11 ms·
Why You Should Start Using a VPN
- robotmay 14y agoI'm starting to consider this pretty seriously due to a flurry of incoming snooping laws in the UK. I normally do a bit of SSH tunneling out to a VPS if I need a proxy; is SSH my best option/most secure option? What do others recommend?
- ibotty 14y agossh is certainly save. some find it not very comfortable though. (but if you know your way around ssh, you should be fine)
- eckyptang 14y agoLikewise. General options: 1. Don't do anything the state considers naughty. I suggest you kill yourslf now if you consider this viable. 2. Steal someone else's WiFi and deal with the moral consequences. You can do this by finding a "VendorA7E4B4" lookalike SSID (default configuration) and using the password calculator here: http://www.nickkusters.com/Services/SpeedTouch/Lookup http://www.nickkusters.com/Services/SpeedTouch/Lookup - I only know of this as I had to lock my router down due to unauthorised access. 3. Use a VPN and risk being logged or falling foul of RIPA. 4. Use a dead drop http://deaddrops.com/ http://deaddrops.com/ and risk being bagged at site. 5. Use SSH tunnels + proxy and risk misconfiguration + logging and RIPA. 6. Use paper or sneaker net and risk stop+search and RIPA. Welcome to the machine.
- joethompson 14y agoBest/most secure option for tunnelling traffic through to your VPS? SSH is definitely secure enough for that, provided you have a strong password or even better key-based authentication. To make something like that more user friendly though you could just install VPN software like OpenVPN on your VPS. This also ensures things like DNS queries are sent over the VPN so they can't be intercepted on their way to the server. Of course this assumes you trust your VPS provider, at least more than your ISP.
- gizzlon 14y agoas long as you're sure you tunnel all the traffic through, so nothing "leaks" out to your local network. If you just do port-forwarding, you'll miss DNS, for example.
- davedx 14y agoAre most VPN providers fine with you using your VPN as a server (e.g. web) of some kind? Or is that frowned upon / against TOS usually?
- wladimir 14y agoVPN providers simply give you the VPN endpoint to use with e.g. OpenVPN configuration. They don't give you login information for a server (unlike VPS). You could maybe run a server behind the VPN, but many don't give you a dedicated IP but use NAT. It could be that you're allowed to open ports and redirect them to you, but whether this is possible differs per provider. It's not usually part of the normal package.
- SnaKeZ 14y agoI have a WRT54GL Router with Tomato "Victek" firmware so I can connect with Open VPN. Cheap and secure solution.
- drtse4 14y agoI can't recommend enough the use of sshuttle: https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle Way better than a SSH tunnel (check the readme) and you don't need to have a VPN server on the remote server, just ssh access. Supports both Linux/OSX, been using it for nearly one year without issues.
- icebraining 14y agoI'm a fan too! Just a correction: you need ssh and python, since it launches a daemon on the server (it uses a clever way of doing that, by packing and pushing all the necessary code over the SSH connection to the Python interpreter).
- ch0wn 14y agoReally great tool and dead-simple to set up. However, the last time I checked, there was no DNS and UDP support. Do you know if that changed?
- robotmay 14y agoLooks like it supports DNS now, from looking at the readme.
- drtse4 14y agoYes, it supports dns now using the --dns option. UDP is not supported though.
- pyre 14y agoThe --dns option routes all DNS requests over the VPN connection. This means that you can't connect to a work VPN and (e.g.) browser porn on your lunch break. A cool option would be to route specific DNS requests over the connection (e.g. just requests for an internal DNS domain).
- StavrosK 14y agoI don't understand, what does this do that ssh -D doesn't?
- michaelt 14y agoIt's all very well saying a VPN services keep your communications secure, encrypted and away from the prying eyes of your ISP - but why would you trust a VPN provider more than an ISP? These consumer-oriented VPN services marketing to bittorrent users seem kind of sketchy to me.
- tjoff 14y ago"but why would you trust a VPN provider more than an ISP?" You probably shouldn't. There are most likely laws against your ISP from listening in on your traffic, not for your VPN. If the government wants to listen in it doesn't matter, your VPN service is forced to cooperate anyway so you haven't gained anything. If I'd use a VPN I'd make sure to use one that is in another country, probably making it a bit harder to connect the VPN and ISP to you that way - but hardly bulletproof.
