4 ms·

> By using a VPN you cut yourself off from participating as an equal citizen on the net. What?

by Hnrobert42 9y ago

superkuh 9y ago
You can't host servers off a VPN. You don't have control or use of your own ports. You can consume and that's about it.
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  I’m not sure why you have that idea. I’m not entirely familiar with how most off-the-shelf VPN providers work, but I have a simple IKEv2 VPN hosted on Digitalocean that just gives me a public IP address, to which I can route a thing I want. This service appears be be specifically tailored for that use case, though I know nothing about it: https://staticvpnip.com https://staticvpnip.com
- Sohcahtoa82 9y ago
  If I wanted to host servers, I'd host them somewhere else, not on my home internet connection. I'm really not sure what point you're trying to make, or how you're defining "participating" in this context.
  - superkuh 9y ago
    > If I wanted to host servers, I'd host them somewhere else, not on my home internet connection. But why? You probably have a tens to hundreds of megabit connection that is always on. You have powerful computers that wouldn't even notice a webserver running. Buying a domain costs $8 and pointing it at home is as simple as changing the DNS entry a couple times a year or using DynDNS services. And what you don't have is a need for all the complexity and requirements that most automatically assume they need just because they're drowing in them in their day job. Hosting from home is more than enough for a personal website. It cuts the gordian knot of deciding what types of speech and content will be allowed on any given service. It prevents the perverse incentives of spying and selling users. It allows you to add things to your site on a whim just by copying a file to your web directory or opening an text editor. All the tools of your operating system, this refined and extremely usable software is now just there. Now you don't need a database. No need for a CMS. No need for scaling or containers or 99.9999% uptime. Hosting from home allows you to participate in the 'net in a way that is just natural. When there's not 5 layers of abstraction between you and the web you really can participate and build whatever you want. And since you don't need all that abstraction, dynamic content, and CMS (your OS is the CMS!) the security problems everyone loves to jump on simply vanish. Say you want to monitor your logs, well, you don't need to go install some dynamic language parser and prettifier full of attack surfaces. You just tail the log and grep. You open it in OpenOffice if you really have to have a GUI. You can set alerts as easily as tailing a log. You see day to day the type of bots, people, and referers and how they come to your site all without google analytics. You can respond to people using your site in real time; I love adding personal messages to people as they browse my site(s). This is what I mean by participating in the net. Getting down into it. It's a beautiful thing and it solves so many problems that can't even be approached when you're using someone elses computer and someone else's connection. And if you're in the USA you completely bypass third party doctorine and actually have an expectation of real privacy. I just don't get the hostility to the concept I see on HN.
    - Sohcahtoa82 9y ago
      > Hosting from home is more than enough for a personal website. It cuts the gordian knot of deciding what types of speech and content will be allowed on any given service. Cool, and then when I post something to my self-hosted blog that pisses someone off, my home internet gets DDoS'd and I lose my Internet access. It has happened before on IRC. I banned a user because they were spamming racial slurs, and they responded with a DDoS. I was offline for an hour while struggling to get someone on my ISP's support line that understood what it meant to force my IP address to change. Now I use an IRC bouncer in AWS to hide my home IP address. > It allows you to add things to your site on a whim just by copying a file to your web directory or opening an text editor. All the tools of your operating system, this refined and extremely usable software is now just there. Now you don't need a database. No need for a CMS. No need for scaling or containers or 99.9999% uptime. I think you misunderstand the reasons people use CMS. It makes it so I can just fill out a single text box and click "Post" and have all the indexes and links on the entire web site update automatically to include that post. I can allow people to write comments. I can create the ability for users of my site to search it. And maximum uptime is still important. My home internet died shortly after I got to work a couple days ago, and I wasn't able to fix it until I got home. 10 hours of straight unplanned downtime is unacceptable for any server, even a personal website, IMO. > And since you don't need all that abstraction, dynamic content, and CMS (your OS is the CMS!) the security problems everyone loves to jump on simply vanish. The truth is quite literally the opposite. If I'm hosting it myself, and my server gets hacked, my entire home network becomes at risk. > Say you want to monitor your logs, well, you don't need to go install some dynamic language parser and prettifier full of attack surfaces. You just tail the log and grep. Uh...people can tail and grep logs from any server. You misunderstand there's a reason people use dynamic language parsers and prettifiers. Look at raw logs is awful. It's far easier to fire up a log analyzer and see "Oh, there are a lot of people making requests to X resource and it's creating a bottleneck." > It's a beautiful thing and it solves so many problems that can't even be approached when you're using someone elses computer and someone else's connection. It creates more problems than it solves. It puts my home network at risk. It makes me in charge of dealing with hardware failures. If whatever I'm hosting gets popular, and I can't scale. > I just don't get the hostility to the concept I see on HN. Because what you're proposing shows extreme naivete.
- gruez 9y ago
  >You can consume and that's about it. Uploading videos isn't "consuming". Writing blogs/articles isn't "consuming". Contributing to open source projects isn't "consuming". Neither of those activities require forwarded ports.
  - superkuh 9y ago
    True enough. But they also aren't participating in the net. They're using other people and companies' resources to do things rather than participating yourself. And that's bad because it leads to centralization. And centralization leads to perverse incentives to spy and censor.
    - fwip 9y ago
      You've got a weird definition of participation.

