how many of us here use vpns?

I don't but thought I should. I don't do much on uploading or downloading stuff, mainly just comment. I think vpns may raise a red flag that you are hiding something, so if you get on someone's radar and they see you have a vpn, they may try to investigate farther. But generally having everything encrypted to hide your activity, IP address, and location is the best for security.
 
VPNs are mostly good for accessing content which is blocked in your country. Other than that all you do is you shift your trust from your ISP to your VPN provider. They are both companies that make money and will not move a finger to help you as soon as it is discovered that you do something that puts their money interests in danger.
 
My arsenal:
Epic Privacy Browser
Proton VPN
TOR browser.
All free (or free versions). Between the three, a connection is guaranteed.


PonyLove said:
I think vpns may raise a red flag that you are hiding something, so if you get on someone's radar and they see you have a vpn, they may try to investigate farther.
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Only if you're in Iran or Tibet, etc. ;)
Western world courts have repeatedly upheld our right to privacy.
 
Use a VPN as a minimum, it's removes the association of this site to your IP address except at the VPN provider where the two meet. Use a VPN which uses encryption and advertises as "no logs". You have to trust that they actually don't keep logs, but it costs more money for them to keep logs of your activity, so it's likely they don't.

PonyLove said:
I think vpns may raise a red flag that you are hiding something, so if you get on someone's radar and they see you have a vpn, they may try to investigate farther.
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I think you'd be surprised at how many people use VPN for torrenting pirated content following all the compensation claims from the movie production companies scraping IP addresses. And ISPs don't care and just want to make money, here the government passed laws requiring them to keep logs of websites visited and they fought it pretty hard as it would costs them millions.
 
I have pia VPN which I pay for using prepaid debit cards, but just use it for torrents, only ever switch the full IP on for browsing if there's something really off that I want to anonymize.
 
VPNs aren’t going to flag you as suspicious. With Covid and work from home, anyone connecting their computer or laptop back to their company’s resources uses a VPN to do so. personal vpns will easily get lost in the noise of corporate vpns
 
DCCAM said:
VPNs aren’t going to flag you as suspicious. With Covid and work from home, anyone connecting their computer or laptop back to their company’s resources uses a VPN to do so. personal vpns will easily get lost in the noise of corporate vpns
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These days they are very commonplace
 
On my windows 10 machine all the spy telemetry ips are changed to 00.000.00 and I run Oracle Virtual Box with Kali linux OS. It is password protected and encrypted so even if my machine was compromised I am safe...I use PIA VPN but I go through two proxy servers after the VPN..easy to setup on Kali...


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DinoRawr said:
Yep I did. It was pretty much push-button for me.
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It was experimental when I used Opera. It never worked or konked out and revealed my IP (no kill switch). Never trusted them after that.
 
for the most part, your ISP doesn't care what you do on the internet. as long as you are browsing https-sites then all your ISP really sees is traffic from site A to your IP address. if you download something, all they see is the traffic and not exactly what you downloaded. the point is, your ISP won't be snooping your traffic unless someone legally asks them to check. ISP makes money on you continuing to pay for their service.

with all that said, i would encourage a VPN to mask your traffic for privacy reasons if you value privacy. yes, if you are not doing anything illegal then there is no worries but then why do we shut the blinds on our windows of our house when we're not doing anything illegal in our house, right? also, you could access other-country-stuff with a vpn so that's a perk.

the choice is yours. i'm sure law enforcement have bigger fish to fry then you browsing this forum.
 
Yes.

I use PIA and i tunnel out in Panama. Beast isn't really even cared about where I am, people have been caught engaging by the police (on videos they had) and have been warned not to do it again. However, being as old as I am, I prefer to keep my private life private, with everyone out there wanting to suck up as much metadata as possible. Everything I don't want to connect to my already huge data pile (thanks facebook and googs) I do with a VPN.

A special note of concern with VPN's, always make sure no logs are kept, and by that I mean don't just take their word for it, do your research. Around the time I got PIA, I learnt it's true they don't keep logs, there was a court case where they were asked for them and had nothing to hand over.
 
PonyLove said:
I don't but thought I should. I don't do much on uploading or downloading stuff, mainly just comment. I think vpns may raise a red flag that you are hiding something, so if you get on someone's radar and they see you have a vpn, they may try to investigate farther. But generally having everything encrypted to hide your activity, IP address, and location is the best for security.
Click to expand...
Be aware that VPNs have *NOTHING* to do with encryption beyond that which is "normal" (https, ferinstance). You want that, you have to head for TOR. At best, a VPN is effectively "Computer X sent a packet to this address (the "entrance" to the VPN)" and "This address (the entrance to the VPN - which in this case makes it the exit from the VPN) sent a packet to Computer X". Both packets are either plaintext, or encrypted with the https encryption method, which might or might not be worth spit on a hot griddle - some say that it's quite secure, others think it's barely secure or not secure at all. You be the judge.

