41–50 of 133 posts
> "VPNs are the only way to stay safe when using something like BitTorrent" very wrong. It's not really much. It's probably just limiting your possible bandwidth. If somebody wants to catch you, it's just one additional step to get to you (via the VPN provider).
Some VPN providers explicitly state that they don't keep track of IP assignments. If they don't log that then it makes finding downloaders much harder.
It's all very well saying a VPN services keep your communications secure, encrypted and away from the prying eyes of your ISP - but why would you trust a VPN provider more than an ISP? These consumer-oriented VPN services marketing to bittorrent users seem kind of sketchy to me.
This is my big problem with wanting to use a VPN. The VPN account is directly tied to you by your payment details. Also most VPN services that claim to "not keep any logs whatsoever" are just a 3 page website with not much information. Maybe that's safer since they are low profile, or maybe it isn't? I honestly have no idea and I wish I did. It feels like your just trusting some random person to not mess with you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Theory of Operation It's like a VPN, since it can forward every port on an entire network, not just ports you specify. Conveniently, it lets you use the "real" IP addresses of each host rather than faking port numbers on localhost. On the other hand, the way it works is more like ssh port forwarding than a VPN. Normally, a VPN forwards your data one packet at a time, and doesn't care about individual connections; ie…
So what does this do that ssh -D doesn't? Does the "packet loss" part apply to ssh -D?
"ssh -D" is closer to a proxy server:
-D [bind_address:]port
Specifies a local "dynamic" application-level port forwarding.
This works by allocating a socket to listen to port on the local
side, optionally bound to the specified bind_address. Whenever a
connection is made to this port, the connection is forwarded over
the secure channel, and the application protocol is then used to
determine where to connect to from the remote machine. Currently
the SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 protocols are supported, and ssh will act
as a SOCKS server. Only root can forward privileged ports.
Dynamic port forwardings can also be specified in the configura-
tion file.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really great tool and dead-simple to set up. However, the last time I checked, there was no DNS and UDP support. Do you know if that changed?
Yes, it supports dns now using the --dns option. UDP is not supported though.
It's sad to see the reasoning for using VPN's being so deeply mixed with bittorrent and similar things "worth hiding" according to some. There are actually many good reasons to use various forms of secure tunneling. Many ISP's serve requested pages from massive caches. Although provider caching can improve performance in some cases as well as reduce bandwidth costs for the ISP, it can often result in stale informatio…
T-Mobile in the UK does this. They also re-write the HTML. This line is added after the first - http://1.2.3.8/bmi-int-js/bmi.js language="javascript">
Images come from http://1.2.3.11/bmi/ycombinator.com/images/s.gif
And they add an alt message to tell you how to update the images to the original images. Which is annoying if the alt originally contained useful information. (The original alt comes back if you update the images.)
I'm in the UK. Having images served from 1.2.3.x is suboptimal.
It's all very well saying a VPN services keep your communications secure, encrypted and away from the prying eyes of your ISP - but why would you trust a VPN provider more than an ISP? These consumer-oriented VPN services marketing to bittorrent users seem kind of sketchy to me.
I trust a VPN provider more than a ISP. The reason is pretty simple, I trust a random company more than a 30-200 year old telecommunication company which has strong ties to government and content delivery networks. How many VPN's companies has deals with content networks? How many ISP has a content network deal? How many VPN's has has a past of cooperative with government surveillance? How many ISP has cooperated wit…
ISPs, on the other hand, provide a different service and privacy is merely an additional consideration. It's not their main reason to exist.
It's all very well saying a VPN services keep your communications secure, encrypted and away from the prying eyes of your ISP - but why would you trust a VPN provider more than an ISP? These consumer-oriented VPN services marketing to bittorrent users seem kind of sketchy to me.
This is my big problem with wanting to use a VPN. The VPN account is directly tied to you by your payment details. Also most VPN services that claim to "not keep any logs whatsoever" are just a 3 page website with not much information. Maybe that's safer since they are low profile, or maybe it isn't? I honestly have no idea and I wish I did. It feels like your just trusting some random person to not mess with you.