And if you use one, are you happy with it?
I’m trying to get more into privacy and security and VPN is currently a struggle for me (and it seems also for some people in my social circle). It’s mostly cost, effectiveness, but also connection issues (not being able to connect to servers, not reaching websites, sometimes slower speed.
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Using one is silly you should at least use Rethink, Foxyproxy, etc
They all have tradeoffs and trust is an intricate one that’s easily swept aside and forgotten with assumptions like “Swiss privacy law is strong”. Plus some are designed for streaming some are not, fingerprinting is less impactful when every fingerprint has a different address
I connect to my home network via VPN if I’m out and about. There’s no additional cost, but I feel more secure in a public wifi and have access to all my internal services as I’m used to.
Same here. My mobile provider blocks the standard VPN ports, and also access to other DNS servers, so I am pretty sure, their low price means they are selling my data. Going through a VPN on a non-standard port to my home network, from where I can go out through DNS over https and also a pi-hole, and being protected by my own firewall, gives me the (false?) feeling of an additional layer of security.
Wtf kinda mobile service is that?
Cheap MVNO with enough data and good coverage/no outages. The low price comes from somewhere, I guess…
Native Mullvad app when home using my own DNS server, Tailscale through a gluetun container + headscale when away. The latter eats up battery quite a bit otherwise I’d just keep that on all the time.
it all depends what you do, the average person honestly does not need a VPN, is it still “nice”? sure, getting over streaming restrictions or getting cheaper flights, and if you desire to sail the seas to any degree than also yeah get a VPN, and ofc, getting over porn bans
The average person doesn’t know how to use a VPN, either. They turn it on once, expect magic, and don’t go beyond that.
Love the people coming into the privacy community to say they don’t value privacy rather than explaining the limits of a VPN in that regard
They didn’t say they don’t value privacy; a bit of a strawman. Most connections are private even if not anonymous. TLS is sufficient for many uses. Knowing this allows one to be discerning about when a VPN is more useful.
Actually maybe I misread your intent. On second glance, looks like you might be yes-and’ing.
“I value privacy I just think TLS is sufficient” is exactly the kind of crud I’m talking about hahaha. You guys would be so easy to DNS poison
Don’t think this attitude will survive long once Copilot & stuff starts making meemaw and peepaw into Minority Report-style billboards for gallblader medication
Are you saying TLS doesn’t make the data that traverses a connection private? If so, I think we’ve discovered the deficiency in your viewpoint.
e: missed a word
That must sound really epic if you don’t know anything about how internet security works at all and have no threat model outside of a guy sharing public wifi with you. No important personal information, photos, professional files, financial documents, websites. Which would track for a Lemmy.world reply guy who apparently got roused from days of slumber by me impertinently pointing out I am the only person in the thread advocating thorough privacy practices
Take it down a notch Scotty. We’re all here for a common purpose. No need to brow beat people. It’s exactly this attitude that I harp on in privacy forums. It’s like, give a guy some information and suddenly they think they’ve got some moral or intellectual high ground and others are mere normies, sheep, et al. Some people don’t need a VPN with a triple hop Socks proxy. Their threat model doesn’t dictate that. Where as I want all the obfuscation I can get.
Funny you say that since a few hours ago someone on here posted “how did reddit ban my alts??” and you’re acting like this is an issue that only affects hobbyists and experts. My guess is you don’t say anything interesting enough to have issues.
No. You’re the only one I see implying there are no cases where data is private outside a VPN. Strictly speaking, if you need only the data across a connection to be private TLS is sufficient. Who is implying that is a complete threat model. You are building more and more strawmen against which to argue, but it really just sounds silly. I’m a professional that has been in the industry for decades, so your dick waving contest just doesn’t move me.
Yes, a more complete risk analysis in many cases may show that you’d like the host one is reaching to also be private, but nobody is saying such a situation doesn’t exist; you’re barking at the moon.
Hah, now you’re trying to bring your employment requirements into it. Imagine trying to dick wave about being an IT guy and throwing a tantrum because someone didn’t trust datacenters and want to hug and kiss them and hand over all of their family’s information to them. Your whole threat model is the guy trying to break into wifi. You are literally part of my own threat model. Law enforcement is an asset to you, not a part of a threat model. You are a computer mall cop. Yeah, people like you are exactly why nobody should ever be satisfied with TLS encryption 😂 incompetent shrill nincompoop
I have 2 that I use regularly. PIA to unblock things on the internet (and change how things are logged) and Tailscale to access my home network remotely. I’m happy with both of them.
Tailscale works really well for me as well.
VPN’s are like a condom for the internet. With much of the internet trying to fuck you putting on a wrapper is probably a good idea.
Eventually you get used to the slower speeds, rarely have issues with connection and if I do I just change IP. If a website doesn’t allow a vpn I really don’t need to go there and for the sites that I do want to visit there are optional different front ends I use.
A vpn and a good add blocker is pretty much a necessity for me at this point.
If a website doesn’t allow a vpn I really don’t need to go there
Indeed. If all my obfuscation techniques break a site, and I can’t fix it by hopping onto a new VPN IP, I go somewhere else. The internet is a vast library and usually, one site’s info is replicated somewhere else more easily accessible. I mean, when you stop and think about it, at no other time in human history have we had the sum total of the world’s knowledge in the palm of our hands or on our desk. Maybe not wisdom, but certainly vast stores of knowledge. The great libraries of Alexandria would look like my magazine rack in comparison. It’s all out there, sometimes you just got to dig for it.
