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

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

#82
post #11

> Motivation: Lately due to GDPR many websites are blocking access in the EU. For me, I cannot order medicines back home via netmeds.com Blaming GDPR for this is a bit like blaming a lead mine for getting shot. Yes, it's involved but it's not the reason. It only seems to be certain large US websites that carte-blanch refuse to serve EU visitors over GDPR, mostly those with large, tendril-filled advertising networks t…

Business and people will take the path of least resistance. If only a small part of my traffic / business comes from the EU yet I am going to incur huge costs, and have to fundamentally change the way my business runs to comply with GDPR guess what, the EU is getting blocked, as make not sense to do it. My current company does not really collect user info, does no business at all in the EU or is even consumer facing…

> Business and people will take the path of least resistance.

No, this is malicious compliance.

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

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You have the same problem on most VPS providers too.

Yup. Got me a Racknerd VPS for fairly cheap and made it a PiVPN for fun, but things like Netflix don't work.

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

#85

While it does not yet exist as an end to end solution, BlindTLS[0] is a technique which perfectly fits the description of a "poor man's vpn". You pay the vpn provider for a tiny fraction of the traffic, and you can safely route the rest directly through your own ISP. This should work around most censorship techniques or geographic blocking. It doesn't promise privacy though. [0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/347…

I wonder what percentage of VPN users use a VPN for censorship/regionlock circumvention, and what percentage of VPN users use it for privacy.

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

#86
post #14

Or you could just use sshuttle with far less steps: https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle

sshutle's page is terrible at explaining what it does. It mentions a common problem ("I have that, yes please!") and then just says "get sshuttle" and ends there.

https://sshuttle.readthedocs.io/en/stable/how-it-works.html

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

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You have the same problem on most VPS providers too.

It's getting to the point where anything other than a censored, throttled, traffic shaped, surveilled, overpriced, residential ISP IP is a second class citizen. It's a real bummer.

I use a router behind my router at home that runs 100% of my traffic over a VPN before it leaves the building. Any services that don't work, I simply don't use them. Someone else will take my money.

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

#88
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have the same problem on most VPS providers too.

It's getting to the point where anything other than a censored, throttled, traffic shaped, surveilled, overpriced, residential ISP IP is a second class citizen. It's a real bummer. I use a router behind my router at home that runs 100% of my traffic over a VPN before it leaves the building. Any services that don't work, I simply don't use them. Someone else will take my money.

The only option I found to work was to have friends with a spare /24 willing to peer with your BGP router, unfortunately

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

#89
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…

I used this method in China in 2009 and after a couple of minutes, the packets began to drop.

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

#90
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some medical insurances require using CVS. One might be surprised by how shitty that is, but if so one has forgotten how shitty it is to live in a jurisdiction where medical insurance is a thing that is necessary.
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