Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

schub.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 281 posts

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#131

Post by feanaro »

despera wrote: post #69
tyingq wrote: post #5

Seems to ignore two things... a) Your ISP is almost always in the same legal jurisdiction as you are. A VPN need not be. b) A VPN has some incentive to deliver on privacy. Your ISP does not. It's fair to call out that a VPN isn't perfect for either privacy or anonymity. But it clearly can be better than your ISP.

No it cannot be better. It can be only equally good or as bad as your ISP. Just because they claim that they protect your privacy that's just a blind faith. Users trusted PureVPN claims for protecting their privacy but all it took was an FBI investigation and through court documents to find out that they actually were keeping logs, despite all their claims.

It cannot be better but it is a matter of blind faith to trust they are better?

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#132

Post by blackflame7000 »

sdan wrote: post #101
blackflame7000 wrote: post #85

All I know is that since I got a VPN my ISP no longer sends me letters warning me that I have 7 more warnings until I'll be admonished for archiving movies.

Which VPN?

PIA. It's cheap and used to be fast but a lot of people have started using it so they are now having to raise price / regulate bandwidth. However, they let you log on 5 or 10 devices simultaneously on different servers all over the globe,

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#133

Post by raxxorrax »

wglb wrote: post #20
tyingq wrote: post #5

Seems to ignore two things... a) Your ISP is almost always in the same legal jurisdiction as you are. A VPN need not be. b) A VPN has some incentive to deliver on privacy. Your ISP does not. It's fair to call out that a VPN isn't perfect for either privacy or anonymity. But it clearly can be better than your ISP.

So what protection does a foreign VPN provider have from the NSA? The answer: None.

I always recommend users to pick a VPN service in a country not on friendly terms with domestic agencies. Sure, that country gets your data but have a harder time correlating it with anything.

In my circle, VPN use starts to be requested by non-technical users that just want to minimize their digital footprint.

Seems amazing to me, since people spend 200$+ on a service for a year, so it seems rather important to them.

No reason not to use globalization to your own advantage.

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#134

Post by auslander »

Very misleading, factually wrong post.

"Log in to your Facebook account. Connect VPN. Did Facebook forget who you are?" He forgot step to open new private window to clear login cookie.

VPN is a must for everybody in there days of data harvesting. We will be sorry tomorrow, seeing many new ways it can be used by global corporations and governments.

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#135

Post by yason »

The article seems to talk about all kinds of things VPNs are not about, and criticises them for those, and give a thin touch, if any, to the actual reasons VPNs are useful and why they were designed in the first place. Weird.

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#136

Post by mammalutte »

ikeboy wrote: post #3

> Just like you have to trust your ISP that they do not collect data, you have to trust that your VPN provider is not storing the same data. Bull. Shit. Find me a major ISP that publicly claims they don't log any data. Anyone making a claim remotely similar to those made in https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-services-keep-you-anonymo... If it was the norm for ISPs to claim this, maybe this argument would work. For no…

That claim doesn't mean that ISPs do not collect data. It means that your VPN providers must be blindly trusted, like ISPs. IIRC when the UK introduced a law asking all ISPs to keep all user activities in logs, at least some of them complained that the costs were too high to put it in practice. Make of that what you want. Trust or not trust?

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#137

Post by ysw0 »

Run PiVPN on an t2.nano on AWS. Takes 15 minutes to set up. $5 / month for the instance and 9 cents / GB. Turn off logging. Will cost you a bit more than real VPN services but is completely private.

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#138

Post by tylerl »

I remember specifically the same video the author was talking about (http://youtu.be/1PGm8LslEb4), and I also cringed when Destin read the ad copy for ExpressVPN.

Commercial VPNs are the homeopathy of the Internet.

They're selling snake oil. For all but the most impossibly pathological customer scenario, nothing that a commercial VPN can give you will actually protect you in any meaningful way. But they can hurt you. Since there's no quality control of any sort, and since their customers are self-selecting for dangerous behavior, it's a horrible environment to go mixing your traffic into.

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#139

Post by john_minsk »

AstralStorm wrote: post #55
Dylan16807 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logs are worth a lot of money to advertisers if your customers can't effectively avoid the process.

And a lot of money to a lawyer who will sue the ISP under privacy laws if it comes to light. It has to be clearly stated in the signed contract that your data will be shared with third parties, in what way and how they will be processed. The company involved would definitely lose any Privacy Shield provisions for the EU and potentially peering rights. Losing enough peering is identical to being disconnected. Class su…

>Class suit of this kind is easy.

...in US

Post reply on HN