- rahoulb 14y agohttp://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anonymity-seriously-111007/ http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anon... Of course, the providers there could be lying about not keeping logs, but it's interesting none the less.
- rotation1 14y agoThis is my big problem with wanting to use a VPN. The VPN account is directly tied to you by your payment details. Also most VPN services that claim to "not keep any logs whatsoever" are just a 3 page website with not much information. Maybe that's safer since they are low profile, or maybe it isn't? I honestly have no idea and I wish I did. It feels like your just trusting some random person to not mess with you.
- muyuu 14y agoSimple, pay with bitcoin. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade#Connectivity https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade#Connectivity
- 14y ago
- pilif 14y ago> "VPNs are the only way to stay safe when using something like BitTorrent" very wrong. It's not really much. It's probably just limiting your possible bandwidth. If somebody wants to catch you, it's just one additional step to get to you (via the VPN provider).
- icebraining 14y agoIt certainly doesn't make you safe, but if the threat is a fishing expedition trying to get a few hundred or thousand Torrenters, the fact that they'd need a court order from a different country/jurisdiction might be enough to get them to leave you alone.
- w1ntermute 14y agoAnd a seedbox would work just as well for this purpose, and will result in much higher upload/download speeds and, in the case of private trackers, save you the costs of owning/running a PC on 24/7 to seed back your downloads.
- meritt 14y agommm. amazon micro free tier and rtorrent.
- voltagex_ 14y agoWouldn't Amazon stomp on you pretty quickly for this?
- TheAmazingIdiot 14y agoThey didn't the last time I did that. I had some dodgy stuff going on over at an amazon free tier, including; socks proxy, ping tunnel, Metasploit, semi hidden tor end-node, ctorrent, and a few other things. I also linked a 25$ visa card from a convenience store, so very limited traceability. All they did was bill me for the bandwidth.
- olalonde 14y agoShameless plug: I've just spent the last few days figuring out how to correctly configure OpenVPN and pptpd on my Ubuntu servers + Android & OS X clients (it's a real pain in the ass). I'd be happy to install and configure those on your own server(s) for 5 BTC per install (I'm kind of short on money right now :(). If you want to give it a try by yourself, I recommend the following articles (doesn't seem that complicated but trust me, you can be stuck on a bug for hours!): http://library.linode.com/networking/openvpn/ubuntu-10.10-maverick http://library.linode.com/networking/openvpn/ubuntu-10.10-ma... http://blog.riobard.com/2011/11/12/pptp-vpn-on-ubuntu http://blog.riobard.com/2011/11/12/pptp-vpn-on-ubuntu. I can help with minor problems on Skype as well (o-lalonde).
- joethompson 14y agoIt should be noted that PPTP does have some serious vulnerabilities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-to-Point_Tunneling_Protocol#Security http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-to-Point_Tunneling_Protoc...) and should probably be avoided if security is your primary concern.
- olalonde 14y agoTrue but it's much easier to set up on server side as well as client side. I mainly use VPN to get around firewall of China so security isn't really an issue for me.
- joethompson 14y agoYeah, unfortunately the others are a bigger pain, main reason why I use PPTP myself.
- MikeCapone 14y agoWouldn't getting around China's firewall mean that security is more, not less, important? I know that if I was in a country where the government could imprison me for what I read or write, I'd make double-certain my security is up to par.
- 14y ago
- belorn 14y agoThe What Makes for a Good VPN section lacks one major and important aspect. Ping times (latency). If you play games online, you want a VPN that is either close to you, or close to the game servers, or which traffic is highly prioritized. If you are lucky, you might increase your latency going through a vpn than if you went without. It sound illogical, but routing is not equal for all, and traffic might be boosted if your VPN's network has higher priority than your ISP. Going from europe to US, I found that different AS had latency up to 200-300 MS in difference, and this does not take into account the stability of it. One net had a average of 80ms which only differentiated with 50m over time (the Swedish national university ISP). The Swedish ISP's that offer services to the public almost all uses a other backbone network than the university ISP, and that has an average of 250 ms to US, and which latency goes up and down between 150-800ms.
