6 ms·

I will just leave this here: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com https://www.privateinternetaccess.com

by WordyMcWordface 10y ago

cjrp 10y ago
Until VPNs become illegal...
- noir_lord 10y ago
  That would be a very hard fight for them since enforcing it without fundamentally breaking the way the internet works would be very expensive to a lot of very wealthy companies and sadly in this 'democracy' the people with the money are heard the loudest.
  - eeZah7Ux 10y ago
    > That would be a very hard fight Not at all. It's enough to point the finger at commercial VPN providers and claim the the users are doing suspicious things including filesharing, and encourage ISPs to block VPN providers by address block. Many ISPs would love to do that because they want to inspect cleartext traffic and sell metadata. Of course corporate VPNs would be left untouched. There.
    - noir_lord 10y ago
      > It's enough to point the finger at commercial VPN providers and claim the the users are doing suspicious things. The problem there is we live in a containerised world, how would they stop someone running a 'recipe' that creates a VPN on something like AWS/Digital Ocean and uses that as the VPN exit point. The only way to deal with that is to have a central licensing authority for VPN's where you have to hand over the keys, that's going to be a massive and expensive fight for them.
      - eeZah7Ux 10y ago
        > how would they stop someone running a 'recipe' that creates a VPN on something like AWS/Digital Ocean They don't need to. Even if 10% of citizens were able to do that, controlling and censoring information for the 90% is way more than enough to manipulate people perceptions and ideas, and thus, democracy. Not even Stasi or the "great firewall" of China aimed at 100% success rate - they simply don't need to.
        pbhjpbhj 10y ago
        >controlling and censoring information for the 90% // What you appear to be alleging is that by being able to access the threads I saw on Al-Jazeera or Reddit or what-have-you that the government can somehow control the information I'm receiving enough to manipulate me to serve their political ideals. Freedom of the press may not be perfect in the UK but it seems close enough that a government can't manipulate democracy simply by monitoring internet use. UK population is 65M. Reported crimes (which includes littering and traffic violations AFAICT) is about 1 per mille in the UK [1]. There's no way the gov are using the criminal justice system to control the population to a significant extent, they certainly can't control the criminals. The prisons are full. The establishment can try to jump up crimes but the scale they need to do that to control the population seems enormous compared to the resources available. If you can write a lie on the side of a bus and have the country vote against their best interests then why on Earth would you try and carefully contrive criminal activity in order to stop people from visiting websites you don't like to subtly alter a few people's perception of the political situation. Seems entirely bonkers. [1] http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Total-crimes-per-1000 http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Total-c...
        eeZah7Ux 10y ago
        > Seems entirely bonkers Throughout the last 100 years there has been examples across many dictatorships and engineered democracies where incredible amount of efforts has been spent on achieving information control. Dragnet surveillance proved many times to be effective at chilling free speech and intimidating dissenters.
  - philovivero 10y ago
    > enforcing it without fundamentally breaking the way the internet works China does this. They fundamentally break the way the internet works. They don't seem to care.
- digler999 10y ago
  then people would just resort to steganography. it wouldn't be terribly difficult to mask asymmetric traffic that appeared to come from a youtube-like "site", or symmetric traffic that looks like skype video but with encrypted packets inside the compressed video transport layer. This is an unwinnable fight and I can't believe anybody would be stupid enough to try.
  - dest 10y ago
    the chinese great firewall is quite good on those topics AFAIK
gambiting 10y ago
I just feel like using a VPN, while legal, might already put you on some list of "suspicious" users. Surely, if you have something to hide, then you are worth investigating closely.
- noir_lord 10y ago
  Which is why we need to push as many people as possible to use VPN's, they already have too much straw and too few needles so lets give them even more straw. The reality is that no one in the know thinks this has anything to do with terrorism and everything to do with political control. If you don't have the right to privacy then all other rights are subverted, previous governments have used the state security apparatus to monitor perfectly legal political activities, they've proven again and again they can't be trusted with this kind of power and we let them give themselves more (and legalise all the illegal shit they where already doing). The reality is the UK (which traditionally has been a less free society for a 'free' society) is rapidly sliding into something you can't realistically call a free society.
