41–50 of 65 posts
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And Whisper Systems, TOR, tox are free as in free beer. What's your point?
TOR isn't free. The support and development is paid for by donations and funding, the bandwidth (currently over 12000 MiB/s) is paid for by lot's of volunteers. I get your point though. The question isn't whether something is free to use, it's who's paying for incurring costs.
I'm not quite sure what the appeal of free VPN services are, or why anyone would trust them. Setting up a VPN server takes very little time. From a default Ubuntu installation you only need to install the OpenVPN Access Server package, visit a web page and add a user. You can do this from a cloud service provider in a location with favorable privacy laws, like Iceland. I do this with GreenQloud, and just spin up my V…
In the US and many other places, prepaid cards are not anonymous. IIRC you need ID of some kind to buy them in Germany, for example (similarly for SIM cards)
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Depending on your needs, you can just roll your own with Amazon EC2. I use it for an SSH tunnel, mostly to use while at work. Not that I'm doing any weird browsing, I just don't like the thought of my employer keeping a log of what I am doing on my free time ( https://xkcd.com/303/ ). I wrote a script to spin up a new instance when I need it, and to terminate it when I don't. It should cost less than $10/mo, and I on…
That's a VPN but not anonymous. Amazon knows who you are.
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Depending on your needs, you can just roll your own with Amazon EC2. I use it for an SSH tunnel, mostly to use while at work. Not that I'm doing any weird browsing, I just don't like the thought of my employer keeping a log of what I am doing on my free time ( https://xkcd.com/303/ ). I wrote a script to spin up a new instance when I need it, and to terminate it when I don't. It should cost less than $10/mo, and I on…
That's a VPN but not anonymous. Amazon knows who you are.
Hosting you own VPN server seems overkill for this kind of use case. There are many trustworthy VPN providers that I'd recommend for use cases unrelated tor BitTorrent. A couple of years ago people recommended SwissVPN over and over to me, though I've never used it. I was a happy IPredator customer for quite some time.
If you want to host your own VPN server (let's face it, servers are useful anyway), I'd recommend cloud providers other than Amazon. Iceland, Sweden and Germany are very friendly countries.
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TOR isn't free. The support and development is paid for by donations and funding, the bandwidth (currently over 12000 MiB/s) is paid for by lot's of volunteers. I get your point though. The question isn't whether something is free to use, it's who's paying for incurring costs.
Facebook isn't free by those criteria, either.
I'm not quite sure what the appeal of free VPN services are, or why anyone would trust them. Setting up a VPN server takes very little time. From a default Ubuntu installation you only need to install the OpenVPN Access Server package, visit a web page and add a user. You can do this from a cloud service provider in a location with favorable privacy laws, like Iceland. I do this with GreenQloud, and just spin up my V…
>People who wish to be nearly untraceable can use a prepaid credit card for anonymity. Does anyone have experience with this? I tried it once, and found that most places blocked the use of these cards and needed a "real" one.
Free product, free support, no logs. They're either lying or trying to turn this into a freemium product at some point in the future. Everything else just seems unlikely. Furthermore, their domain is protected by WhoisGuard (Panama). If they (the people involved, not the servers) were sitting in Sweden this would be unnecessary (compare IPredator). The IP address behind the website points to the same Swedish datacent…
I can't tell you how happy I am to see this as the top comment. Free is a con. If you want a cheap VPN that you control (and that's faster than Tor), set up an endpoint on something that takes Bitcoin payment and pay with Bitcoins obtained via an anonymous route. This list might be helpful. https://www.exoticvps.com
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That's a VPN but not anonymous. Amazon knows who you are.
There is always a server that knows who you are. Whether it's an OpenVPN server hosted on an EC2 instance or a TOR entry node. Hosting you own VPN server seems overkill for this kind of use case. There are many trustworthy VPN providers that I'd recommend for use cases unrelated tor BitTorrent. A couple of years ago people recommended SwissVPN over and over to me, though I've never used it. I was a happy IPredator cu…
There's a fundamental difference here. With EC2, you get a server that knows who you are and what you're saying (at least they know who you're talking with, if you use HTTPS). The TOR entry node only knows who you are, but knows nothing about who you're communicating with or what you're saying.
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Probably a better disambiguation would be "services" that are free. Open-source projects can always be validated to make sure that they are not monetizing their user-base. Tor is a service but by reading the source code, you can see (if you understand the code) that nothing monetizable leaves your computer. I don't have as much confidence in Tox just because it hasn't been around as long (and I haven't read the sourc…
Wikipedia is a service.