Live data from Hacker News

VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN

brave.com

31–40 of 142 posts

Re: VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN

#32
post #24

This is not a new idea. Hola has been around for years. Trying to protect users through access control is foolish. It's like running a Tor exit from home.

Cant recommend not running a TOR exit node from home enough. When i was running mine for the ~6 months it was online, cox would shut my internet off for various reasons on a weekly basis.

Re: VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN

#33
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously you can do a block for *.onion. But suppose someone searches up "how to make a [insert bad thing]" or something else inappropriate on something as simple as Google. It'd be somewhat hard to block all urls from Google or DDG that contain some text (not to mention that I've heard that people who are in this business use acronyms or other slang... which to the general user (like me) probably won't know. Don't…

I believe the blocking is done on a domain/host level, so you'd block google.com in that case. That's likely not required, because google.com is generally thought to be okay, but you are correct that even that may be problematic. If your IP has searched for "$governmentBuilding blueprints" and there's a bomb planted at that building a week later, you could become a person of interest (provided that Google saves the i…

Google knows IPs are shared and track on L7, they know Tor, NAT, CGNAT. So I'd wager if you share access to Google via Tor you'd get issues with Google quite quickly if not logged in and easily L7 traceable, in form of captchas and blocks everywhere.

Re: VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN

#35
post #24

This is not a new idea. Hola has been around for years. Trying to protect users through access control is foolish. It's like running a Tor exit from home.

Cant recommend not running a TOR exit node from home enough. When i was running mine for the ~6 months it was online, cox would shut my internet off for various reasons on a weekly basis.

My IP got blacklisted from various sites for simply running a non-exit relay. People say it's totally safe to run a relay/bridge; it is not.

Re: VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They explain that in the first paragraph or so. This allows edit nodes to decide what types of content will be routed to their node.

And opens the network to abuses Tor was meant to protect against. If proof-of-destination is built into the network then that is a huge step towards invalidating the main benefit of using a VPN -- you don't want someone (your local authority) knowing where you've been. Current VPNs sort-of work by not being in your local jurisdiction. Decentralizing it makes it easier to attack.

It uses zero knowledge proofs, so it doesn't really give anyone on the way proof-of-destination.

Re: VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cant recommend not running a TOR exit node from home enough. When i was running mine for the ~6 months it was online, cox would shut my internet off for various reasons on a weekly basis.

My IP got blacklisted from various sites for simply running a non-exit relay. People say it's totally safe to run a relay/bridge; it is not.

Which sites?
Post reply on HN