  - hash-set 10y ago
    The surveillance state has always been about political control. Terrorism is merely the justification.
    - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      >Terrorism is merely the justification. // You've lost sight of any balance when you start claiming that terrorism is just an idea used to justify state oversight and not an actual problem of organised harm/killing of peaceful civilians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings - presumably you think that's just a huge fiction created so the government can get hold of your holiday snaps.
      - gambiting 10y ago
        I think one can acknowledge that terrorists and terrorist attacks are definitely a real thing that exist, and at the same time one can think that the current reaction is completely out of proportion, where the whole society is giving away its freedoms to prevent a really minor threat?
ryanlol 10y ago
How is that supposed to help? Go sell snake oil elsewhere, recommending this stuff actually puts peoples lives at risk.
- duaneb 10y ago
  The only thing putting people at risk is portraying privacy as suspicious. Everyone should use a VPN.
  - ryanlol 10y ago
    Yeah right, because using PIA==privacy. How about we refer people to actual privacy tools like Tor instead?
    - NetStrikeForce 10y ago
      Tor has zero to do with privacy and everything to do with anonymity.
      - 24gttghh 10y ago
        Does anonymity not imply privacy?
        DiabloD3 10y ago
        No, due to browsers leaking data and state actors controlling tor end points. They still know know someone out there is doing something, and can build ad profiles and threat profiles on them, they just can't link those profiles to you easily: that is anonymity. Privacy would be inability to build useful profiles.
        24gttghh 10y ago
        Interesting. But if someone could remain anonymous, even with a profile being created for that "anonymous entity" and there is nothing tying that anonymous profile back to a real person, that would still seem to be private to me. If the anonymous profile could be connected to a real person, that would seem to be neither anonymous, nor private.
smnplk 10y ago
https://www.tunnelbear.com/ https://www.tunnelbear.com/ gives you 500MB of traffic for free.
grownseed 10y ago
Been using these guys for a few years now, best use of $40/yr. You'll occasionally get blocked on certain sites (which you can often fix by simply changing location), but their infrastructure is definitely impressive. I get to use the full speed of my connection, which ironically is not always the case when I'm not connected through PIA (there's definitely some selective throttling going on, even though my ISP pretends there isn't). So sure, I'm probably on a bunch of watch lists, but at this point it's hard to care anymore, it feels like everybody is in one way or another, everybody will be found guilty should someone decide so... I actually have legitimate reasons for using VPNs, but moves like this from governments around the world just give me even more of an incentive to use VPNs. One can only hope that politicians will be done in by the very same rules they're blissfully pushing through.
- lucaspiller 10y ago
  Does Netflix work through it? I have an DO box that I use as a VPN, and Netflix has blocked it recently.
  - grownseed 10y ago
    Unfortunately, Netflix doesn't work through PIA, they apparently aggressively block IP ranges from most major VPN providers, so the issue isn't specific to PIA. This is a bit of a "screw you" to privacy-conscious people, but then again Netflix have their own issues to deal with (whether legitimate or not is a different conversation). Two things I do on occasion: have a box dedicated to watching Netflix, that isn't on a VPN (which might not help if you're trying to bypass national licensing restrictions), the other is to tunnel my connection to one of my servers through the VPN, which works fine, though it's a bit of a pain.
  - dx034 10y ago
    Don't think so. Netflix got really good at blocking all vpn and datacentre ips
JohnStrange 10y ago
By a company called "London Trust Media" run from Los Angeles, CA? Uhm, I don't know...
- ryanlol 10y ago
  A company with a history of covering up breaches and making very dubious claims about their ability to resist law enforcement.
dx034 10y ago
Used hide.me so far. Speeds there were really good and the company is not located in Europe or us. But this is much cheaper, any experience? Especially using it in the UK, does it increase latency significantly?
_qbxp 10y ago
I've had PIA, AirVPN, and now iVPN. Definitely a fan of iVPN. They are organizational members of the EFF (for what it's worth), and their service has been the fastest I've used thus far. A bit pricey though.

