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You might want to remind people what commercial VPNs are good for: it masks the IP from _COMMERCIAL_ entities. It doesn't protect from the NSAs of the world bec
by maqp 5y ago
You might want to remind people what commercial VPNs are good for: it masks the IP from _COMMERCIAL_ entities. It doesn't protect from the NSAs of the world because they have no restrictions in what VPN foreign servers they compromise, and FVEY routinely bypasses constitutional protections by compromising servers of opposing countries, e.g. GCHQ and NSA exchange data they extract from the opposing countries citizens.
Mullvad and other VPNs only provide trivial layer of IP address masking, they don't automatically block the endless list of tracking elements from HTTP headers to web bugs, LSOs, JWTs, cookies, webRTC, or canvas fingerprinting, and user actions on the site.
It's also the case simply downloading a bunch of browser plugins will probably make your browser look unique, if it wasn't already.
The best protection you have for anonymous browsing is with the Tor Browser, where every Tor user falls into three buckets depending on the privacy slider setting.
Commercial VPN to access the Internet is mostly a "feel good" service that offloads trust under foreign jurisdiction that might not e.g. have laws wrt. torrenting, but don't think for a second it provides safeguards against governments. It's not that Wireguard isn't excellent protocol, it's that the server is performance aside, just an ordinary computer that can be compromised invisibly with one expensive zero-day and a persistent rootkit, and there's nothing the companies can do about it.
- elliekelly 5y ago> Mullvad and other VPNs only provide trivial layer of IP address masking, they don't automatically block the endless list of tracking elements from HTTP headers to web bugs, LSOs, JWTs, cookies, webRTC, or canvas fingerprinting, and user actions on the site. I’ve been a Mullvad user for a few years now and I’ve been quite happy with them but one thing I’ve noticed is that, no matter how I’ve got Mullvad or my browser configured, BBC/Channel 4 knows I’m not actually in the UK. If anyone has any idea how they’re getting my location I’d be curious to know.
- stavros 5y agoMaybe they just assume that anyone on Mullvad isn't in the UK?
- q3k 5y ago> BBC/Channel 4 knows I’m not actually in the UK. If anyone has any idea how they’re getting my location I’d be curious to know Plenty ways to figure out you're connecting from behind a VPN. Aggressively filtering for well known residential address space, detecting suspicious changes in traffic patterns from shared blocks/IPs used by VPN companies, detecting split DNS behaviour, detecting much higher latency and/or lower TTL between the client and server than what's expected/average within that public address space, detecting unexpectedly low MSS/MTU on the segment behind NAT, ...
- codezero 5y agoYou might be sending a language in the request header (many browsers do this by default), something like en-gb. I bet there are a few other areas this localization information leaks.