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"It might be worth getting a VPN if you use sketchy WiFi often, or want to bypass geo-blocking or restrictive firewalls. But remember that you’re trusting the V
by rsync 7y ago
"It might be worth getting a VPN if you use sketchy WiFi often, or want to bypass geo-blocking or restrictive firewalls. But remember that you’re trusting the VPN provider with all your traffic."
I never understand this false dichotomy - especially in a forum which is named ... let me check ... "hacker news".
Just set up your own.
It costs almost nothing to run a EC2 instance in the region of your choice (or at some other provider like GCS or whatever). There are keystroke-by-keystroke instructions everywhere on setting this up.
Extra points for adding the extremely trivial and also very low cost steps of signing up under a corporate name and removing your personal identity from the account altogether.
Some more extra points for multiplying the almost-zero-cost by 3 or 4 or 5 and spinning up extra copies of your endpoint in multiple regions (or even providers) and manually (or automatically) switching between them.
You don't need to trust anyone - adjust your threat model all the way up to "near nation state" (in the case of Amazon or GCS) and assume these actors could already discern all of your Internet traffic even if you weren't doing business with them.
Christ.
- Ruthalas 7y agoCould you provide a good reference for the process you describe, or maybe just a good set of search terms? I'd like to pursue this, but have just little enough experience with ec2 to not be composing effective search terms.
- kizashi 7y agoI think one of the interesting option out there is: https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand Waiting for https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand/pull/1668 https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand/pull/1668 to be fixed though.
- nitzle 7y agoHey, I wrote the PR you just linked (#1668). Was there an issue with the code changes you ran into? Just asking since you said you were waiting for it to be fixed. If so, I'd love to know what the error was so I can test/fix it. Or did you just mean the underlying issue (ACMEv1 protocol being deprecated)?
- kizashi 7y agoHey, thanks for the fix. I was indeed able to spin off a Streisand server using it without any error <3!
- nitzle 7y agoHey there, I found an issue in the PR recently that affects the auto-renewal process. Nginx will still serve the old certificate after renewal succeeds since it's never restarted or reloaded. I have another PR open to fix this, but there's a manual way to apply the fix if you're so inclined (and you still have that Streisand server up and running). Obviously this only applies if you don't plan on destroying/recreating your Streisand server after the newer PR gets merged (EDIT--just got merged). But just in case, the steps are pretty easy (it's in the PR here too: https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand/pull/1688 https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand/pull/1688): [root@streisand]# cat > /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/deploy/01-reload-nginx.sh << EOF #!/bin/sh systemctl reload nginx EOF [root@streisand]# chmod u+x /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/deploy/01-reload-nginx.sh If your cert was already auto-renewed (unlikely given the timeline), you'll also need to run systemctl reload nginx to serve the new cert, since the deploy script wasn't present when certbot ran the renewal.
- jsjohnst 7y agohttps://github.com/trailofbits/algo https://github.com/trailofbits/algo It’s an Ansible playbook for easily setting up a VPN with good security defaults. It’s so easy and really the only knowledge you need to know is how to get api keys for the provider of choice.
- scarejunba 7y agohttps://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-an-openvpn-server-on-ubuntu-18-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-... Their tutorials will hold your hand all the way to the end.
- miki123211 7y agoBe aware that a lot of streaming services block traffic that doesn't originate from residential IPs, AKA Digital Ocean, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Linode etc. Apparently BBC even uses a whitelist instead of a blacklist. ISPs give them the list of ip addresses they use for individual customers, and those are the only ones permitted. No VPS will help you in this case, trust me, I've tried.
- wolco 7y agoIf the ispes use dymanic ip assignments they have given an ip range to the bbc. Try a few proxies in the uk you might find a machine on the range.
- heavyset_go 7y agoResidential proxies exist.
- scarface74 7y agoThis reminds me of the infamous comment when DropBox was introduced and why geeks don’t get it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
- rsync 7y agoI am looking at the name of this website and I see that this website is named "hacker news".
