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Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

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21–30 of 413 posts

Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#21

Props to Apple for the design of this service. It doesn't hit all the privacy targets that long-time personal VPN users might be looking for, and it doesn't get into the game of trying to circumvent region locked content*, but otherwise it's likely to be a solid privacy improvement for almost all users in a careful and deliberate way. I use a VPN for other reasons (downloading Ubuntu ISOs mostly) but I'll probably tu…

Why do you use a VPN to download free and publicly available iso images? (Ubuntu). Just curious. Do you download directly from a mirror or use BitTorrent for this? (If the latter I think I kind of understand the rationale for the VPN)

[deleted]

Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#22
post #6
post #3

My experience with this so far was... mixed. - This breaks DNS resolution for company-internal domains. - This routes all my traffic through CloudFlare or another CDN I might or might not trust (yes, the IP is hidden, but not the data) - it significantly slows down my internet access on my location. - it tends to turn itself on again without my intervention especially the last point is very problematic for me

> This breaks DNS resolution for company-internal domains. Is this not the case for any VPN or proxying service? In fact, it could even be a security flaw if your internal domains were accessible on external VPN style endpoints?

> Is this not the case for any VPN or proxying service?

No, it's not.

> In fact, it could even be a security flaw if your internal domains were accessible on external VPN style endpoints?

It would be, but then this is not something that happens on a network configured in the way you describe.

Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#23
post #15

Props to Apple for the design of this service. It doesn't hit all the privacy targets that long-time personal VPN users might be looking for, and it doesn't get into the game of trying to circumvent region locked content*, but otherwise it's likely to be a solid privacy improvement for almost all users in a careful and deliberate way. I use a VPN for other reasons (downloading Ubuntu ISOs mostly) but I'll probably tu…

> but UK residents do typically pay for the content whereas those outside the UK are unable to. In essence, what you're saying boils down to "it's already paid for, but nobody else can have it anyway". It's unreasonable and there is no need to make excuses for this behaviour.

It's generally down to the terms for content that networks (BBC in this case) buy licenses to. The IP owners don't want the networks to allow the whole world access to that content for the price that the network is willing to pay to show it to their region.

Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#24

Props to Apple for the design of this service. It doesn't hit all the privacy targets that long-time personal VPN users might be looking for, and it doesn't get into the game of trying to circumvent region locked content*, but otherwise it's likely to be a solid privacy improvement for almost all users in a careful and deliberate way. I use a VPN for other reasons (downloading Ubuntu ISOs mostly) but I'll probably tu…

> I use a VPN for other reasons (downloading Ubuntu ISOs mostly).

This made me smile. Good one.

For context, copyright trolls recently tried to extort torrent users for downloading and sharing Ubuntu ISOs.

Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#26

Props to Apple for the design of this service. It doesn't hit all the privacy targets that long-time personal VPN users might be looking for, and it doesn't get into the game of trying to circumvent region locked content*, but otherwise it's likely to be a solid privacy improvement for almost all users in a careful and deliberate way. I use a VPN for other reasons (downloading Ubuntu ISOs mostly) but I'll probably tu…

Why do you use a VPN to download free and publicly available iso images? (Ubuntu). Just curious. Do you download directly from a mirror or use BitTorrent for this? (If the latter I think I kind of understand the rationale for the VPN)

[deleted]

Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#27

Props to Apple for the design of this service. It doesn't hit all the privacy targets that long-time personal VPN users might be looking for, and it doesn't get into the game of trying to circumvent region locked content*, but otherwise it's likely to be a solid privacy improvement for almost all users in a careful and deliberate way. I use a VPN for other reasons (downloading Ubuntu ISOs mostly) but I'll probably tu…

Why do you use a VPN to download free and publicly available iso images? (Ubuntu). Just curious. Do you download directly from a mirror or use BitTorrent for this? (If the latter I think I kind of understand the rationale for the VPN)

[deleted]

Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#29
post #10

I don’t really mind paying few bucks for privacy. But I think Apple in the process is gonna kill a lot VPN providers. While I don’t care right now I hope it doesn’t make Apple a monopoly.

Everyone I know who uses a VPN doesn't really care about Privacy with a big P (i.e. state actors etc), they either use it to get around geo-blocks or to conceal their use of BitTorrent and maybe porn sites and this only seems to cover the last of those.

Re: Apple's iCloud+ “VPN”

#30
post #3

My experience with this so far was... mixed. - This breaks DNS resolution for company-internal domains. - This routes all my traffic through CloudFlare or another CDN I might or might not trust (yes, the IP is hidden, but not the data) - it significantly slows down my internet access on my location. - it tends to turn itself on again without my intervention especially the last point is very problematic for me

Does Apple preserve the client source IP in the request (similar to Cloudflare's VPN) or will the server only see the IP of the exit node?

The whole point of the service is to hide the client source IP.
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