I will just leave this here: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com https://www.privateinternetaccess.com

cjrp 10y ago

Until VPNs become illegal...

noir_lord 10y ago
That would be a very hard fight for them since enforcing it without fundamentally breaking the way the internet works would be very expensive to a lot of very wealthy companies and sadly in this 'democracy' the people with the money are heard the loudest.
- eeZah7Ux 10y ago
  > That would be a very hard fight Not at all. It's enough to point the finger at commercial VPN providers and claim the the users are doing suspicious things including filesharing, and encourage ISPs to block VPN providers by address block. Many ISPs would love to do that because they want to inspect cleartext traffic and sell metadata. Of course corporate VPNs would be left untouched. There.
  - noir_lord 10y ago
    > It's enough to point the finger at commercial VPN providers and claim the the users are doing suspicious things. The problem there is we live in a containerised world, how would they stop someone running a 'recipe' that creates a VPN on something like AWS/Digital Ocean and uses that as the VPN exit point. The only way to deal with that is to have a central licensing authority for VPN's where you have to hand over the keys, that's going to be a massive and expensive fight for them.
    - eeZah7Ux 10y ago
      > how would they stop someone running a 'recipe' that creates a VPN on something like AWS/Digital Ocean They don't need to. Even if 10% of citizens were able to do that, controlling and censoring information for the 90% is way more than enough to manipulate people perceptions and ideas, and thus, democracy. Not even Stasi or the "great firewall" of China aimed at 100% success rate - they simply don't need to.
      - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
        >controlling and censoring information for the 90% // What you appear to be alleging is that by being able to access the threads I saw on Al-Jazeera or Reddit or what-have-you that the government can somehow control the information I'm receiving enough to manipulate me to serve their political ideals. Freedom of the press may not be perfect in the UK but it seems close enough that a government can't manipulate democracy simply by monitoring internet use. UK population is 65M. Reported crimes (which includes littering and traffic violations AFAICT) is about 1 per mille in the UK [1]. There's no way the gov are using the criminal justice system to control the population to a significant extent, they certainly can't control the criminals. The prisons are full. The establishment can try to jump up crimes but the scale they need to do that to control the population seems enormous compared to the resources available. If you can write a lie on the side of a bus and have the country vote against their best interests then why on Earth would you try and carefully contrive criminal activity in order to stop people from visiting websites you don't like to subtly alter a few people's perception of the political situation. Seems entirely bonkers. [1] http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Total-crimes-per-1000 http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Total-c...
        eeZah7Ux 10y ago
        > Seems entirely bonkers Throughout the last 100 years there has been examples across many dictatorships and engineered democracies where incredible amount of efforts has been spent on achieving information control. Dragnet surveillance proved many times to be effective at chilling free speech and intimidating dissenters.
- philovivero 10y ago
  > enforcing it without fundamentally breaking the way the internet works China does this. They fundamentally break the way the internet works. They don't seem to care.
digler999 10y ago
then people would just resort to steganography. it wouldn't be terribly difficult to mask asymmetric traffic that appeared to come from a youtube-like "site", or symmetric traffic that looks like skype video but with encrypted packets inside the compressed video transport layer. This is an unwinnable fight and I can't believe anybody would be stupid enough to try.
- dest 10y ago
  the chinese great firewall is quite good on those topics AFAIK

gambiting 10y ago

I just feel like using a VPN, while legal, might already put you on some list of "suspicious" users. Surely, if you have something to hide, then you are worth investigating closely.

