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VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

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Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#201

Post by CKN23-ARIN »

icebraining wrote: post #192
CKN23-ARIN wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many ways to do this. Make the password widely-known. Announce it over the intercom. Post it on the walls. Offer both encrypted and non-encrypted SSIDs. The non-encrypted SSID could even just be a captive portal with instructions to connect to the encrypted SSID. If you're feeling wild, use WPA2 Enterprise, and accept any credentials.

"WPA and WPA2 don't provide forward secrecy, meaning that once an adverse person discovers the pre-shared key, they can potentially decrypt all packets encrypted using that PSK transmitted in the future and even past, which could be passively and silently collected by the attacker. This also means an attacker can silently capture and decrypt others' packets if a WPA-protected access point is provided free of charge a…

Notably, this is only a problem for WPA2-PSK, not WPA2-Enterprise. But, fair enough -- this does render my first suggestion unsuitable.

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#202

Post by najra »

chewz wrote: post #186
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.

People from the First World have no idea that porn and politically sensitive content is blocked in so many countries. Youtube is heavily censored - you won't be able to watch Charlie Chaplin movies or some lectures on Greek democracy in Thailand. Also this censoring is poorly executed by some ISPs via simple DNS hijacking. As a result your connection is slow and with terrible jitter. As for the proverbial airport/caf…

What would you consider the best/easiest way to setup your own?

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#203

Post by headmelted »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #187
headmelted wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but shake my head at this whole argument. For literally years I've been telling people that a VPN run by a third party does not enhance privacy or security, but because the consensus is "VPN = secure" it's a losing battle, and I sound like a tinfoil-hat-wearing loon. Most VPN services are not designed to provide privacy or security, and if you have a subscription to one, that's probably not the reason yo…

I don't think your analysis is complete. Most VPN's raison d'être is providing privacy. If it's publicly known that they don't then that kills their business. An ISP is tasked with connecting prior to the internet, they don't make claims about privacy, they can reveal information about clients without necessarily putting anyone off, most of the clients for large ISPs have probably never heard of a VPN. If a VPN wante…

>There was a paper a little while ago, they directly identified pages by mitm-ing HTTPS by using meta-data (page size alone IIRC). Success was something like 80%.

Link please. I don't doubt what you're saying, I'm just really interested in reading more about this.

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#204

Post by martinraag »

najra wrote: post #202
chewz wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People from the First World have no idea that porn and politically sensitive content is blocked in so many countries. Youtube is heavily censored - you won't be able to watch Charlie Chaplin movies or some lectures on Greek democracy in Thailand. Also this censoring is poorly executed by some ISPs via simple DNS hijacking. As a result your connection is slow and with terrible jitter. As for the proverbial airport/caf…

What would you consider the best/easiest way to setup your own?

Streisand [https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand] automates the setup of several different VPN services on cloud providers.

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#205

Post by amdavidson »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #189
wglb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A foreign provide surely has more, in the legal realm, than a domestic one?

What legal protection from the NSA does a foreign (to the USA) provider have? Signals intelligence from foreign sources is the NSA's exact mission.

At least the NSA has a purported requirement not to do domestic spying, even if Snowden proved that's not being followed.

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#206

Post by dngray »

FabHK wrote: post #198
tya99 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Im actually glad that the author pointed out that once you log in somewhere that will track you, that connection is associated with you. Exactly, and it's usually a cookie or some sort of persistent storage. I use a VPN, but I use it at the router level. https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Linux_Router_with_VPN_on_a... I know my ISP logs my metadata (by law), whereas I trust that my VPN provider does not. Essentially…

Superb list. But what world are we living in that one needs a specific browser with 10+ addons and tweaks to have some amount of basic privacy. Lunacy!

We've documented it here:

https://github.com/dngray/ghacks-user.js/tree/fx-desktop

https://github.com/dngray/ghacks-user.js/tree/fx-android

The setup is aimed to minimize duplication.

> But what world are we living in that one needs a specific browser with 10+ addons and tweaks to have some amount of basic privacy. Lunacy!

Yes, I wish it was like the 90s. . Unfortunately the advertising/tracking industry is insidious and could not care about user experience.

