121–130 of 333 posts
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At risk of sounding sale pitch'y. Mullvad is the only VPN the longer I use the more I like it. I've tried MANY competitors first and all the other ones so far seem to only get worse over time. I love that I can pay directly with a crypto wallet and have true anonymity.
crypto is a public ledger. If someone wanted to find you, that's pretty easy target.
I know multiple people who worked / working at Mullvad and they take their business, security and privacy _very_ seriously. Not surprised to see them shine here.
Coincidentally, Mullvad, Windscribe and IVPN all worked when I was in China behind GFW, while more popular options did not. Seems like there are VPNs, and then there are VPNs.
Fwiw I'm not switching from mullvad
I tried to use ProtonVPN when I switched over to ProtonMail a year ago. But so much of the web does not work when you're on a VPN. For example even HackerNews has VPN restrictions. More and more sites know where VPN endpoints originate. How will VPNs prevent this in the future without them just become easy to block?
Apple, for better or worse, has been able to use their size to pressure sites into accepting connections from their Private Relay service. If VPN usage becomes the norm, sites will have to give in eventually.
It’s a little weird because Apple has device attestation which is run via Cloudflare and Fastly. You’d think that would get you around the challenges, but that doesn’t seem to happen.
Interesting to learn you can identify the real country/area of origin using probe latency. Though could this be simulated? Like what if the VPN IP just added 100ms-300ms of latency to all of its outgoing traffic? Ideally vary the latency based on the requesting IP's location. And also just ignore typical probe requests like ICMP (ping). And ideally all the IPs near the end of the traceroute would do all this too. To…
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I have been thinking about it but it is tricky from a legal standpoint. What I'm trying to arrange next time I visit is to have a secondary line installed at my parents place that is in my name. So that when I pull heavy traffic from that line it doesn't impact them and I can't get them in trouble for posting a message that isn't government approved.
Heavy traffic to access a bunch of gov websites? There's definitely more to your story then. I'd say, anything heavy and random, use the general VPN and the rest use an rpi at your parents' home.
They used government websites as an example, not to say that all of their traffic was to government websites.
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Yes, I don't understand the advantage or disadvantage of this. Let's say I need a Colombian IP address, I would figure it out pretty quickly it this was not genuine, except if the geo-block protection would be fooled too. Most of the "problem" countries are tiny places. Monaco, Andorra etc. It might be tough to rent a server there. And your list of clients should be minimal.
> I would figure it out pretty quickly it this was not genuine, except if the geo-block protection would be fooled too. It would (unless the blockers use this company's database I guess): > The IP registry data also says “Country X” — because the provider self-declared it that way. That could be good or bad depending on what you're using the VPN for. E.g. if you only care about evading stupid local laws like the UK's…
I'm a big VPN user since I am the citizen of one country and the resident of another. Even for government services I have to use a VPN. I tried to access the bureau of statistics of my home country through my foreign residential IP and got 404s on all pages. Enabled VPN and everything magically started working. For watching the election result video stream I also had to VPN but at least that one gave me a clear messa…
Do you have friends or family in your home country that will run an AppleTV box with Tailscale for you as an exit node? I can't get into work from a non-US IP, but I can Tailscale back to my house and it works just fine. I even gave my in-laws (who live several states away) an AppleTV box running TS just to have another endpoint if for some reason the power goes out at my house while I'm gone (rare, but happens).
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The best thing is that they accept crypto. I wouldn't want to pay for a VPN with a credit card in my name.
> I wouldn't want to pay for a VPN with a credit card in my name. Wow, you must be using the VPN for some seriously shady stuff.
I'd gather a small amount of that up (however I did that), keep it in an offline wallet, and spend it on VPN service every now and then.
It just seemed like the right way to go about things.
(And then I lost that wallet, because of course I did, with about $14 worth of BTC in it. I didn't care enough at that time to see if I'd backed it up properly; I wasn't planning on using it for anything anymore anyway. That was in 2014 and those backups are waaaay gone now, but it'd be around $2k worth of BTC today -- plenty to buy some DDR5 RAM. Whoopsie-doodle!)
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Are any VPN's getting China wrong? It would be pretty obvious. In fact, common VPN's I'm looking at don't even support China as an option. Obviously no VPN's are mixing countries up where it becomes clear from what you're allowed to browse. But so "if you do things that are legal in one country, but might not be in another" is what I'm specifically asking about. Ultimately, legality is determined by the laws that app…
China was just an example. Try to extrapolate on your own. Take someone from Russia, Iran, wherever, trying to access information they aren't allowed to access, or sharing information they aren't allowed to share. They think they're connected to a neighboring country, but in reality are exiting from their own country. Therefore, the traffic gets analyzed and they fall out a window. Imagine Snowden sharing information…
No need for the snark. Obviously we're not talking about somebody in Iran or Russia connecting to a VPN that just leads back into their own country, that would be idiotic. None of the VPN providers are providing anything like that. Those don't even make sense conceptually. A Western VPN provider that an Iranian or Russian is using isn't even legally allowed to operate nodes inside of Iran or Russia due to sanctions.
I'm talking about the realistic mix-ups that the article is using as examples. Where Somalia is actually going to France or something. That's why my original comment started with "Is there any real-life situation..."
No VPN providers are accidentally routing into an oppressive dictatorship.
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> I wouldn't want to pay for a VPN with a credit card in my name. Wow, you must be using the VPN for some seriously shady stuff.
Back when I was doing that uber-shady business of torrenting, and this kind of VPN was much less-common than it is today, I paid for VPN access with crypto. I'd gather a small amount of that up (however I did that), keep it in an offline wallet, and spend it on VPN service every now and then. It just seemed like the right way to go about things. (And then I lost that wallet, because of course I did, with about $14 wo…