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Want to use my wifi?

thejh.net

51–57 of 57 posts

Re: Want to use my wifi?

#51
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a multitude of VPN services in the market already. The generally accepted "best practice" for those with VPN service is to use it everywhere (not just on the road). When you're paying monthly, most people feel incentivized to use the service as much as possible. I've set up VyprVPN for a couple of ultra-paranoid friends, and the whole process was very smooth and end-user friendly.

And there were plenty back-up services before dropbox.

I get what you're saying, but Dropbox is not a back-up service. The distinction is that Dropbox didn't exist before Dropbox. There are unique aspects of Dropbox that were new when Dropbox was introduced.

There is nothing new or unique in what you described, with the exception (maybe) of automatic initiation of VPN services when you're on "public" wifi. I would argue that this is a differentiation of little or no consequence, because there's no reason to not use a VPN all the time.

You basically described every personal VPN provider in the market as a start-up idea.

Re: Want to use my wifi?

#52

I've been thinking about the possibility of injecting a JavaScript bitcoin miner into every page loaded through my access point. Imagine the possibilities for an open AP that's located in a very public place, like Times Square, or near a busy Starbucks (where access is slow and unreliable). If you really wanted to take this to the evil next level, you'd just break one (or several) WPA keys on nearby APs and have your…

Is that even remotely lucrative? As I understand, even a $300 GPU is orders of magnitude more powerful than any CPU miner, let alone a JavaScript based one. And even a single GPU isn't remotely competitive these days compared to the GPU farms and now ASIC setups. So you'd need to inject JS into, I dunno, a million, devices to make anything worthwhile.

One of the winning entries from the Node Knockout competition did this[1]. They didn't give any real numbers (20kH is mentioned in the comments, but it's not clear how many devices it took for that), but it does seem like you would have to have a massive amount of devices running it.

[1] http://nodeknockout.com/teams/shoop-team

Re: Want to use my wifi?

#53
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How easy is it to fully automate VPN only computer usage so that everything I do comes out of a machine at Amazon EC2 for example? I've never set it up and was curious what others have done to make it as invisible as possible.

How easy is it to fully automate VPN only computer usage so that everything I do comes out of a machine at Amazon EC2 for example? Startup idea! Make a tool that automatically tunnels your connection when you are on a public wifi. Make it open source and offer a hosted service. Also interesting if you are in a country which censors the internet. The dropbox of VPNs. For marketing you offer to write articles like this…

and make it work for Android.

Re: Want to use my wifi?

#54
post #30

Using a browser in incognito mode does none of the sort. You can still enter your password into it and it can be stolen just as easily. The true solution is to only browse over HTTPS, connect to a VPN or not use untrusted networks. Note that if I can spoof an IP address, I can send you bogus DNS replies, and send you to a web server that impersonates Google/Facebook/etc. but does not require HTTPS (unless they use th…

Using chrome or Firefox will give you a big fat warning when you strip the https with a man in the middle attack for google and facebook.

Only if you explicitly go to " rel="nofollow">https:// - if you type directly into the address bar you might end up at " rel="nofollow">http:// which usually redirects you to " rel="nofollow">https:// - but if you are on a compromised network you could get an incorrect response for the address of from the DNS request and therefore go to a server that servces " rel="nofollow">http:// with a redirect to " rel="nofollow">https://. If you are not paying close attention you might just assume the green highlight in the relevant part of the address bar means all is well, where you are in fact accessing something you were not expecting but which looks like what you were expecting long enough to collect some useful details (such as your account credentials) from you.

While I can't get a cert signed for facebook.com (at least not without very expensive bribes or other human factors engineering) but I could get one for faceboolc.com easily enough and if you aren't looking closely that might fool the eye. It wouldn't catch everyone, anyone going direct to " rel="nofollow">https:// would be warned as you suggest, but it could catch some out.

Re: Want to use my wifi?

#55

It's pretty easy to set up a VPN on EC2. Probably not the BEST solution out there (the instances certainly aren't designed for that use) but better than nothing.

At $0.07/hour for 1TB/month, with <1min startup time, DigitalOcean is actually a decent host to do this with.

Re: Want to use my wifi?

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not know for VPN, I use ssh. It is very simple and does not require any system administration right. Install a proxy (squid) on your Amazon EC2. Install putty if you are on windows and launch it with port forward using the option -L: putty -L 3128:127.0.0.1:3128 user@host Add the option --proxy-server=127.0.0.1:3128 on you chrome shortcut and that's it.

That'll tunnel your http traffic which is a good start but it's worth checking out ssh -D for an easy SOCKS proxy.

Do you know if either of those two methods do tcp-over-tcp, or is it tcp done correctly?

Re: Want to use my wifi?

#57
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'll tunnel your http traffic which is a good start but it's worth checking out ssh -D for an easy SOCKS proxy.

Do you know if either of those two methods do tcp-over-tcp, or is it tcp done correctly?

If you're using a protocol that sits on TCP and you push it over SSH sitting on TCP then it's going to be TCP-over-TCP. Or in other words, for the vast majority of use cases, no.
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