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Using a VPN would protect the privacy of your IP sessions from Verizon, although your VPN provider would now be able to see all of your session information. I

• gzer0 5y ago
  I suspect that the effort required to succesfully produce viable evidence from a VPN provider such as Mullvad are significantly higher than the effort we see here from ATT, T-mobile, Sprint, and Verizon.
  • travoc 5y ago
    That is probably true in most cases. Choose your poison.
  • flowerwolf 5y ago
    Also, don't use a VPN provider that knows who you are and don't use one in your own jurisdiction.
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  I am my own VPN provider. EC2 micro instance on AWS running StrongSwan. Sure, feds could dig that up, but it would be messier. I wonder what in/out logs AWS keeps on its VPCs....
  • zzyzxd 5y ago
    > EC2 micro instance on AWS running StrongSwan Just curious, how many captchas do you solve with this setup daily? Or even IP bans? I did exactly the same thing once and it was so annoying.
    • SavantIdiot 5y ago
      None? I've had this for a long time with no issues. That's weird. I'm on it now listening to spotify, reading WaPo and browsing HN. What sites complain? I'll try it?
      • bklyn11201 5y ago
        Why pay AWS $0.09 a GB tax to listen to Spotify?
        • SavantIdiot 5y ago
          Yes. Spotify. Ahem. That's why I use my VPN... cough cough.
      • rlt 5y ago
        You might have gotten lucky with the static IP / subnet assigned to your machine. I set up a VPN on a Digital Ocean instance and got captchas all the time on various websites, especially ones using CloudFlare etc (I’m aware of Privacy Pass but didn’t bother setting it up as it was a temporary thing)
    • beermonster 5y ago
      You can always use Privacy Pass as quite often you're dealing with CloudFlare protected sites. That said, if you're using your own EC2/lightsail instance you won't see as many CAPTCHAs as, say, using a commodity VPN service. Given you can't detect a VPN per-se (if configured properly) usually the way it works is that the destination node knows you're coming from a source IP from a known VPN-supplier's well-known IP-block. If you go for this kind of setup (running your own VPN on AWS) you're simply changing your ISP to Amazon. They still might (and probably will) be monitoring egress traffic at the very least to perform any kind of incident analysis.
      • flowerwolf 5y ago
        The big providers are definitely monitoring, and are probably working with NSA/FBI, if nothing else then at least to look for APT CNE/org.crime.
  • gtsteve 5y ago
    t3.micro = $0.0104 x 750 = $7.80/mo without taking your bandwidth into consideration. Lightsail costs $3.50/mo with 1tb transfer bundled or $5/mo with 2tb. If your setup is scripted then it probably makes sense to switch over to save a bit of cash. Others following the same path could save some money by using Lightsail as opposed to EC2.
    • SavantIdiot 5y ago
      Yeah, but I wanted full control...
      • mnahkies 5y ago
        Can you please clarify what control you are gaining using EC2 over lightsail? (And why it's useful for your stated purpose)
        • SavantIdiot 5y ago
          I know I'm not selling my requests? I don't have to trust lightsail. Sure, I have to worry about AWS keeping logs of my requests but that seems less likely? Is that your argument?
          • fomine3 5y ago
            AWS operates LightSail and LightSail is cheaper for who use bandwidth a few TB. That's why the question.
          • mnahkies 5y ago
            Lightsail is basically an EC2 instance packaged with an ipv4 address, storage and bandwidth to compete with low cost VPS providers. I personally use lightsail for most always on things and then just use ec2 for on demand workloads, because it works out far cheaper (these are just random personal projects so I'm heavily optimising for low cost) You can't configure the lightsail instances as much as an EC2 instance, but otherwise it's essentially the same product (both operated by AWS).