- gizzlon 14y agoJust me, or is this very misleading: [..] all of your internet communication is encrypted and secured from eavesdropping. The most important thing you need to know about a VPN: It secures your computer's internet connection to guarantee that all of the data you're sending and receiving is encrypted and secured from prying eyes. Eh.. No? It secures the data from you to the VPN provider. After that, it's just as open and unencrypted as it would otherwise be. Sure, it probably helps protect your data from the local network & your ISP, and gives you extra anonymity. But after leaving the provider, the traffic would be in the clear, and if you use the same connection to log-in to your facebook, the anonymity will go out the window.
- PlanetFunk 14y ago^ This. VPN is not a magic bullet. It stops your ISP from snooping and adds another hoop to jump through when tracing you. If the sites you visit (nodes you hit) are monitored you are still at risk. [Edit] not protected/still at risk.
- XERQ 14y agoI run SSD Nodes (http://www.ssdnodes.com http://www.ssdnodes.com), which you can use to set up an OpenVPN/PPTP/SSH-Tunnel server for secure, private access. I've seen users in other countries using our cloud servers for VPN purposes because they got better, lower latency routes to most other providers (due to the optimized transit/peering connections at SoftLayer Infomart in Dallas, TX). [/plug]
- im3w1l 14y agoHow did you see that?
- XERQ 14y agoOne of the companies on our platform actually built an entire business around selling proxies for people in other countries to have better latency to gaming servers in the US. At one point they had all their proxy/VPN endpoints on our platform. Unfortunately they aren't in business any more. Their current site: http://flashping.com/en/ http://flashping.com/en/ Website archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20100108103341/http://www.flashping.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20100108103341/http://www.flashpi...
- lucb1e 14y agoAnyone else missed the "why" part and only read about "what" and "how"? I read most of the article, but the only thing it says on the matter is that it encrypts your internet connection. This might be true, but what use is that? Why would I want to do that? That question is not answered. Or whynot use Tor instead?
- petitmiam 14y agoIt's explained under the section "Why You Need a VPN, or How You Can Benefit from Using One", which has dot points for different types of users.
- furyg3 14y agoI posted this on another thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3913985 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3913985), but I think it's relevant here... I feel pretty double about VPN as a solution for masking my online activities. My reasons for using a VPN break down into these (related) categories: 1. Security. I don't trust this network at all, such as unsecured wifi in coffeeshop. 2. Access. This network has draconian restrictions I need to get around, such as corporate proxy servers or country firewalls. 3. Privacy. It's none of this network's business what I'm doing. 4. Legal. I don't want to get in trouble here. Especially when traveling where I don't know the laws, but increasingly in my own country. Hell, the courts in NL haven't figured out if TPB is legal, how should I know? VPN can solve many of these problems most of the time... but always using a VPN means that I have a single point of failure for all four of these. If my VPN provider is compromised, shady, or coerced to turn over my data, I'm sunk. In that way using various internet connections at home/work/coffeeshop/mobile may be better.
- corford 14y agoValid point but there's nothing stopping you setting up your own VPN (either on a small VM from someone like Linode or, if you're paranoid enough, a cheap 1U server bought off ebay and placed in a colo facility). For the single point of failure issue (which is also valid)... just setup two or more VPNs :) And, in an emergency, you can always fall back to the underlying connection.
- snowwrestler 14y agoSetting up your own VPN does not solve the traceability problem, unless you happen to find a colo facility that does business in face-to-face cash transactions only. If you use Linode to set up a VPN, Linode knows your personal and Linode IP, knows when you access their network, and knows your name and billing info. If compelling by warrant they will turn that over to law enforcement.
- corford 14y agoSorry, I didn't realise removing traceability was the goal. If you want that, you're better off with tor not a VPN.
- pavs 14y agoanother recommendation would be to setup your own vpn server and change servers often instead of going for a vpn provider. http://www.slashgeek.net/2012/06/15/how-to-be-completely-anonymous-online/ http://www.slashgeek.net/2012/06/15/how-to-be-completely-ano...
- alokm 14y agoSteps to configure your own vpn http://library.linode.com/networking/openvpn/debian-6-squeeze http://library.linode.com/networking/openvpn/debian-6-squeez.... Used it my self.
