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Props to Apple for the design of this service. It doesn't hit all the privacy targets that long-time personal VPN users might be looking for, and it doesn't get
by danpalmer 5y ago
Props to Apple for the design of this service. It doesn't hit all the privacy targets that long-time personal VPN users might be looking for, and it doesn't get into the game of trying to circumvent region locked content*, but otherwise it's likely to be a solid privacy improvement for almost all users in a careful and deliberate way.
I use a VPN for other reasons (downloading Ubuntu ISOs mostly) but I'll probably turn this on and leave it running on all my devices because of how transparent it appears to be. I trust Apple's onion-routing design more than I trust my VPN provider not to log things.
* I'm actually glad they don't try to get around region locks. I consume a lot of BBC content and live in the UK. I'm constantly struggling with my VPNs (with UK endpoints) being blocked because others outside the UK could be using them. It would be nice if the BBC didn't block like this, but UK residents do typically pay for the content whereas those outside the UK are unable to.
- loloquwowndueo 5y agoWhy do you use a VPN to download free and publicly available iso images? (Ubuntu). Just curious. Do you download directly from a mirror or use BitTorrent for this? (If the latter I think I kind of understand the rationale for the VPN)
- syntaxstic 5y agoProbably because of this - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/fake-dmca-takedown-notice-targeted-ubuntu-downloaders-yesterday/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/fake-dmca-takedown-n...
- xuki 5y agolinux iso is code for pirated content
- Jiocus 5y agoAnd here I was, still thinking Linux was "an illegal hacker operation system, invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War".
- soylentcola 5y agoI think you've confused it with Lunix.
- Jiocus 5y agoOr was Lunix confused with Linux? All satire anyhow.
- yunohn 5y ago“Ubuntu ISOs” is a common euphemism for pirated content like media or games.
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- chrisfinazzo 5y agoUntil a few months ago, I had never really used BitTorrent to do anything - save for about 20 minutes back in HS almost 20 years ago (!) (I think I was running uTorrent on Windows, it was weird and I really didn't know how to use it.) However, in order to "acquire" [this][1], torrenting was realistically the only sensible option I had. A direct download from the Internet Archive would have taken roughly 7 hours @ 100 Mb/s. The torrent file was done in an hour. To my great surprise, the link isn't dead, so...yeah :) Transmission CLI FTW. [1]: https://www.caseyliss.com/2021/2/14/a-concert-for-charlottesville https://www.caseyliss.com/2021/2/14/a-concert-for-charlottes...
- vultour 5y ago13GB would take less than 20 minutes at 100Mbps. Regardless, I’m not sure why you only consider near instant downloads “sensible”. I often spent several days downloading things when I was younger.
- chrisfinazzo 5y agoNot so fast. Yes, 100Mbps is ~12.5 MB/s, however when I initially tried the .mp4 link I found actual speeds to be much less, (hence the hours long wait I mentioned) so there's definitely throttling going on somewhere. Also, don't count your chickens before they hatch. I remember downloading Flight Simulator 2002 mods over a 56K modem in my youth - anything over 10MB was a stretch - and I didn't actually have a broadband connection until I went off to college in 2005.
- bjoli 5y agoMy ISP throttles bittorrent traffic.
- krageon 5y ago> but UK residents do typically pay for the content whereas those outside the UK are unable to. In essence, what you're saying boils down to "it's already paid for, but nobody else can have it anyway". It's unreasonable and there is no need to make excuses for this behaviour.
- mtsr 5y agoIt's generally down to the terms for content that networks (BBC in this case) buy licenses to. The IP owners don't want the networks to allow the whole world access to that content for the price that the network is willing to pay to show it to their region.
- subpixel 5y agoBut also, and mostly, in reverse. The BBC is the producer and license owner of a ton of programming, and rather than offer that to the world for a subscription fee, they choose to offer it to select partners (previously mainly PBS, now Netflix and Amazon) for a licensing fee, or sometimes in a coproduction arrangement. This is big money, up-front, with no need to build out a global delivery system or deal with millions of customers.
