121–130 of 240 posts
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How? I mean how do you measure VPN services? I never understood why people working in tech would ever trust a VPN service? A VPN is seeing all your traffic, and you have to take their word that they do not log any of it? I use free tier AWS servers across the globe with wireguard. It might not be perfect, but I still prefer that than using a VPN service.
I trust VPN services for the one thing they're good and useful for: hopping over geo-fences for content. You should not have any expectation of privacy or security from consumer VPN services (if you want that, obtain Tor Browser or Tails as your needs require). They provide a means to choose roughly where your client traffic comes from, and that's it. The rest is marketing bullshit. They're probably sufficient for lo…
VPN providers are something you should have especially high standards for. They are largely unregulated, can see all of your meta data and have an economical incentive to sell it (IIRC some big player has been caught doing that). If a provider shows even the slightest amount of fishiness, instantly discard them (NordVPN immediately comes to mind, with their weird influencer marketing campaign).
We need to implement standards of practice for this, let find a legal head to see how it can be done.
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VPNs do have some legitimate uses. Encrypting traffic over malicious networks (e.g. your average airport wifi) is probably the most common one for the average legal user. Getting an IP address in a given country is another sometimes legal use. I honestly don't know if you can do this with your average commercial vpn, but the technology is also good for many things like setting up virtual networks (hence the name) so…
Just how insecure is airport WiFi these days with SSL and HSTS? I don't normally worry about it, and suspect people who still counsel against it of lazy FUD. I'd notice pretty quickly if someone was MITMing all of my traffic. I guess they could MITM a third-party Javascript site that wasn't being served with HSTS. Normally that would just give them all the information I already give to Google or Facebook and the hund…
A browser is a very complex tech stack and it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if there were vulnerabilities exploitable with a MITM. An airport would be a natural place to try and attack computers, lots of people with lots of money many of whom are doing things like moving that money around and many of whom won't think twice about connecting to an unsecured public hotspot.
There's also all the other apps on your computer, how frequently do you think electron-app-foo-bar updates it's chrome version and what are the chances it's using one outdated enough that there are known openssl vulnerabilities against it?
I don't think third party non-HSTS traffic is that much of a concern these days, both firefox and chrome block http traffic from https pages by default.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How? I mean how do you measure VPN services? I never understood why people working in tech would ever trust a VPN service? A VPN is seeing all your traffic, and you have to take their word that they do not log any of it? I use free tier AWS servers across the globe with wireguard. It might not be perfect, but I still prefer that than using a VPN service.
> how do you measure VPN services? It's pretty difficult. You can't say anything for sure, it's all trust. That's why you should be so strict. When you host your own end point you still have to trust its provider of course, but of course the incentive (concentrated, specific user traffic data) for abuse is much reduced. But how anonymous are you actually? Are you sure your traffic can't be connected to you? Certain y…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I trust VPN services for the one thing they're good and useful for: hopping over geo-fences for content. You should not have any expectation of privacy or security from consumer VPN services (if you want that, obtain Tor Browser or Tails as your needs require). They provide a means to choose roughly where your client traffic comes from, and that's it. The rest is marketing bullshit. They're probably sufficient for lo…
I also use my AWS free tier EC2 + wireguard for hopping over geo-fences. It is free, and my traffic is encrypted from my device to the remote EC2 server.
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Won't amazon cancel them when they keep getting copyright letters? Or do vpns have some other use I am not aware of.
I use a VPN to keep Comcast from logging and selling my data to third parties. The client is always on and running on my PC.
VPN providers are something you should have especially high standards for. They are largely unregulated, can see all of your meta data and have an economical incentive to sell it (IIRC some big player has been caught doing that). If a provider shows even the slightest amount of fishiness, instantly discard them (NordVPN immediately comes to mind, with their weird influencer marketing campaign).
How? I mean how do you measure VPN services? I never understood why people working in tech would ever trust a VPN service? A VPN is seeing all your traffic, and you have to take their word that they do not log any of it? I use free tier AWS servers across the globe with wireguard. It might not be perfect, but I still prefer that than using a VPN service.
- Credit only Word of mouth, but it depends what type of VPN you're looking for. So again, word of mouth these days.
> I never understood why people working in tech would ever trust a VPN service?
-I do, quite a bit actually, I need to connect to another network but region specific.. They are a tool for as you say 'in tech' to work.
> A VPN is seeing all your traffic, and you have to take their word that they do not log any of it?
- At least in Europe that doesn't fly. It does depend on your provider though. Thats why you shop around.
- On this point, I will argue that running your own VPN is better, but so is running your own web hosting. It depends on your priorities.
> I use free tier AWS servers across the globe with wireguard. It might not be perfect, but I still prefer that than using a VPN service.
- Good for you. Enjoy.I wouldn't trust any VPN under China's sphere of influence.
That's actually not an entirely crazy idea if you're trying to hide from Western governments. Are you more worried about the Chinese government coming after you? Likewise, if someone in China is trying to hide from the Chinese government, it might not be a bad idea to use an USA based VPN. Maybe string up a bunch of VPNs in regions that are at least somewhat hostile to each other and it might be too hard to track an…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How? I mean how do you measure VPN services? I never understood why people working in tech would ever trust a VPN service? A VPN is seeing all your traffic, and you have to take their word that they do not log any of it? I use free tier AWS servers across the globe with wireguard. It might not be perfect, but I still prefer that than using a VPN service.
all of your traffic? Or just insecure DNS/HTTP requests?