Slower speeds? I get my full 110 megabytes per second downloading with my VPN hahaha
Thanks for rubbing it in… and failing to mention what service you use.
That’s cuz I get a negative reaction when I mention it hahaha. I use Nord. Got it a few years ago to support Eric from Internet Comment Etiquette, and it just worked for me so I haven’t changed. It used to cap out at maybe 15/20MB per sec, but now I get my full-ass gigabit speeds when downloading stuff. I’ve considered switching but it works great for me and I get max speed, so ehhhh
lol… I get that ;]
I’d probably stick with it as well. My current view is that VPN mostly just provides a cover for general piracy. If “they” wanted to devote the effort they could figure out who I was. But I am sure a lot of vpns serve as honey pots and you wouldn’t want to blow your cover just for someone downloading a movie they never would have paid for anyway. They got the signature thing, but if I was doing something serious then that is going to be quite different than my general use signature and match every other user of Tails or whatever. The signature thing really sucks, but we do have control over what signatures we leave where and via vpns and tor those different “personas” don’t need to be connected by singular ip address.
Or at least that is my present opinion. If anyone here has a good argument against it, I’d like to hear it.
Over the past few years, there has been a great increase in websites using geoblocking. Half the local news sites in the USA block traffic from the EU for example, likely because they want to inject 300 advertising trackers in a manner that would violate EU law. I’ve been using Mullvad for years, and I am happy with it.
Sometimes lemmy.world blocks me from posting from it, which I am not happy with. They were even critical of its strict privacy stance, which I found to be a weird take from a fediverse project.
I do understand their reasons, yet the majority of lemmy.world is shitposting assholes so there’s some flaws somewhere…
I understand Lemmy doesn’t provide a way to fuse multiple signals like the combination of a high-reputation account with a low-reputation IP address and it would be too much to ask volunteer server admins to develop their own. I’m OK with that answer. I don’t expect to dictate the terms by which they give me free services.
The part I didn’t like was their dim view of the fact that Mullvad actually provides privacy to its users. I believe private internet access is valuable to the world even if it enables some harms.
Not related to vpn. But Lemmy.word is also banning users that supports Palestine without notice.
I’ve been using PIA since 2015, and I’ve never really had any issues with it, it does what I need it to do and it only costs $40 a year.
PIA is owned by an Israeli data-harvester, Teddy Sagi, since 2018.
Australia is prepping for that social media ban in December (and maybe the UK porn ban too). Have ‘been in’ New Zealand ever since that news came out
There’s a whole world out there and you pick NZ?!
I’ve still to find any geo-restriction on AUS and NZ sites from Bahamas and considering how AUS and NZ have acted on average the last five years, I’m not browsing the internet from either even if on an anon VPN.
Would be interested to know your views on NZ
I use Mullvad daily. Never turn it off.
Same
If I didn’t torrent, I likely wouldn’t use a vpn. With https sites, my isp can’t really see what I’m up to and my ip is never my actual location.I can’t get Freetube to work so I’ve been downloading youtube videos with PipePipe on my phone and watching them on my laptop. No way could I do this without a vpn.
Using Proton right now, it’s ok (kind of lacking some features on Linux). Planning on switching to Mullvad before next summer.
I use both all the time in the same VPN. Other then sometimes switching locations to find a good one, never a problem.
Are you using the Invidious API? Those are broke as hell.
I was using whatever api Freetube comes with. Do you have a recommended of one that works?
YT broke the Invidious API last month, which barely worked to begin with.
Use your VPN for the thing it’s meant to do and don’t use any API. Just change the VPN to a non-primary location, and turn off the API or use the local IP fallback. If it doesn’t work, change locations again until it works.
I’ll give it a shot. Thanks very much.
I installed Freetube again and it’s working without making any changes. Looks like a different Invidious instance is set as default.
I use
- ProtonVPN mostly to bypass geoblocking or when specific Torrent trackers demand VPNs
- WireGuard self-hosted mostly to reach own devices outside my LAN
- TailScale also for self-hosting access but I pretty much migrated everything to WG
- ssh tunneling (arguably not VPN but still convenient)
I also use split tunneling, inclusive (e.g. everything but Firefox) or exclusive (e.g. only qbittorrent) whenever I don’t want to tunnel all my traffic.
I don’t use one except for work (to connect to corporate networks).
A VPN mostly changes which entity you have to trust (from your ISP to your VPN provider). I don’t have a reason to distrust my ISP any more than any VPN provider. I don’t have any need to regularly get around any geoblocking.
When I do privacy-sensitive things, I use Tor, which is actually effective at hiding who I am and what I am doing.
I don’t have a reason to distrust my ISP any more than any VPN provider.
Some VPN providers are pretty transparent with how they do things though, and publish annual audit results. Much better than an ISP that is opaque.
Very important, and becoming more important by the day as more and more regions agegate the internet. You need to change regions so you can access sites without guaranteed identity theft.
If you don’t use one, it’s fairly trivial to link your activity across the internet, as well as trace any internet traffic back to you, personally.
Connectivity is certainly a problem. For the most part, if they block my access, then I consider them not worth visiting.
I don’t think most ppl need a vpn for at home stuff but I do use Mullvad since I spend a lot of time on college WiFi and they might not like how I access my textbooks and research papers.