> By using a VPN you cut yourself off from participating as an equal citizen on the net. What?

superkuh 9y ago

You can't host servers off a VPN. You don't have control or use of your own ports. You can consume and that's about it.

matthewmacleod 9y ago
I’m not sure why you have that idea. I’m not entirely familiar with how most off-the-shelf VPN providers work, but I have a simple IKEv2 VPN hosted on Digitalocean that just gives me a public IP address, to which I can route a thing I want. This service appears be be specifically tailored for that use case, though I know nothing about it: https://staticvpnip.com https://staticvpnip.com
Sohcahtoa82 9y ago
If I wanted to host servers, I'd host them somewhere else, not on my home internet connection. I'm really not sure what point you're trying to make, or how you're defining "participating" in this context.
- superkuh 9y ago
  > If I wanted to host servers, I'd host them somewhere else, not on my home internet connection. But why? You probably have a tens to hundreds of megabit connection that is always on. You have powerful computers that wouldn't even notice a webserver running. Buying a domain costs $8 and pointing it at home is as simple as changing the DNS entry a couple times a year or using DynDNS services. And what you don't have is a need for all the complexity and requirements that most automatically assume they need just because they're drowing in them in their day job. Hosting from home is more than enough for a personal website. It cuts the gordian knot of deciding what types of speech and content will be allowed on any given service. It prevents the perverse incentives of spying and selling users. It allows you to add things to your site on a whim just by copying a file to your web directory or opening an text editor. All the tools of your operating system, this refined and extremely usable software is now just there. Now you don't need a database. No need for a CMS. No need for scaling or containers or 99.9999% uptime. Hosting from home allows you to participate in the 'net in a way that is just natural. When there's not 5 layers of abstraction between you and the web you really can participate and build whatever you want. And since you don't need all that abstraction, dynamic content, and CMS (your OS is the CMS!) the security problems everyone loves to jump on simply vanish. Say you want to monitor your logs, well, you don't need to go install some dynamic language parser and prettifier full of attack surfaces. You just tail the log and grep. You open it in OpenOffice if you really have to have a GUI. You can set alerts as easily as tailing a log. You see day to day the type of bots, people, and referers and how they come to your site all without google analytics. You can respond to people using your site in real time; I love adding personal messages to people as they browse my site(s). This is what I mean by participating in the net. Getting down into it. It's a beautiful thing and it solves so many problems that can't even be approached when you're using someone elses computer and someone else's connection. And if you're in the USA you completely bypass third party doctorine and actually have an expectation of real privacy. I just don't get the hostility to the concept I see on HN.
  - Sohcahtoa82 9y ago
    > Hosting from home is more than enough for a personal website. It cuts the gordian knot of deciding what types of speech and content will be allowed on any given service. Cool, and then when I post something to my self-hosted blog that pisses someone off, my home internet gets DDoS'd and I lose my Internet access. It has happened before on IRC. I banned a user because they were spamming racial slurs, and they responded with a DDoS. I was offline for an hour while struggling to get someone on my ISP's support line that understood what it meant to force my IP address to change. Now I use an IRC bouncer in AWS to hide my home IP address. > It allows you to add things to your site on a whim just by copying a file to your web directory or opening an text editor. All the tools of your operating system, this refined and extremely usable software is now just there. Now you don't need a database. No need for a CMS. No need for scaling or containers or 99.9999% uptime. I think you misunderstand the reasons people use CMS. It makes it so I can just fill out a single text box and click "Post" and have all the indexes and links on the entire web site update automatically to include that post. I can allow people to write comments. I can create the ability for users of my site to search it. And maximum uptime is still important. My home internet died shortly after I got to work a couple days ago, and I wasn't able to fix it until I got home. 10 hours of straight unplanned downtime is unacceptable for any server, even a personal website, IMO. > And since you don't need all that abstraction, dynamic content, and CMS (your OS is the CMS!) the security problems everyone loves to jump on simply vanish. The truth is quite literally the opposite. If I'm hosting it myself, and my server gets hacked, my entire home network becomes at risk. > Say you want to monitor your logs, well, you don't need to go install some dynamic language parser and prettifier full of attack surfaces. You just tail the log and grep. Uh...people can tail and grep logs from any server. You misunderstand there's a reason people use dynamic language parsers and prettifiers. Look at raw logs is awful. It's far easier to fire up a log analyzer and see "Oh, there are a lot of people making requests to X resource and it's creating a bottleneck." > It's a beautiful thing and it solves so many problems that can't even be approached when you're using someone elses computer and someone else's connection. It creates more problems than it solves. It puts my home network at risk. It makes me in charge of dealing with hardware failures. If whatever I'm hosting gets popular, and I can't scale. > I just don't get the hostility to the concept I see on HN. Because what you're proposing shows extreme naivete.
gruez 9y ago
>You can consume and that's about it. Uploading videos isn't "consuming". Writing blogs/articles isn't "consuming". Contributing to open source projects isn't "consuming". Neither of those activities require forwarded ports.
- superkuh 9y ago
  True enough. But they also aren't participating in the net. They're using other people and companies' resources to do things rather than participating yourself. And that's bad because it leads to centralization. And centralization leads to perverse incentives to spy and censor.
  - fwip 9y ago
    You've got a weird definition of participation.