- tobib 7y ago> It costs almost nothing to run a EC2 instance in the region of your choice I might be wrong about EC2 pricing, but at least for me, ~$11 per region is not "almost-zero-cost". Unless we're talking about on demand instances. I wonder if there is a community run VPN service to utilize instances more efficiently. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/pricing https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/pricin...
- Drdrdrq 7y agoNo need for EC2, you can use Digital Ocean or Hetzner Cloud (GDPR ftw) to cut the costs.
- lsofzz 7y ago> No need for EC2, you can use Digital Ocean or Hetzner Cloud (GDPR ftw) to cut the costs. Throwing GDPR and `ftw' in the same sentence. Hmm. No GDPR does not work that way hah. At least not in the global context. GDPR only applies to you _if_ you happen to be a European Union citizen.
- tzs 7y ago> GDPR only applies to you _if_ you happen to be a European Union citizen There's nothing in GDPR that has anything to do with EU citizenship. 1. GDPR applies to the processing of personal data if the controller or processor is "in the Union", regardless of where the person whose personal data is being processed resides, and regardless of where the processing takes place. 2. It applies to any data subject that is "in the Union". All the places in it that you might have expected it to say "Union citizen" instead say "in the Union".
- jsjohnst 7y ago> It costs almost nothing to run a EC2 instance in the region of your choice Sure, the instance doesn’t cost much, but bandwidth does in the case of AWS and GCS. Streaming 4K video chews through bandwidth.
- phonon 7y agoAWS Lightsail is available in 13 regions and comes with a few TB of bandwidth. https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/
- errantspark 7y ago> Just set up your own. This entire thread is about using a VPN to watch Disney+ outside of geo restrictions. Many many people use VPNs for this purpose and no other. You can't trivially do this on your own at all. You're making it seems simple, getting an VPS with an IP that won't automatically be banned by all sorts of services looking to protect themselves against botnets and the exact sort of geofence hopping that people want to do is extremely difficult.
- Hextinium 7y agoI anecdotally have experienced exactly zero service interuptions while using various VPS providers around eastern and western europe while accessing websites. If you avoid the big name providers they dont seem to block you.
- skinnymuch 7y agoHave you checked to see if ec2 isn’t blocked by Disney+? I would expect that to be blocked. I think Google blocks most ec2 IPs. Going thru 10 GB of data per day would have the total cost above $1/day. Not as cheap as the post makes it seem.
- manigandham 7y agoUsing a cloud provider means high bandwidth bills, being blocked by most sites with IP blacklists, and potentially kicked off and banned by the cloud provider for violation of TOS. You also won't have any anonymity since you're billing details and instances are all logged permanently. It's not really a viable alternative.
- dexterdog 7y agoI do 1 to 4 TB if traffic in my house each month. That would cost $100-400 each month if I ran it through EC2.
- tzs 7y agoCould you use Amazon Lightsail? The $20/month Lightsail plan includes 4 TB of outgoing bandwidth. ($10/month plan includes 3 TB, $5/month includes 2 TB, and $3.50/month includes 1 TB).
- i_am_proteus 7y agoThat'd be about $5 a month on Hetzner.
- altShiftDev 7y agoExtra points for adding the extremely trivial and also very low cost steps of signing up under a corporate name and removing your personal identity from the account altogether. Unless you're paying Amazon in bitcoin you're not removing your personal identity from the account.
- tluyben2 7y agoVultr is one provider you can pay in crypto I think; any others?
- asymptotically2 7y agoYou have to make your first payment via credit card so it's not anonymous unfortunately. joepie91 maintains a list, but it looks like it's a couple of years out of date: http://cryto.net/~joepie91/bitcoinvps.html http://cryto.net/~joepie91/bitcoinvps.html
- tluyben2 7y agoAh I did not know that; I inherited an account from a client. Thanks for that list.
- tluyben2 7y agoEC2 is one of the more expensive options when you add up the bandwidth required. There are tons of small vps and bare metal providers which are cheaper (people named Hetzner, there is OVH and tons of other smaller ones). There is also less chance these are blocked as the streaming providers might not know about them.