141–150 of 240 posts
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> I never understood why people working in tech would ever trust a VPN service? It’s not that I trust them but I’d rather some random company across the world has my jerk off logs rather than my ISP who hands my habits to my government and all its favoured cohorts.
For all you know, your government is running that VPN you’re using
Unsecured Elasticsearch, once again. ( https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/17/ufo_vpn_database/ ) So ES has insecure defaults, I get that and it's been discussed to death. But who the heck, in this day and age, exposes clusters directly to internet traffic? I don't care what the defaults or security measures you have. DONT EXPOSE SERVERS. Place them inside a VPC, preferably a private one(in AWS parlance, behind a NAT…
It's a design problem in my opinion. By default, listening on 0.0.0.0/0 should exclude loopback interfaces by the OS. That way, anything makig incorrect assumptions would fail and would require correction. Second, cloud firewall rules should imply deny all when "none" is selected. That way, having no protection is the same effort as adding at least one manual rule.
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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.
I’ve tried that but all the content providers seemed to know I was using a VPN. Any tips?
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I have been using Mullvad for the last few years: https://mullvad.net/en/ I don't have much to base it on but they seem trustworthy, and I've seen them recommended here before.
I also use Mullvad and I pay by sending an anonymous envelope of cash to Sweden with a random number scribbled on a bit of paper. So far all of the cash I’ve sent has been added to my accounts. There’s obviously no way to know whether they follow through on their no-log claim but my sense is they’re pretty trustworthy. At the very least the person who opens their mail is.
I’m amazed at the smart people that fall for that
The best test are court cases where investigators were stonewalled by a particular VPN provider
If you dont want the US knowing something but dont mind China knowing something, Express VPN got you
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Why would I assure myself that Tor is safe either? Do we know for a fact that government agencies don't control the majority of the egress points?
> Do we know for a fact This always has been and always will be the security rabbit hole. (Well, one of them.) How do you define "know for a fact"? Even if you personally know a person managing an egress node, how do you know they aren't operating on behalf of someone else?
Edit to add: Also, it’s public knowledge that TOR is funded by the DoD, it seems extremely feasible that they privately control a sizable chunk of nodes. Based on what I know of American 3 letter agencies, I don’t think one could resist designing a “secure” system only they can listen in on.
I consider TOR a very secure messaging channel between you, the other party, and the American government (metadata only, but that’s really not too big of a limitation in this case).
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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…
> That's actually not an entirely crazy idea if... Except that it gives them a direct avenue into your network for their own surveillance and other network attacks ... If you think comcast injecting their own JS into http pages is bad, wait you see what the d̶a̶r̶k̶ ̶a̶r̶m̶y̶ CPC could do with such power...
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I’ve tried that but all the content providers seemed to know I was using a VPN. Any tips?
Approximately: IP addresses are allocated to a network operator by the IANA via an ASN. Most large streaming services block non-residential ASNs at this point. Sometimes they miss one here and there. Your best bet is with smaller providers that operate using a less recognizable ASN. At this point even many non-streaming services block traffic from EC2, Azure, and other cloud providers just to cut down on bots.