- hnlmorg 5y agoThe BBC aren't allowed to. There are very strict terms in which the BBC can operate. So what they have to do is sell to subsidiaries like BBC America. And there in lies the licensing issues described in the GPs post. This is one of those classic examples of something that looks really simple from an outsiders perspective but once you have to deal with the details you realise it's anything but simple. And through no fault of the BBC either, I might add. Various commercial stations and news outlets have campaigned relentlessly to shut the Beeb down. It's a miracle the service is still operating, even if their hands are tightly tied.
- kmeisthax 5y agoMore generally, geographic licensing maximizes revenue without damaging brand goodwill for the vast majority of customers, so pretty much everyone is going to do it. Hell, I thought the practice would die (or at least slow down) when Netflix started transitioning away from syndicated TV and movies; this never happened. Netflix will totally geoblock their own shows so they can, say, release a cartoon on a weekly basis in Japan but in binge-watchable chunks in America. You will continue to see anything more premium than a high-subscriber-count YouTube channel be geoblocked until and unless one of two things happens: - Geoblocking gets so heinous that it starts to push people away from shows and services, beyond ordinary subscriber churn. This is unlikely - the US is the biggest market for a lot of this stuff, and that's a market full of people who have no desire to watch foreign media ahead of an official release. Hell, most of us don't even have passports, and think that you can just move to another country by asking politely. - Some country or trading bloc gets enough of a bug up their butt about getting releases late that they start amending copyright law to ban the practice. AFAIK, I've heard Australia was considering banning region locked DVD players at one point; and that the EU was considering forcing online video providers to license content on an EU-wide basis.
- Jiocus 5y ago> I use a VPN for other reasons (downloading Ubuntu ISOs mostly). This made me smile. Good one. For context, copyright trolls recently tried to extort torrent users for downloading and sharing Ubuntu ISOs.
- judge2020 5y agoIf you want to give context, a link to the story would be nice: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/fake-dmca-takedown-notice-targeted-ubuntu-downloaders-yesterday/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/fake-dmca-takedown-n... Importantly, OpSec (the company doing this torrent-dmca-for-hire stuff) says the DMCA itself was spoofed > OpSec Security’s DCMA notice sending program was spoofed on Wednesday, May 26, 2021, by unknown parties across multiple streaming platforms.
- Jiocus 5y agoOf course it was a false flag issue, it never made sense from the beginning.
- paranoidrobot 5y agoIn a world where white noise[1], birdsong[2] and someone playing Beethoven on the piano[3] get copyright strikes/takedown notices - I don't think someone getting a copyright notice for downloading Ubuntu is that far fetched. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3637124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3637124 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27004577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27004577
- lanterk 5y agoThere's actually an album called Ubuntu. Quite possible some duncehead set up a bot to download all torrents with Ubuntu in the name and scrape the IPs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28album%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28album%29
- NicoJuicy 5y ago> Props to Apple for the design of this service. I was under the assumption that it was mostly Cloudflare Warp repackaged with a different name?
- defaultname 5y agoThat would be an incorrect assumption. It's an onion that goes to Apple first and then to a variety of external vendors -- Fastly, Cloudflare, Akamai, and likely others.
- NicoJuicy 5y agoSo, the difference is that they encrypt data before they send it through? I'm not sure if my assumption is completely incorrect. While it's onion routed, the grunt of the work seems to be done by "trusted partners".
- cwizou 5y ago> trying to circumvent region locked content Semi-related to this, but they do offer an option to pick between preserving your approximate location and using a broader location. The example they took in one of the sessions was, if you live in San José, with the first option, you'll get an exit node near San José so you can still get local "content". With the second one, you could get an exit node in Los Angeles. In practice in Europe, it looks a bit different. I do live in the north west of France, and with the first option I regularly get an exit node in the southwest of France (from Fastly), about 700km away (which is pretty fine by me). With the second one however, I get exit nodes in Germany and the Netherlands (pretty much exclusively Cloudflare), which can become an issue with region locked content. I had the issue with Prime Video last week not offering me a Tennis match for which they only bought rights for in France. Obviously it's still early and they might tighten a bit the locations outside of the US, but overall it's definitely quick and well thought out. Last thing, all your traffic from Safari (and presumably some other Apple services ? Still unclear) whether http or https will be routed through it. Only http traffic from 3rd party apps (Firefox, curl etc) is routed through the relays, which I think is a pretty sensible default.
