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I stopped trusting VPNs that weren’t hosted by me years ago. Wireguard is simple enough that any reason to is rapidly diminishing.
by jolux 6y ago
I stopped trusting VPNs that weren’t hosted by me years ago. Wireguard is simple enough that any reason to is rapidly diminishing.
- pen2l 6y ago> If you wanted to see what the most paranoid, security-conscious people are connecting to, and you wanted to install software on their systems that is designed to read all their network traffic and then redirect it through a single choke point, then setting up a VPN service with a huge advertising budget would be a great way to do it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY
- mindslight 6y agoSecurity conscious people aren't installing proprietary VPN trapware, nor routing all of their traffic out one VPN.
- jolux 6y agoWhat are “security conscious” people doing instead, out of curiosity?
- zeepzeep 6y agoTOR
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoI suppose the traditional paranoid answer is TOR.
- mindslight 6y agoRunning generic OpenVPN/Wireguard/TOR/etc, and segmenting traffic by purpose/nym.
- jolux 6y agoSure, that's what I recommend. Wireguard specifically.
- sverhagen 6y agoI assumed this was meant to target a particular cross-section of people that were security conscious, yet not tech savvy.
- Dylan16807 6y agoOther than wanting an IP that's not directly tied to you?
- jolux 6y agoNot sure what you mean by “directly,” there are going to be strong financial ties to any VPN provider one chooses, and as such, they are no better than running your own in a lot of circumstances.
- adrianN 6y agoIf the VPN provider doesn't keep logs, you have plausible deniability that it was in fact your traffic coming out of that exit node.
- jolux 6y agoHow can I trust they don’t keep logs?
- wutwutwutwut 6y agoSame way you trust hey.com not share all your email with everyone publicly. By building some kind of trust, describing how they work, their policies, being clear about how they make money and so on.
- jolux 6y agoI don’t know of any VPN provider as trustworthy as DHH and Basecamp.
- wutwutwutwut 6y agoThat's not relevant.
- 6y ago
- thekyle 6y agoLots of use cases aren't covered by a self-hosted VPN. Public VPN servers allow you to blend in with other traffic coming from a shared IP giving you plausible deniability for things like piracy.
- jolux 6y agoMy use case is not piracy.
- arsome 6y agoA few other major use cases I've used them for: - Scraping, when my scraper gets blocked from the real estate site, wallpaper site, etc, I click next IP, change my UA and I'm ready to go for another round. You can play cat and mouse all day without worrying about all your IPs getting banned. - Avoiding DDoS attacks, if you're doing something that makes you likely to become the victim of a DDoS attack, like say, joining a script kiddie's botnet IRC server, not giving a crap if your public IP gets dropped is pretty handy. - GeoIP bypasses, allows you to work around everything from region locked content to discriminatory pricing - Country-wide and default blockades, many countries censor the internet only in minor and weak ways, blocking things like BitTorrent tracker websites by domain or IP that commercial VPNs will trivially bypass
- judge2020 6y agoAn legitimate users still wonder why using a VPN makes the internet harder to use in terms of being on blacklists and having low IP reputation.
- harshitaneja 6y agoWhat is the benefit of self-hosted VPN? No, security benefit I know of, unless you primarily consume HTTP or other unencrypted communication and even then it saves you from MITM or other attacks between you and your VPN server and not till the content server. Anonymity is only a benefit in public VPNs.
- jolux 6y agoIf what you want is anonymity, VPNs are the wrong tool, as evinced by these leaks. My main use case is privacy on unsecured networks such as that of coffee shops.
- Semaphor 6y ago> VPNs are the wrong tool, as evinced by these leaks. Are they? So far every leak I’ve read of, has been by pretty shady companies. This seems more like evidence that if you buy a pacemaker from aliexpress (or in the case of NordVPN from Wirecard or Theranos), you might die from it failing.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoMy ISP has been quite open about selling my information. Therefore, I'm fond of encrypting everything they see, including destination IPs, DNS, and non-TLS traffic; a VPN is a simple solution. EDIT: To clarify, I know my ISP's spying on me. Therefore, in some models, trading that against a VPN service that might be spying on me in the same way could be a favorable trade. YMMV.
- bouncycastle 6y agoHang on... If you use a self-hosted VPN through a VPS, the hosting company that's providing the VPS could still log ir MITM traffic from the VPS. So you still need to trust someone, no?
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y agoIf you have an encrypted channel to the VPN server, it'd be quite difficult to extract any meaningful data from it.
- kdrag0n 6y agoThe hosting provider can still monitor egress, which is what's more valuable anyway. Hypothetically, they could also snapshot the RAM for deferred analysis, though that's usually more trouble than it's worth. You have to trust someone in the end.
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y agoWell, if you want 100% security, you have to build your own internet. But hosting your own VPN is reasonably safe, unless you have reasons to believe a government-sized entity is specifically targetting you, in which case, yeah, just don't use the internet.
- bouncycastle 6y agoWell, that's what VPNs were designed for in the first place - building your own private network! However, it's a misconception that VPNs provide privacy for browsing the public internet. As we see, there are many weakness.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]