once I'm back from annual leave.

And the idea of "banning VPN services" is possibly one of the most pig ignorant things to come from this whole catastrophe.