- wlk 14y agoNice :) It would have been so much easier for me if I known this link since I configured my own server as VPN for me
- jcr 14y agoIt's sad to see the reasoning for using VPN's being so deeply mixed with bittorrent and similar things "worth hiding" according to some. There are actually many good reasons to use various forms of secure tunneling. Many ISP's serve requested pages from massive caches. Although provider caching can improve performance in some cases as well as reduce bandwidth costs for the ISP, it can often result in stale information being passed to the client (you!). Another common speed/cost improvement for ISP's is serving degraded images from their cache -- by recompressing images (jpg) at a higher compression ratio, the file size is reduced at the expense of degrading the image quality. This is extremely common on mobile networks, but it is becoming more common with land-based providers. In most cases, you'll never notice, since you'll just assume it's a crappy image from the original server. On the other hand, if you do any work with images, then you could be stuffed by the modified images being delivered to you. Having a consistent endpoint provided by a VPN provider can also be a real advantage. For example, if you're doing checking, testing or trouble shooting, against a system on the `net, then knowing what traffic is yours in the logs can be real helpful. With dynamic IP addressing, your endpoint (public IP) always changes. When you're using a VPN and helping out a friend with something as trivial as reporting bugs, you can tell them that the funky traffic from xxx.example.com is just you running some tests. Even if the site owner isn't your best friend or anyone you really know, it's great when reporting bugs to say, "Hey pg, my traffic is always coming from la.tunnelr.com" so it's easier for them to find it in their logs. If you need to do your own pen testing across the `net and your ISP does deep packet inspection (DPI) and egress filtering, then once again, you're stuffed without a VPN or unfiltered remote host. Of course, you need to be on good terms with your VPN provider and let them know in advance that you'll be sending some dodgy traffic over their network, but that's not a big deal most of the time. If you participated in the recent Stripe.com Capture The Flag contest without using a VPN or staged connection (ssh), then you really didn't put very much thought into what could happen if some malicious person rooted the game server and attacked the game participants. Sure, the Stripe folks are fantastic, and they keep an eye on things, but no person has sub-microsecond response times. ;) Also, some ISP's have bandwidth caps and automated thresholds for reducing connection performance, but they usually have a stipulation in their contract excluding VPN bandwidth from the cap/limit accounting. The reason is simple; business customers would use another ISP if the caps/limits interfered with doing work, and most (sane) businesses provide a company VPN to their employees for remote work. I use http://www.tunnelr.com http://www.tunnelr.com almost all of the time simply because it makes my mobile (EVDO VerizonWireless) connection a lot more consistent and reliable on UNIX (OpenBSD). A lot of mobile ISP's don't support UNIX at all, and they expect you to run inane and unaudited software ("VZAccess" which is actually just rebranded stuff from SmithMicro). Having a SSH connection present prevents some of the (intentional) oddities of mobile connections (e.g. "pausing" the link/connection). There are plenty of good reasons to use a VPN that don't involve bittorrent or similar. The best reason of all is if your ISP does not provide all of the exact details of their filtering and caching methods --of course, none do.
- racbart 14y agoHow about setting up your own VPN server on EC2 micro instance for $15/mo + bandwidth (or $127/y using reserved instance)?
- cabacon 14y agoI bet that works. Based on advice in an older HN thread about VPSes, I looked on lowendbox.com and found a Chicago VPS provider for $20/year for a 128M/5G VPS with 200GB/mo. of bandwidth. It seems to run OpenVPN just fine for when I've wanted to use it; I'm just using it when I'm on untrusted wifi, or to route around a network block. I installed TunnelBlick on my mac to be the VPN client; it was a nice interface to setup for the client side, and handles things like DNS flushing automatically. I'm also going to setup ssh servers on 80 and 443 for times when access to ports is restricted by the wifi provider.
- TheAmazingIdiot 14y agoI did similar as well. The local community college blocks all sorts of websites with nannyware on the gateway. I tried changing DNS to googles: no change. I tried a few other things as well, no change. Looked for open proxies: "PROXY search prohibited". What they didnt stop was looking for VPSes. I found one for 20$ a year as well. Loaded up immediately upon payment into a ubuntu 12.04 (rh, slackware, ubuntu, or debian: i dont care). I got a socks proxy running on its localhost, and then ssh tunnelled to the proxy. And there I went.
