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VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

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Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#81

Post by danShumway »

AstralStorm wrote: post #58
danShumway wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could sure them under wiretapping laws of they did. Has this ever worked though? Cursory searching, I don't see or know of any examples of lawsuits that have actually succeeded on this front. And it's not like ISPs have never given consumers an opportunity before.[0] [0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/verizon-draws-fire-for-monitoring-...

The cases are almost always settled for reasons I outlined in response to another thread. (mostly related to peering and PR damage, that can kill an ISP) The app is a tiny blip on the radar waiting for careless. (Read the darn contact, especially if you get a discount.)

You're not exactly boosting my confidence here.

The easy sniff-test for whether or not existing laws are enough to dissuade an ISP from building user profiles is to check to see if it was enough in the past to stop them from doing so.

Do we have any cases of where an ISP broke wiretapping laws and was punished severely enough in a settlement or trial that it either killed the ISP or forced them to restructure or rebrand?

If ISPs can pull off highly profitable abuses and get away with it by just settling when they're called out, that's no guarantee that they aren't going to do the same thing in the future. Verizon bragged that they broke wiretapping laws in 2012. How are they doing now? Still struggling to recover from that, I would expect?

Certainly not selling real-time location data to bounty hunters.

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#82

Post by dvcrn »

nij4uyr wrote: post #50

What VPN provider would you guys recommend?

Also interested in this! Also why VPN vs just setting up one yourself on digitalocean or something like that?

(The reason why I'm not with a VPN yet is because it would compromise my speed. Am I overestimating the impact?)

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#84

Post by kmonsen »

droithomme wrote: post #63
Causality1 wrote: post #33

Author has a computer science understanding of VPNs but is breathtakingly ignorant as to the actual use cases of commercial VPNs. They're used for getting around geoocming and media throttling sure, but the biggest use is piracy. Also, his disbelief of anonymous payment methods is incredibly stupid. I can walk into a store right now and get a prepaid visa using cash, no crypto currency shenanigans required.

> I can walk into a store right now and get a prepaid visa using cash WalMart, Target, and many other large retailers retain photographic records of all purchasers. Many cases have been broken by police claiming to have found a match at a WalMart for the purchase of items committed in some crime. So cash purchases of cards is not always a completely anonymous choice.

Sure, if you are doing illegal stuff very little of what you can find online will protect you. But if you are hiding from non-law enforcement it is easy to get pretty anonymous.

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#86

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

In the US they can share all the site IPs they want.

If you make them put it in the contract, sure: "We'll share it with all these ad agencies for the purposes of targeting." That doesn't help me at all!

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#87

Post by lifthrasiir »

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…

He made this point explicit:

> Networks like these make it easy for attackers to get a copy of your network data, and if you send something unencrypted, the results can be quite harmful.

The web should be ideally end-to-end encrypted with HTTPS. But in case this assumption breaks down, VPN gives an additional headroom for security. Not much (as explained in the article, and thus should not be advertised so), but still useful.

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#88

Post by lsc »

ikeboy wrote: post #23
lsc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I... find it really unlikely that any no-log VPN companies exist for any significant period of time without logging. I don't just mean law enforcement, though that's probably a problem too, (though I have less experience with that one) I'm also talking about the normal abuse an ISP gets. Spammers, etc... From experience, your upstream will shut you down if your customers aren't well behaved.

They all have anti-abuse mechanisms, but that doesn't mean logging. Why couldn't you have a flagging system in real-time that shuts down accounts but doesn't save the data to disk?

>Why couldn't you have a flagging system in real-time that shuts down accounts but doesn't save the data to disk?

That's what I described with the deep packet inspection. You could hook up an IDS and block users based on the IDS output, but like I said, the sort of people who like no log VPNs will not like that. At one point I set that up at my VPS company a long time ago, (of course, I was very up front about it and told my customers, and I was surprised that customers were really, really angry about it, so I took it down within a day or two. Sorry guys, I mean, I should have stuck with the traditional route of only examining packet headers.)

If you act in the usual way for an ISP and only examine packet headers, then you will need to react to complaints about your users. Those complaints can roll in up to a week after the abuse happened.

I could believe a VPN service that said it kept logs for a week. That seems possible. (of course, there's still the legal issues, but I personally haven't seen those, while I have been almost disconnected by my upstream for customer abuse before)

It gets worse, too, if I use shared IP addresses. So, the way my VPS company was setup, everyone had a static IP. And that was really pretty easy; an abuse report comes in saying that a certain IP did something at a certain time. As all my customers had their own IPs, all I had to do was make sure the IP hadn't been moved to a different customer recently, and I knew who to go after. Aside from that ill considered day-long experiment with the IDS, I didn't do any network logging at all outside of total packet/byte counts (outside of troubleshooting) because I didn't really have to in order to go after abuse. I knew what IP was owned by who.

But, in a shared-IP system? this is way worse. All your users are behind a NAT, right? so you get that same abuse complaint a few days after a thing happened saying that IP X did this thing at time Y to target IP Z. Well, all your customers are coming out of IP X, so that doesn't help you. In a NAT system, to manage abuse complaints without deep packet inspection, you need to log the headers from every connection. User X connected to IP Y on port Z, etc... It's the only way to trace back the abuse to the customer.

(Things get dramatically easier if every customer has it's own IP; then you just need to record who had what IP when. I don't know how many "no log" VPNs use NAT vs giving each active user their own IP. Of course, things get even easier with IPv6)

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#89

Post by jedberg »

jwr wrote: post #30

I use VPNs for one main reason: so that my ISP does not build a complete profile of me based on the sites I'm visiting. This can be mitigated to a certain extent by using a VPN. I do not expect to become anonymous or invisible on the internet all of a sudden, I just do not want the guy listening next to my front door to know everything about me. In the US, where personal data is a free-for-all and everybody and their…

But all you've done is kick the can down the road, so now your VPN service can build a profile on you instead.

Re: VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

#90

Post by dsl »

kmonsen wrote: post #70
solipsism wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FSM == Flying Spaghetti Monster?

Russian intelligence service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service

That is the FSB (or (ФСБ). FSM isn't the acronym or a transliteration of any known national intelligence service.

FSB - Federal Security Service, Russia

MSS - Ministry of State Security, China

DGSE - General Directorate for External Security, France

FSM - Federated States of Micronesia National Police would be my best guess. They do dignitary protection and counter-narcotics, so I would assume they have at least some intelligence function.

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