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- Nov 14, 2012
The entire point of a VPN is to hide where home is. When you share a connection from Switzerland that lasts a day and is shared with hundreds of people it also helps protect you from corporate trackers that sell your data.
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- Thread starter Null
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🏰 The Fediverse is up. If you know, you know.
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- Nov 11, 2016
I've never quite understood how proton turns a profit off their free available service. I guess there are enough power users that exceed the limitations and pay but boy it's easy for simple browsing.
It really depends who you're 'hiding' from. Your security needs for shitposting about a vindictive cow who likes to try and dox\sue people is a lot different than the security one would need hiding from a state actor.
It really depends who you're 'hiding' from. Your security needs for shitposting about a vindictive cow who likes to try and dox\sue people is a lot different than the security one would need hiding from a state actor.
- Joined
- Apr 28, 2018
Crazy stuff man, I avoided any of them and just went straight for TunnelBear. I just liked the whole bear motif.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
VPNs in my opinion are too big a target for not being very attractive for subversion by certain agencies. That said they're probably safe enough to protect you from random greedy copyright lawyers and crazy forum admins. I'm not entirely sure they're good enough when a place you were active in gets seized complete with logs just because somebody read a bit too much 8chan and went on a spree, or caves in when it gets some low level police inquiry as null has gotten in the past, and my imagination is it depends how much public interest/pressure is on them in such cases. People say this never happened as the truth would come out that a VPN logs and supplies data but when uniformed people show up at your house at 4 AM, take all your electronics and scare and imply to you that you're "in hot water now" and better shut up, you're not gonna talk about it. Most people wouldn't. In many countries "gagging" people to talk about such things is also a perfectly legal tool.
What I'm generally mostly worried about with them is subversion for passive data collection, and I just don't really trust them there personally. That data they collect for god knows whom might not even be valuable now, but with shifts in laws in some countries and technology in general (to sort through it) it might become valuable later. These agencies have a very long breath and love doing shit like collecting stuff for twenty years "just in case". Look it up if you don't trust me on that, even "just" law enforcement loves such strategies. I wouldn't even be surprised if this very post ends up in some agency archive. Not because it's of special interest, just because it was passively crawled with everything else.
What also gives me pause with VPNs is how utterly aggressive some of them are marketed and advertised, even with huge, often unlimited rebates when you do as much as just sign up.
I'd go with Tor for general browsing, the decentralized "no single place knows all, nobody's in charge" nature of it speaks to me more from a security standpoint. I also like how most places lock out tor exit nodes by default, it's a bit of a seal of quality regarding how anonymous it probably is. (barely any of the big players do this for VPNs, strange if they're "just as anonymous&safe" IMHO) Tor has gotten noticeably faster in recent years and places that do blanket bans on exit nodes are often not worth visiting to begin with. Normal stuff (e.g. shopping on eBay, online banking) I personally do without anything as that's tied to my identity anyways. ( = it makes no sense to hide my IP from e.g. Amazon when I do christmas shopping with my account. They know my address. It might even make me less anonymous as they might correlate that data with other browsing I do)
All this also won't help you if you have poor opsec or limited understanding how this stuff works. I for example push my tor browser instance in a network namespace in linux in a way where it can only communicate with the outside world via tor and can't even see my network interace(s)/local network, even if I wanted it to. If you don't get any of that and just want to push a button that makes you anonymous, you might be in an inferior position to begin with. This is not meant in an insulting or arrogant way (I hold privacy very dear and it should be available to everybody) but the truth is if you can't identify risks and plan your own opsec, you might have a problem. Even the kiwileaks have shown that people that found their way here are not good about anonymity and there was enough data in that leak to dox some of them. No fancy vpn/browser/technology is going to protect you if you can't do it by yourself.
What I'm generally mostly worried about with them is subversion for passive data collection, and I just don't really trust them there personally. That data they collect for god knows whom might not even be valuable now, but with shifts in laws in some countries and technology in general (to sort through it) it might become valuable later. These agencies have a very long breath and love doing shit like collecting stuff for twenty years "just in case". Look it up if you don't trust me on that, even "just" law enforcement loves such strategies. I wouldn't even be surprised if this very post ends up in some agency archive. Not because it's of special interest, just because it was passively crawled with everything else.
What also gives me pause with VPNs is how utterly aggressive some of them are marketed and advertised, even with huge, often unlimited rebates when you do as much as just sign up.