noir_lord 10y ago
Which is why we need to push as many people as possible to use VPN's, they already have too much straw and too few needles so lets give them even more straw. The reality is that no one in the know thinks this has anything to do with terrorism and everything to do with political control. If you don't have the right to privacy then all other rights are subverted, previous governments have used the state security apparatus to monitor perfectly legal political activities, they've proven again and again they can't be trusted with this kind of power and we let them give themselves more (and legalise all the illegal shit they where already doing). The reality is the UK (which traditionally has been a less free society for a 'free' society) is rapidly sliding into something you can't realistically call a free society.
- hash-set 10y ago
  The surveillance state has always been about political control. Terrorism is merely the justification.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    >Terrorism is merely the justification. // You've lost sight of any balance when you start claiming that terrorism is just an idea used to justify state oversight and not an actual problem of organised harm/killing of peaceful civilians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings - presumably you think that's just a huge fiction created so the government can get hold of your holiday snaps.
    - gambiting 10y ago
      I think one can acknowledge that terrorists and terrorist attacks are definitely a real thing that exist, and at the same time one can think that the current reaction is completely out of proportion, where the whole society is giving away its freedoms to prevent a really minor threat?

ryanlol 10y ago

How is that supposed to help? Go sell snake oil elsewhere, recommending this stuff actually puts peoples lives at risk.

duaneb 10y ago
The only thing putting people at risk is portraying privacy as suspicious. Everyone should use a VPN.
- ryanlol 10y ago
  Yeah right, because using PIA==privacy. How about we refer people to actual privacy tools like Tor instead?
  - NetStrikeForce 10y ago
    Tor has zero to do with privacy and everything to do with anonymity.
    - 24gttghh 10y ago
      Does anonymity not imply privacy?
      - DiabloD3 10y ago
        No, due to browsers leaking data and state actors controlling tor end points. They still know know someone out there is doing something, and can build ad profiles and threat profiles on them, they just can't link those profiles to you easily: that is anonymity. Privacy would be inability to build useful profiles.
        24gttghh 10y ago
        Interesting. But if someone could remain anonymous, even with a profile being created for that "anonymous entity" and there is nothing tying that anonymous profile back to a real person, that would still seem to be private to me. If the anonymous profile could be connected to a real person, that would seem to be neither anonymous, nor private.

smnplk 10y ago

https://www.tunnelbear.com/ https://www.tunnelbear.com/ gives you 500MB of traffic for free.

grownseed 10y ago

Been using these guys for a few years now, best use of $40/yr. You'll occasionally get blocked on certain sites (which you can often fix by simply changing location), but their infrastructure is definitely impressive. I get to use the full speed of my connection, which ironically is not always the case when I'm not connected through PIA (there's definitely some selective throttling going on, even though my ISP pretends there isn't). So sure, I'm probably on a bunch of watch lists, but at this point it's hard to care anymore, it feels like everybody is in one way or another, everybody will be found guilty should someone decide so... I actually have legitimate reasons for using VPNs, but moves like this from governments around the world just give me even more of an incentive to use VPNs. One can only hope that politicians will be done in by the very same rules they're blissfully pushing through.

lucaspiller 10y ago
Does Netflix work through it? I have an DO box that I use as a VPN, and Netflix has blocked it recently.
- grownseed 10y ago
  Unfortunately, Netflix doesn't work through PIA, they apparently aggressively block IP ranges from most major VPN providers, so the issue isn't specific to PIA. This is a bit of a "screw you" to privacy-conscious people, but then again Netflix have their own issues to deal with (whether legitimate or not is a different conversation). Two things I do on occasion: have a box dedicated to watching Netflix, that isn't on a VPN (which might not help if you're trying to bypass national licensing restrictions), the other is to tunnel my connection to one of my servers through the VPN, which works fine, though it's a bit of a pain.
- dx034 10y ago
  Don't think so. Netflix got really good at blocking all vpn and datacentre ips

JohnStrange 10y ago

By a company called "London Trust Media" run from Los Angeles, CA? Uhm, I don't know...

ryanlol 10y ago
A company with a history of covering up breaches and making very dubious claims about their ability to resist law enforcement.

dx034 10y ago

Used hide.me so far. Speeds there were really good and the company is not located in Europe or us. But this is much cheaper, any experience? Especially using it in the UK, does it increase latency significantly?

_qbxp 10y ago

I've had PIA, AirVPN, and now iVPN. Definitely a fan of iVPN. They are organizational members of the EFF (for what it's worth), and their service has been the fastest I've used thus far. A bit pricey though.