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This is always topical: Don't use VPN Services https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29 https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29
by CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
This is always topical: Don't use VPN Services
https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29 https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29
- crazydoggers 7y agoThe article is slightly more nuanced... know when and why to use VPN is more accurate. As mentioned near the end of that article, using known or suspected hostile networks, like public WiFi is a good reason to use VPN.
- Spooky23 7y agoThe problems addressed by avoiding a locally hostile network by connecting to another, globally hostile network is solving a very limited, nuanced set of problems. Unless you're VPNing to your home or office, these public providers are just asking for trouble. They're too cheap to run well.
- crazydoggers 7y agoYes, you can run your own VPN... that’s a great solution. Also public WiFi attracts low hanging fruit sort of exploits. Incentives for the VPN company that already makes money, to actively hack and exploit your machine are significantly less. It’s not a privacy issue, it’s a security issue.
- malux85 7y ago"Dont use VPN services" then at the bottom: So then, what? THIS TYPE OF VPN
- bildung 7y agoWhich is not a service, but a self-hosted open source solution.
- malux85 7y agoYeah much better, a server that the user will probably not be talented enough to secure and will forget to patch the OS, libraries or application itself. /s
- russiandriver 7y agoAnalogy: "Don't eat at restaurants if you want to control your food." "If you for some reason cannot do that, here is a way to set up a food truck"
- okal 7y agoAnalogies are imperfect, but I think the intention was more like "If for some reason you cannot do that, here is a simple meal you can make in your own kitchen."
- ultraism 7y ago> Because a VPN in this sense is just a glorified proxy. The VPN provider can see all your traffic, and do with it what they want - including logging. So can my ISP and they have been confirmed to sell customer data and work directly with NSA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/25/att-secretly-sells-customer-data-law-enforcement-hemisphere https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/25/att-secretl...
- s_dev 7y agoPick a cloud provider you trust. I was thinking of moving from Digital Ocean (US) to Hetzner (German) and setting my own VPN up through a normal server.
- ultraism 7y agoWhy are public cloud providers more trustworthy than VPN providers? Some VPN providers are sketchy but not all of them.
- s_dev 7y agoIt's not that they're more trustworthy it's that you have more control. They could be feeding traffic to the NSA as well but you can encrypt it yourself -- with VPN services like Nord you're relying on other people to do that for you but often VPN services can offer convenience services like country switching etc but if security is what you're after then cloud providers and setting up your own VPN seems like a more reliable alternative. To the people looking to setup a simple http proxy in three steps: 1. Set up a server instance who's IP you know and have configured ssh. 2. In Browser: Manual SOCKS Proxy: 127.0.0.1: your_chosen_port 3. In terminal: ssh -i ssh_key -D your_chosen_port user@ip_address
- jerf 7y agoI've pondered this before, but I don't see much advantage in having my traffic which currently comes from many IP addresses as I roam about the world, many of them shared and constantly changing, all come from one IP address that is absolutely only me. Plus browsing the web from a hosting provider is a worse web; you'll get more sites rejecting you or putting you through bad CAPTCHAs all the time because the same service you can rent a server from, so can all the spammers and scrapers and other bad actors, so you're pretty likely to end up in an IP space with bad reputation. If anyone can argue me out of this position, go nuts. I want this to work and do something useful, I just can't convince myself it does even with that bias.
- danShumway 7y ago> Your IP address is a largely irrelevant metric in modern tracking systems. I don't believe this for one second. Your IP address on its own is not sufficient to identify you. That doesn't mean your IP address is not helpful in identifying you. If you have Javascript disabled, it is a heck of a lot easier to identify you with a combination of an IP address, user agent, and OS than it is to identify you without the IP address cutting down the pool of potential visitors. On top of that, if you're targeting me and do a geo-location of my IP address, it will get you within 5 miles of my house. That's close enough that you'll know which county I'm in, which with a few other easily-obtained pieces of information will let you pull up my voter registration, which will give you my exact street address. Of course, you could mitigate this by setting up your own VPN on something like Linode, but unless you're regularly rotating IP addresses, you've just traded a pseudo-identifier that multiple people/devices share for a persistent identifier. This argument comes up all the time, and I have never heard anyone explain it in a way that passes my sniff test. If you want me to stop using a VPN, you need to do a lot better than just claiming that IP addresses don't matter -- you need to show some kind of evidence to back that up.
- orbital-decay 7y agoIf you have Javascript disabled, it is a heck of a lot easier to identify you because you're one of the very few who disabled Javascript.
- concordDance 7y agoAre there really so few of us? It feels like there should be millions of us: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/noscript/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/noscript/
- neop1x 7y agomodern "web apps" written purely in tens of MB of javascript complicate it a bit
- danShumway 7y ago
- golergka 7y agoIt absolutely ignores government's censorship, though. I use NordVPN simply because I want to access resources that would be otherwise banned for me.
- sli 7y agoIt also ignores that some VPN services have proven their no logging claims in court, multiple times.
- coldpie 7y agoMore importantly, don't do anything private on a networked computer. As the daily breaches show, there is no such thing as computer security in 2019.
- BjoernKW 7y ago> You are on a known-hostile network Which is precisely the use case I use a VPN for. I'd rather trust an at least somewhat trustworthy VPN provider with my data than a random coffee shop and clients who happen to be on the same network at the time.
- jrockway 7y agoI feel like that's crazy. There should be no traffic entering or leaving your machine that's not end-to-end encrypted already. Trusting some fly-by-night VPN provider because they buy a lot of YouTube ads is no substitute for proper end-to-end session level encryption.
- runeb 7y agoSimply seeing what servers you connect to can reveal a lot about you. Where you work, what social media accounts you have, what apps you have installed, what you are interested in reading etc. HTTPS doesnt help you with that.
- ctz 7y agoThis article tries to enumerate the use cases for use of commercial VPN services, but misses out my only use case of these services: evading geoblocks. It seems fallacious to me.
- jfrankamp 7y agoExactly. Run your own. I setup and teardown vpn's all the time, takes about 5 minutes to launch, a min to teardown via simple cloudformation script.
- ryantgtg 7y agoA strongly-worded gist, but my sole use case is avoiding DMCA notices. VPN still seems like a good solution for that.