I'd go with Tor for general browsing, the decentralized "no single place knows all, nobody's in charge" nature of it speaks to me more from a security standpoint. I also like how most places lock out tor exit nodes by default, it's a bit of a seal of quality regarding how anonymous it probably is. (barely any of the big players do this for VPNs, strange if they're "just as anonymous&safe" IMHO) Tor has gotten noticeably faster in recent years and places that do blanket bans on exit nodes are often not worth visiting to begin with. Normal stuff (e.g. shopping on eBay, online banking) I personally do without anything as that's tied to my identity anyways. ( = it makes no sense to hide my IP from e.g. Amazon when I do christmas shopping with my account. They know my address. It might even make me less anonymous as they might correlate that data with other browsing I do)
All this also won't help you if you have poor opsec or limited understanding how this stuff works. I for example push my tor browser instance in a network namespace in linux in a way where it can only communicate with the outside world via tor and can't even see my network interace(s)/local network, even if I wanted it to. If you don't get any of that and just want to push a button that makes you anonymous, you might be in an inferior position to begin with. This is not meant in an insulting or arrogant way (I hold privacy very dear and it should be available to everybody) but the truth is if you can't identify risks and plan your own opsec, you might have a problem. Even the kiwileaks have shown that people that found their way here are not good about anonymity and there was enough data in that leak to dox some of them. No fancy vpn/browser/technology is going to protect you if you can't do it by yourself.
- Joined
- Apr 20, 2018
like I said before I do not care (not enough energy) if my VPN is doing some shady shit or doesn't resist a determined state actor who thinks I'm a terrorist or illegal weapons dealer or something. If a government really wants to track me down they can easily and I just can't put in the energy to be paranoid. I just don't want to see any ISP letters from watching an old movie or downloading music.
- Joined
- Aug 29, 2019
That is why its a good idea to use TOR when ever you can even for general web browsing. You can't correlate a TOR start/stop time for something that happens on a site if you never stop TOR. Leave a site like drudgereport with it's autorefresh or a site like KF open in a tab and your connected to the guard node constantly.
Use TOR 1 time in a month and it correlates exactly to the time something exceptional happens on a site. Ya that might be you.
Use TOR 31 days a month and something happens its a lot harder to say that was you.
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2019
I got "hacked" in the big kiwifarms breach and literally have only seen an uptick in Nigerian Prince emails to the address associated.
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2018
I got "hacked" in the big kiwifarms breach and literally have only seen an uptick in Nigerian Prince emails to the address associated.
I got scared and started following a tutorial I found on /g/.
- Joined
- Nov 14, 2012
a_lurker
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 16, 2019
People who use their VPN to avoid getting nastygrams from their ISP from torrenting. Eats through the data caps on most free vpn accounts quick.
selamat_pagi
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 24, 2019
I run my own VPN on an EC2 instance, works wonderfully. Free for a year, and something like $7 a month at my current data usage after. Highly recommend.
- Joined
- Oct 7, 2019
The difference between shady and not-shady VPNs is more for general privacy concerns than anything else, imo. You're right - if the feds want you they'll get you, no matter what you do. However, the company that just bought PIA has an awful reputation. They're an aggressive tracking and advertising company, and they've also been involved in adware and browser hijacking in the past (you can read about that a bit here). The MPAA still won't bother to get your real IP, and the spooks will still get it if they want it, but if you're a general privacy sperg like me, the difference between that and a more reputable provider is absolutely critical.
- Joined
- Apr 26, 2017
Fucking Semper Fi. Thanks for the heads up, Josh. Little things like these are why I stick around. Every crazy motherfucker under the sun can suck my ball if they don't like my opinion, dox or not but a cover of a fuckup coming from a service or site admin feels like actual treason and a completely valid reason to bolt the fuck out.
No electronic service is safe but morals are a choice. If you compromise those, you're done.
No electronic service is safe but morals are a choice. If you compromise those, you're done.
a_lurker
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 16, 2019
eh, if your the sort to use the vpn to "hide among the crowd" and an additional layer of CYA when your up to shady shit, this method does fuck all as the traffic coming out of it is directly tied to you and your billing info.
However if you're trying to make a remote access tunnel to and from home, or just for a private pipe when on foreign networks, this ain't too bad of an idea if you've got the cash to do it. Trusting yourself is better than some less than transparent company shilling "privacy services"
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2017
Depends on the jurisdiction. I wouldn't trust anyone's who can type weird letters.
> park some distance away
José Mourinho
The Special One
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kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
Been using ProtonVPN even before the affiliation, and it was mentioned on the forum too several times when discussing about VPN options.
So far it's pretty good for me.
So far it's pretty good for me.
- Joined
- Nov 14, 2012
I noticed that ProtonVPN uses very clearly labeled "ProtonVPN XX" ASN names which would indicate to a network administrator it is a proxy service.
- Joined
- Nov 21, 2019
whats the most expedient way to transfer my data to the cia aws servers
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