- ohashi 14y agoI do exactly this. Great for traveling to China and other countries where you might be outright blocked or worried about people snooping. Of course it doubles over on coffee shops and any other shared network you don't trust the provider or neighbors.
- zodiac1111 14y agojustf@ck the GFW
- paltman 14y agoAlso, check out https://www.vpnod.com https://www.vpnod.com
- Karunamon 14y agoSo on that note, are there any VPN providers that HN would recommend? Something preferably not based in the USA or any countries exceedingly friendly with the USA (so the UK, Sweden, etc are out)
- pandakar 14y agoI tried airvpn for a month, had a very good experience, and they are explicit about following EU privacy rules.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- propercoil 14y agomullvad, nuff said
- unhammer 14y agoWell, Mullvad is based in Sweden, which the asker didn't seem to like[1]. However, they do have exit nodes in the Netherlands too, if you prefer, and allow payment with bitcoin. [1] Although I can't think of any suitable alternative countries – I mean, most countries are either fairly friendly with the US, or fairly corrupt, or both (or even fairly corrupt and fairly unfriendly with the US and currently surrounded by big US military bases on all sides). Perhaps the Principality of Sealand?
- BryanB55 14y agoI may be wrong but it was my understanding that a VPN will slow down your internet connection. Is this not true anymore? For those that use a VPN do you keep it connected on your own secured wifi connection the entire day while working with no added lag? I remember using hotspotshield and torproject.org in the past but they always made things so slow it wasn't worth using. Maybe those were just the free/cheap services.
- lobster45 14y agoIt all depends on the service being used. tor is especially slow because your traffic is routed through many points online. Hotspotshield is slow because of the bandwidth limits for the free service. If you pay for a legitimate vpn service, you will get what you pay for, a fast connection
- MattRogish 14y agoI always use a VPN when on an un-trusted network, even if it's secured (someone could always be listening on the wired portion of the network). Personally, I find "Cloak" (https://www.getcloak.com/ https://www.getcloak.com/) to be a fantastic app that works on my Mac and iOS devices. It's super-simple to get setup and running, and very cheap, too.
- calgaryeng 14y agoIs http://www.tunnelr.com/ http://www.tunnelr.com/ the same as any of these external VPN's? I'm not clear on the differences between OpenVPN type stuff and OpenSSH. Is this going to mask my identity online?
- debacle 14y agoWhat is the benefit of using a VPN over something like SSH tunneling?
- sliverstorm 14y agoVPN is much more complete, and generally easy to use. 'ssh -L' sets up a single mapping. 'ssh -D' sets up a proxy on a port, and client software must be configured to use that proxy. With a VPN, you simply connect, and you can access any services on any ports. Additionally, I think UDP is supported, which is a bit tricky with ssh tunneling.
- alexchamberlain 14y agoIf I bought a VPS in the UK and US and connect them via a VPN, is it possible to route traffic geographically?
- pasbesoin 14y ago"The first rule of..." Sigh.
- nextstep 14y agoWhich option would be the fastest? Anyone have a recommendation for all of my traffic that won't severely slow my 50mpbs connection?
- biomechanica 14y agoA VPN will help keep you semi-private for surfing the web. However, when it comes to something like Torrents, someone with a decent amount of knowledge and paycheck would probably not be stopped from finding out who you are. For using bit torrent or other file sharing in a private, anonymous session, I would use I2P. In fact, they welcome it. I'm not sure why a lot people put VPN's up on a pedestal. VPN's are useful for other things but I wouldn't rely on them for 100% or even 90% privacy against a foe that _really_ wants to know who you are. I2P, my friends.
- nikcub 14y ago'VPN' is becoming synonymous with 'anonymous online' but it is far from the truth. for eg. if you use the same web browser in non-VPN sessions as with VPN sessions the cookies being sent are the same and each website just linked your real session with your anon session. It really needs to be VPN, plus separate browser, plus separate browser fingerprint, plus proper failover. But that is much harder to sell/explain to users than something you just pay $6 a month for and forget about
- qq66 14y agoBest way to do this is a separate virtual machine.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]