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#207

Post by lagadu »

bigiain wrote: post #167
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.

Not only does my ISP have no "incentive to deliver on privacy, my ISP is _legally required_ not to deliver on privacy. They are by law in the tinpot jurisdiction I live in, required to retain all "meta data" about my internet connection, and provide it to "law enforcement" which has turned out to include not just terrorist and serious drug crime divisions of the police, but also local council garbage services and the…

This is my reasoning behind using a vpn for things other than getting around geoblocked content: I'm adding another layer of international bureaucracy and law enforcement to the process of a copyright's holder getting to me, despite it actually being legal where I live.

There's no barrier like international bureaucracy and language barriers. Good luck navigating the courts of 3 countries within the time period that any logs might have to be saved for at the last hop.

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#208

Post by danShumway »

netwanderer3 wrote: post #117
danShumway wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google has my data, does that mean I should also give it to Comcast? This kind of argument comes up a lot, and I really don't understand it, at all. Privacy is a process, it's something you improve over time. The alternative is completely circular. I shouldn't care about switching to Firefox, because my ISP is already getting all this data anyway, and I shouldn't care about using a VPN because Google is getting al…

My point is if you are trying to prevent someone to build a profile on you entirely then VPN is useless. For majority of the public who use a VPN provider, they are essentially shifting all the risks of their personal privacy from a highly regulated industry (ISP) to one that is much less regulated (VPN providers). This is a bit similar to all the ICO scams associated with an unregulated cryptocurrency industry. ISP…

> ISP at least will not sell your data to questionable buyers

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/us-cell-carriers-still-sel...

ISP regulation in the US has completely failed to prevent abuses. I'm not here to argue that you should blindly grab a 4-5$ a month VPN, but absent a technological solution like Tor, this is better than nothing.

But if you really think your ISP is more trustworthy than PIA, set up your own VPN on a Linode server and use that instead. At least then you won't have to trust your university/hotel/business Internet to be configured correctly, and at least then you won't be handing your zip code to every single site you visit.

Even a self-controlled VPN is a strict privacy/security upgrade over connecting your laptop unprotected to a hotel's wifi.

> if you are trying to prevent someone to build a profile on you entirely

If you are trying to prevent someone from building a profile on you entirely, then you are going to need to do a lot more than use a VPN. But that's in addition, not instead. You have to start somewhere.

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#209

Post by gruez »

pizzazzaro wrote: post #173
cantrevealname wrote: post #57

> If you are using your device on a public network, VPNs can help you protect your data. I have a ProtonVPN subscription myself, just for those instances where I am sitting in an airport waiting for my plane Seems like a contradictory message. He just got through telling us how most of the web is now end-to-end encrypted with HTTPS. So why does he need a VPN at the airport? Is he checking his email? I can't imagine t…

Im actually glad that the author pointed out that once you log in somewhere that will track you, that connection is associated with you. A vpn is not a cure-all. It is only as private as you're willing to make it. If you want to pirate movies and chat on facebook at the same time, you're probably gonna have a bad time. What you do is absolutely a part of your advertising/tracking profile. Payment information - some p…

>If you want to pirate movies and chat on facebook at the same time, you're probably gonna have a bad time. What you do is absolutely a part of your advertising/tracking profile.

This is probably not going to work with public vpn services because many users share one server, and the server you use changes every connection. Thus facebook can’t really correlate your torrent traffic with your session because it could be anyone else on that server.

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#210

Post by chewz »

najra wrote: post #202
chewz wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People from the First World have no idea that porn and politically sensitive content is blocked in so many countries. Youtube is heavily censored - you won't be able to watch Charlie Chaplin movies or some lectures on Greek democracy in Thailand. Also this censoring is poorly executed by some ISPs via simple DNS hijacking. As a result your connection is slow and with terrible jitter. As for the proverbial airport/caf…

What would you consider the best/easiest way to setup your own?

I am running strongswan[1] with IKEv2 on cheap (10$ per year) VPS in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Or you can google for how to set up your own VPN on AWS/Google Cloud free tier.

[1] https://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/UserDoc...

[2] https://medium.com/@tatianaensslin/how-to-create-a-free-pers...

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