131–140 of 228 posts
If you are using Firefox, be sure to follow everything mentioned in the "about:config" hacks section.
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Personally I would never use a US-based VPN.
Everyone has different needs. If you are a journalist building up a story against powerful adversaries, then you absolutely find a VPN provider in an impartial jurisdiction. If you are just trying to hide your browsing habits from your nosey ISP, torrent a couple movies, and latency matters at all to you, a local VPN is not a terrible choice.
I'm not in the US, so the local advantages don't apply, only the three-letter agency illegal snooping disadvantages.
Ok, so which vpn providers are good?
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Those people will have VPNs and other security measures. This is about exploiting ordinary people to widen the power differential between the two.
I think you overestimate the average politician. They may not bother with the internet. I'm confident Senator Lamar does not. But really, i don't think it would take very long to figure out where he and his staff in DC and in Tennessee live. I don't know what the data purchase rates are, so that could be expensive. But buy the data for a bunch of neighborhoods. Perhaps 50,000 people. watch the data for a while, query…
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On the contrary, Hanlon's razor could just assume good intentioned VPN hosts failing to secure their design by negligence or ignorance of broken protocols.
To the contrary, Ockham's razor means shell VPN companies set up by the multi-billion dollar three-letter agencies whose entire job seems to be to gather as much data as possible by any means. :-)
I used a droplet on DigitalOcean to configure an Algo server. Very seamless setup, highly recommend. There's a $10 promo floating around: DROPLET10. You can self host too.
There are a few schools of thought on where responsibility should lie in protecting user privacy. The first that it is a role of government and policy - in the same way the government sets standards for automobile and road safety they can set and enforce policies for user privacy. The second school of thought is individual responsibility. Users should take steps to protect their own privacy on a case-by-case basis, i…
'use WhatsApp, use Signal' ... warning people away from VPN's probably isn't going to help. When you put it that way, I think we should warn people away from "VPN" just like we (now) warn people against "military-grade encryption" because that term is more likely to indicate snake oil than working privacy. So there needs to be a brand like Signal that delivers what VPNs promised.
Some VPNs do deliver what they say. They proxy your traffic, and they don't keep logs. Some, such as AirVPN and IVPN, have changed jurisdiction to protect user privacy. PIA has demonstrated in court that it doesn't keep logs.
Personally, with the Investigatory Powers Bill in the UK, I will "wave the wand of a technology solution" to conserve and protect my own privacy.
Sure, if the policy was changed upstream then a lot more people would benefit than the technically inclined folks, but if there's a bug upstream we don't all sit with it and wait, we fix it locally and vendor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those people will have VPNs and other security measures. This is about exploiting ordinary people to widen the power differential between the two.
I think you overestimate the average politician. They may not bother with the internet. I'm confident Senator Lamar does not. But really, i don't think it would take very long to figure out where he and his staff in DC and in Tennessee live. I don't know what the data purchase rates are, so that could be expensive. But buy the data for a bunch of neighborhoods. Perhaps 50,000 people. watch the data for a while, query…
There are all sorts of problems like this. What could you learn from the browsing history of people that work in sensitive areas? i.e. nuclear facilities, national labs, financial/industry regulators, etc. City and state representatives probably give away a lot through browsing. There's plenty of low lying fruit ripe for exploiting in huge ways.
Another avenue: merely knowing when someone is likely to browse the internet tells you:
-they're awake
-they're at home/indications of their location
-their level of awareness (think security workers or even prison guards)
Imagine being able to figure out the best time of day to hit a bank by browsing history? In an aggregate way you could probably figure out staffing (corporate level) or whether someone's home (residential level).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone has different needs. If you are a journalist building up a story against powerful adversaries, then you absolutely find a VPN provider in an impartial jurisdiction. If you are just trying to hide your browsing habits from your nosey ISP, torrent a couple movies, and latency matters at all to you, a local VPN is not a terrible choice.
Fair point. I'm not in the US, so the local advantages don't apply, only the three-letter agency illegal snooping disadvantages.