51–60 of 228 posts
A heads up: theres a really nice project called Streisand[1] which provides a multi-protocol VPN with very little effort. You can launch one on a cheap cloud provider (like DO, if their policy allows). [1] https://github.com/jlund/streisand
Any estimate on EC2 costs using this moderately?
This should help figure things out: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html
No, they're not. The solution is getting strong, enforced laws that protect our privacy and punish those who break them. But for the moment, with advertisers viewing themselves as gods gift to the internet who think that all your information belongs to them simply by virtue of existing, and who will go to great lengths to acquire and store it all (for perpetuity), a solution is needed, and part of that is VPN's.
A heads up: theres a really nice project called Streisand[1] which provides a multi-protocol VPN with very little effort. You can launch one on a cheap cloud provider (like DO, if their policy allows). [1] https://github.com/jlund/streisand
Any estimate on EC2 costs using this moderately?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because ISPs can't read your traffic
But now the VPN provider can just track you and sell all your browsing history instead of the ISP, so how is this better?
Edit: Also, you can pick VPN providers outside your adversary's sphere of influence. That's standard advice for users in China, for example.
The limitations are: no ipv6 support :(, sometimes leaks dns, and always crashes shortly after it is first started (then works fine when you start it again). There seems to be little active development.
To work around the limitations, I mostly use SOCKS (curl also supports SOCKS), plus run sshuttle to try to catch any additional traffic. For that matter, SOCKS alone would at least catch the most sensitive traffic for most people (and would make it easy to have another browser profile for watching netflix).
I get a $15/year OpenVZ account from ramnode.com, which supports VPN usage. I haven't had an issue with bandwith (it seems to undercount quite a lot) but don't watch netflix or otherwise use that much bandwidth.
The main issue I've had is that some websites (google, amazon, gog) will default to various other languages that I assume other people who are doing the same thing speak. Fixed by logging in to the site and they then seem to remember for a while even if you don't log in, but eventually they switch again.
The nice thing is that the remote server can be configured to just have an SSH server on port 80 (in case you ever want to use it from restrictive public wifi; I first stated to do this after seeing SSL downgrade errors on public wifi) with public key authentication, so there is much less to worry about in terms of being responsible for a system open to the internet all the time. In SSH, I set:
KexAlgorithms=curve25519-sha256@libssh.org
HostKeyAlgorithms=ssh-ed25519-cert-v01@openssh.com,ssh-ed25519
Ciphers=chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com
MACs=hmac-sha2-256,hmac-sha2-512
Edit: Speed is quite good with this setup and while I haven't done extensive comparisons, it does not seem to lower the connection speed by much.
Perhaps one solution might be to poison the data and have your router/device make spurious random DNS lookups and HTTPS connections. Ensure the list of random websites includes the top few hundred companies likely to be in the market for usage data. If enough people did this it would make the data useless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But now the VPN provider can just track you and sell all your browsing history instead of the ISP, so how is this better?
Because you have much more choice for VPN providers than for ISPs. And you can change VPN periodically, far more easily than changing ISP. Also, you can use nested chains of VPNs, much like Tor, to distribute trust. So adversaries must compromise multiple providers, quickly enough that logs will be available. Edit: Also, you can pick VPN providers outside your adversary's sphere of influence. That's standard advice f…
One thing I was wondering, beyond your own personal ISP, does this mean that the backbone providers, the Level 3's of the world, are going to get into selling data to advertisers? I was feeling personally ok because I use an ISP with a strong privacy pledge, but I wonder if their uplink is going to be selling my data. Though I guess it's less of a concern since the backbones don't have the complete personally identif…
If I was a betting man - backbone providers don't do this (sell to advertisers). It would be costly to maintain the interception/analysis infrastructure required for such data collection. I daresay it would cost more than what they would make off the data.