A RIDICULOUSLY over-simplified comparison/explanation of the two technologies follows:

If a "watcher", whoever that happens to be, has the resources, they can watch packets coming out of all of the possible "exits" from the VPN (which is a finite number, no matter which VPN service you might be using), and say "Aha! That's the packet we just saw go in the other end, and it's heading for this destination address over here!" So then they watch that destination address, and sure enough - here comes a packet from the destination address, headed for an entrance to the VPN. Shortly afterwards, since they're watching the various places it might pop out, they see that packet come popping out, and can look at where it's supposed to go - To "Computer X". Whap! You've just been traced.

You can think of a packet as being a car traveling down the freeway, being pursued by the cops in a helicopter. Suddenly, you swerve onto a ramp that puts you in a tunnel that the chopper can't see into. The obvious concept is that the chopper just climbs until it can see both ends of the tunnel, and waits for you to come out the other end. Presto - you're busted! But wait! This is a special VPN tunnel! It has 4000 entrances, and 4000 exits, and you can pop out of any of them! In theory, the chopper can climb high enough to see all the entrances and exits, and just wait for you to come out before resuming the chase. In practice, it's damned hard to watch every exit from the tunnel, so there's a reasonably good chance that you can pop out and get where you want to be. Problem is, you're still gonna be driving the same car out that you went in with. If they can recognize that car, you're hosed.

Now let's think about TOR...
Same scenario: You're tooling down the freeway with the chopper chasing you in your candy-apple-red 2021 Dodge Challenger. You duck into the tunnel. Only with TOR, once you're in the tunnel, you come to a screeching halt, jump out, and get in a beat-to-shit 1963 used-to-be-blue, but now it's mostly rust and primer grey, International Harvester pickup truck, spin around (as best you can in this old clunker) and pop back out of the tunnel going the way you came from. Somebody else comes running up, and drives the Red Challenger to a chop-shop so secret not even the driver knows where it is. You, meanwhile, drive the IH to ANOTHER tunnel, and repeat the process, unseen, and unknown. When you come out this time, you're in a Green 1993 Toyota Corolla, and you drive to ANOTHER tunnel and do it all over again. Only this time, you come out of the tunnel driving a yellow 1971 VW Super Beetle with rust on the rocker panels and bad valves. You can keep swapping cars like this for (theoretically) as many times as you like. (but obviously, each swap means longer to get to your destination - which is why TOR connections are *MUCH* slower than a VPN or "just regular" connection) Meanwhile, the chopper has probably had to go refuel, losing all chance of spotting you coming out the other end of that first tunnel you drove into. Finally, you decide you're tired of playing "Which way did he go?", and you drive to wherever it was you were headed. They swap the car you're in for something else, and you kick back and party with them for a while. Then you decide to go home - You reverse the process - You drive the car they swapped for the one you arrived in back to the last tunnel, and pick up another car, lather, rinse, repeat, until you get back to the original tunnel, where your Red Challenger has been repainted metal-flake Kool-Aid purple. You get in, and you drive home. Cops have no idea what happened - they only know that you vanished into the first tunnel, and were never seen again.

Like I said, this is a *RIDICULOUSLY* oversimplified description, but it's pretty close to what actually goes on.
 
yes I thought if you are on someones radar and using a VPN they can eventually see where you are going, but they initially have to be wise to your "illegal" actions.

I have a friend that works for the US intelligence agency that deals with computer security stuff, and he said, it does not matter what you do, if the government wants to find you , they will. But I though I heard where, was it Appl, that would not let the government in on their de-encryption code, but I think they eventually buckled. It was dealing with terrorist.
 
PonyLove said:
yes I thought if you are on someones radar and using a VPN they can eventually see where you are going, but they initially have to be wise to your "illegal" actions.

I have a friend that works for the US intelligence agency that deals with computer security stuff, and he said, it does not matter what you do, if the government wants to find you , they will. But I though I heard where, was it Appl, that would not let the government in on their de-encryption code, but I think they eventually buckled. It was dealing with terrorist.
Click to expand...
Apple has told the feds to go fuck themselves, and has, in fact, beefed up the security in the iPhone in such a way that the method the feds/consultants/whoever (it never got said publicly) used can't be used in phones newer than the iPhone 6.

Nobody is talking details (security through obscurity - bad idea, but better than absolutely NO security) but apparently, the chnges made in the wake of that case did something to make the method used to break that one phone impossible. Speculation (details haven't been revealed, but theres a lot of circumstantial evidence that says the theory is pretty good) says that breaking it open involved disassembling it at the chip level, which would allow for replacing the "secure area" chip that handles the encryption/decryption with a "work-alike" circuit that had the "ten failed tries and it self-wipes" capability deleted, then proceeding to brute-force the password with no worries about the phone wiping itself after 10 failed attempts. As in "Is the password 0000? No? Is it 0001? No? 0002? Nope. 0003? Still no. 0004? etc, all the way out to 9999. (except they probably hit the actual combination long before reaching 9999)
 
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