- fnord77 5y agoI wish I could pay for bbc iPlayer service outside old blighty. But they don't allow it.
- ptaffs 5y agoThis is as much to do with their content license agreements as it is BBC being disinterested. Material BBC licenses to distribute, they are limited to the UK, and content BBC licenses to foreign TV presumably can't be also distributed to that same region. There is a service BBC run which allows those outside the UK to stream some content (https://www.britbox.com/us/ https://www.britbox.com/us/).
- xnyan 5y agosmartdnsproxy.com - 2 weeks, no credit card needed. Works perfectly and you don't need to use a VPN, just one of their DNS servers.
- fnord77 5y agothis is showing up as a malicious site.
- easrng 5y agoI took a look at this, it seems the way it works is when you do a DNS lookup it does a lookup itself and rewrites the IPs before returning to you. It stores a mapping of client IP and rewritten IP to real IP and when it gets a request on the rewritten IP it looks up the original and proxies the request. Pretty cool, but I wouldn't trust it with anything unencrypted. It offers no privacy benefits.
- ska 5y agoYou still can in some places if I recall correctly. Notably not in US due to licensing disagreements (of course).
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y agoLike, commonwealth nations? Or just countries too small to bother with the legal fees?
- kergonath 5y ago> It would be nice if the BBC didn't block like this, but UK residents do typically pay for the content whereas those outside the UK are unable to. As an exiled Londoner, I would love to be able to pay to access BBC programmes. Unfortunately I can’t, so a VPN is often the only solution (well, I guess torrenting would be another one, but it’s not really better).
- dylan604 5y agoIf only there was a way to store a user's information so that they could be identified with some sort of a login process that would indicate that they are a current valid member. It would also be impressive if this same system would allow the user to indicate that they are currently abroad to allow a temporary exemption of geofencing. Obviously, this is something licensing agreements do not allow for, but it seems like such an obvious user friendly concept that it will never be allowed.
- robotresearcher 5y agoBritBox is a neflix-like service that has UK shows from the BBC and ITV. Decent catalog.
- rlaabs 5y agoBBC Select is another option for BBC documentaries if you have either Amazon Prime video or an Apple TV. https://www.bbcselect.com/ https://www.bbcselect.com/
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- hammock 5y agoWhich vpn do you use?
- danpalmer 5y agoPrivate Internet Access. I used to use NordVPN but found it to be much slower, less stable, worse macOS integration, not as good on the privacy front.
- hammock 5y agoDo you have any thoughts on PIA vs Mullvad?
- bjoli 5y agoPIA is owned in a weird structure I don't understand in a jurisdiction where any legal agreements with my home country are, most likely, non-existant or untested. They also seem to have enormous amounts on money to spend on marketing or paying off torrent review sites. Everybody recommends them, but all of these things make me uneasy.
- sa1 5y agoAfter the recent freenode drama, best to avoid them.
- 1_player 5y agoFWIW, Mozilla VPN is based off Mullvad, which I've enjoyed for a year to download Linux ISOs and I've never had an issue with. Also they have one of the most anonymous of setups (accept cash, crypto, no username or passwords or personal details required, you're just given a random account number you can add credit to) NordVPN is oversubscribed crap. PIA was founded by Andrew Lee, the big brain behind the current Freenode drama, with help of the infamous Mark Karpeles of Mt. Gox fame. I'd rather use something else.
- wolverine876 5y agoPIA is owned by the person who owns Freenode, afaik. I would certainly look into that before trusting them.
- mkr-hn 5y agoThey get some by way of their portion of most Americans' cable bills from BBC America.