Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need) • Hacker News Board

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#51

Post by NavinF » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 3:47 AM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #47

NavinF wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Last time I used sshuttle (bypassing content blocks in India by tunneling to a server in the US), my bandwidth dropped from 10mbps to 1mbps. Back then wireguard didn’t exist, but IPSEC could easily saturate the 10mbps link. I suspect it’s a combination of TCP-over-TCP and a horrible default buffer size that makes sshuttle unusably slow.

You don't need VPNs to bypass censorship blocks in India. Well, at least in my experience. Apps that manipulate TCP packets locally to break fingerprinting [0] like GoodbyeDPI (Windows) [1], GreenTunnel (cross platform CLI) [2], Intra (Android) [3] have been adequate. [0] https://nitter.net/vinifortuna/status/1304189371688660992 ( https://twitter.com/vinifortuna/status/1304189371688660992 ) [1] https://github.com/Val…

Neat! I’ll keep that in mind next time I travel. Tho I’d still use a self-hosted VPN to hide the destination IP when I don’t mind the latency.

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#52

Post by TedDoesntTalk » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 4:37 AM UTC

dinvlad wrote: post #27

mindslight wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I handle this pragmatically by using different VMs with assorted browsers, browser configs, and exit addresses. For the context of buying from CVS (realworld nym, heavy surveillance), I'm running NoScript and slowly enable domains until the site works. Doing this for some sites actually speeds them up considerably (eg Home Depot).

The problem is in this case, no amount of blocking will work, because the site was completely broken without those, at least for me :-) Though I can reduce the amount of divulged info for sure, but the very fact they're using them means my order details likely go to third-parties, and it's impossible to prevent that because it relies on that reporting in the chain of logic (i.e. order won't proceed until a successful…

Why not just avoid CVS and use another pharmacy (online ordering). I use valisure because they also test the medications they sell for impurities, but there are plenty of others… like even supermarket pharmacies have online ordering now with home delivery or pickup.

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#53

Post by TedDoesntTalk » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 4:41 AM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #38

tzs wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a non-EU site finds itself subject to GDPR because of Article 3(2), they need to then worry about whether or not Article 27(2) applies to excuse them from Article 27(1). If not then they have to deal with the hassle and expense of hiring a representative in the Union. If they are indifferent to EU visitors but happen to get enough of them that 27(2) won't excuse them from 27(1), then it may be worth blocking EU vi…

Just reading this comment makes me inclined to block visitors from the EU from my hobby sites. (Work is compliant; hobby/personal stuff isn’t worth the bother of even reading what Article 3(2) is.)

Rule #437: don’t take legal advice from random internet dudes.

GDPR has been out for some years now and we can see the enforcement personnel do not go after companies worth under $100 million, let alone hobby sites. After all, enforcement personnel only have so much capacity.l just like the FDA, USDA, BLM, and countless other agencies burdened with enforcement.

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#54

Post by jijji » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 4:43 AM UTC

it depends what your use case is, but if you are trying to mask you public IP, I'd been using Squid Proxy [0] for decades and even have production networks using it for scraping activity in a load balanced way

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_(software)

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#55

Post by anotherhue » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 5:06 AM UTC

rkeene2 wrote: post #48

gibs0ns wrote: post #40

I've generally considered an SSH tunnel as a poor man's VPN. If you're going to the effort to spinup a machine, and use SSH anyway, i find it much easier to use `ssh user@server.com -D 4444` then I can set my browser's proxy settings to use localhost:4444 as a SOCKS5 proxy. For those apps that don't have native proxy support, I use proxychains to force them over a proxy connection. Ofcourse this is only useful for a…

That is a SOCKS5 proxy (as you said), however SSH can pass IP packets or Ethernet frames: https://rkeene.org/viewer/tmp/ssh-ip-tunnel.txt.htm

Doesn't this have all the usual TCP over TCP issues?

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#56

Post by henning » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 5:08 AM UTC

Could this be turned into a bash script without loss of functionality? I'm not trying to denigrate the work or Ansible as a tool in more complex scenarios.

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#57

Post by rmkrmk » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 5:13 AM UTC

shepherdjerred wrote: post #37

Nothing will ever beat Tailscale (it is by far my favorite piece of software in this space)

Tailscale is just great! It's so easy to use, I have it running on all my devices and servers, so I can connect to them from wherever I want, and with the "Exit Node" feature you can also select a system to route all traffic through (and switch easily between them, at least on mobile).

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#58

Post by throaway46546 » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 5:35 AM UTC

julienb_sea wrote: post #20

My cyberghost vpn is under 3$/mo and has unlimited usage. It's hard to imagine any pay-as-you-go scheme coming even close from a cost perspective.

The only downside is VPN provider endpoints are blocked by many services.

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#59

Post by 0xbadcafebee » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 6:07 AM UTC

If you're spending $5 on a VPS, aren't there actual VPN services that cost $5 or less that you don't have to manually set up and destroy?

If you're just doing it for fun (kinda like "hosting your own mail") I recommend setting up an IKEv2 IPSec VPN. It might be the hardest VPN to set up? But you learn a good deal about VPNs and networking. Most OSes ship with a native IPSec VPN implementation, and most "enterprise" VPNs are some variation of IPSec. Mobile devices, internal firewalls, internet gateways, enterprise AWS tunnels, etc. You can keep getting fancier by adding VLANs, GRE, BGP, certificates, RADIUS.

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#60

Post by linuxandrew » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 6:31 AM UTC

OP mentions DigitalOcean as a compute provider. Is there much info on which compute providers will ban you for, say, P2P or BitTorrent activity? Presumably this is against the ToS for most providers.