this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
96 points (95.3% liked)

Privacy

37039 readers
1 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] kitnaht@lemmy.world 69 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

These fucking things always tip-toe around the issue anyone wants a VPN for: Piracy.

Are you pirating shit? Yes? Use a VPN.

[–] kratoz29@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Are you pirating shit? Yes? Use a VPN.

I pirate and seed shit from Mexico no issues without VPN... My only headache is CGNAT.

[–] pineapple@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
[–] kratoz29@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sadly the country has a lot of other shit to worry about, I don't expect that to change in the short or long time lol.

[–] cyclohexane@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

You'd be surprised how terrible politician priorities are

[–] UnsavoryMollusk@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

CGNAT

I am so sorry. How do you usually circumvent that bs ?

[–] pineapple@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Depending on your ISP sometimes you can just call them, ask to opt out of cg-nat and they will do it for free.

[–] kratoz29@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For seeding? Out of luck as I don't have a VPS currently, I used one to open my ports with some hacky ways using Wireguard and IPtables stuff, if there is a better way I would like to know lol.

Now I just constantly seed in hopes that people with the ports opened can access my stuff.

For accessing my files, Zerotier and Tailscale have been a godsend.

I also happen to have IPv6 support and I can access some exposed services through it without too much hassle, Plex and Bitwarden are two big examples.

[–] UnsavoryMollusk@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Just so you know Proton VPN has port forwarding if you can afford them.

[–] mayhair@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

and you don't live in a third world country 🙃

[–] nayminlwin@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago

Hooray for third world freedom. I've been raw-dogging torrent for years.

[–] DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you pirating shit? No? Guess what, use a VPN!

[–] kitnaht@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I mean, legit true though. A lot of ISPs are selling your data now too.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I like how the article boils down to, "Except for some isolated use cases, Tor is far superior to a VPN in both cost and safety," and a lot of the comments boil down to "YEAH VPNS ARE GREAT GET A VPN."

It is okay to read the article before writing a comment, guys. In some circles, it's even encouraged, because you might learn something.

[–] umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Except many services are very aggressive to Tor exit nodes, namely Google and Cloudflare. Everytime I just met with CAPTCHA after CAPTCHAs, and eventually I gave up on the site.

Yeah, I should cut ties with Google but cutting YouTube on NewPipe is hard. I'm on Proton and watching YouTube is already hard.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You may want to give Freetube a try, which may avoid that issue (especially if combined with libredirect).

Got the captcha endless wave yesterday using freetube on linux until I changed VPN nodes. I don't think it's proxying (not checked though)

[–] Oestradiolo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The latest captchas and cloudflare-turnstile approve you because the google-cloud flare networks have already determined who you are as an individual and just wave you through.

Tor gets the checks because they don’t know who you are and are seeing you for the first time. Getting a captcha means your privacy strategy is working.

[–] umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It is working so well that I get an infinite loop of it on the same page.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah the whole logic of "If I protect my privacy effectively, I won't be able to use Google services anymore! O woe" is a little bit strange to me.

[–] OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't know if your full of shit or this is legit. I really think this is legit.

[–] Oestradiolo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s a massive oversimplification. But with captcha systems everywhere, they’re able to see you visit a newspaper, visit the journal site, try to download a journal pdf, and captcha is able to easily conclude that you’re a human and have automatic approval.

Maybe if you’re going straight to a site for the first time today it would measure your single mouse click. And then from there tracking you across the Internet, assuming you’re online for maybe 6 hours like 99% of connected humans.

Tor blocks all the fingerprinting, and anonymizes the ip address. Captcha is only able to see a computer arrive at the website requesting access. Captcha’s only tool is to give challenges which the bots are able to beat. So they make you run the challenge multiple times, seeing how long it takes your or randomizing how many times you’re willing to do them.

Source: some tech YouTuber did a mini documentary about it. You could watch it yourself I assume.

[–] 0x0@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

and anonymizes the ip address.

The hell it does, it's the exit node's IP address, nothing anonymous about that.... and that's the problem, they know it's a Tor exit node so they'll give you extra shit for it.

[–] pineapple@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've had the same experience with vpn's requiring a captcha for every second website I visit.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Absaroka@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you're looking for a VPN, check out Mullvad.

It's just €5 / $5.25 / £4.15 a month. They haven't changed that price since launching in 2009. So they've also been around a while. Does everything you need a VPN to do. And they're based in Sweden, which seems to have some good privacy rules. They also don't keep logs.

[–] UnsavoryMollusk@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No port forward though (I understand why but it is still annoying)

[–] MrPoopbutt@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What would be the benefit of port forwarding?

Is this something you could do on your router on your side, making it so it doesn't matter if they dont do it?

[–] heyixen815@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Torrenting, can reach more peers. Especially helpful for older, less popular torrents.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] UnsavoryMollusk@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Sadly doing it on the router would not be enough. Not a problem if you are browsing of course. But if you host, needs to listen on a specific port or whatever it gets annoying. And obviously piracy.

[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I love the ultra paranoid path Proton offers. It reminds me.of GoldenEye.

You -> VPN Server 1 -> VPN Server 2 -> TOR -> endpoint.

[–] TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org 22 points 1 year ago

"Good luck, I'm behind 7 proxies!"

[–] DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tailscale is the best VPN that exists rn.

[–] SanndyTheManndy@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why did you not include DPI spoofing?

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I guess it refers to things like GoodbyeDPI. A lot of people use it to watch Youtube after it got "slowed" rather than using a VPN.

Edit: also realized that meant obfuscation protocols like VLESS because VPN protocols are stupid easy to block.

[–] SanndyTheManndy@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Getting around deep packet inspection.

[–] leanleft@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tor has plans for free/mo.

[–] kitnaht@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

And Tor sucks. You shouldn't use it for torrenting, it's frequently targeted by intelligence agencies for IP unmasking, etc.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 2 points 1 year ago (10 children)

You shouldn’t use it for torrenting

True.

it’s frequently targeted by intelligence agencies for IP unmasking

I would take issue with "frequently," in the grand scheme of things, but yes. It is a sufficient level of protection that state intelligence agencies have to have specific methods, which sometimes work and sometimes don't, to try to specifically attack one specific actor on Tor if they care enough to do it. In contrast to a VPN, which any bumbling fuckhead in more or less any jurisdiction can generally defeat with a single subpeona, and even a fairly stupid intelligence agency can defeat without blinking.

Tor sucks

Your axioms don't add up to your theorem. There are cases where a VPN is better, torrenting being one of them, that part is true.

load more comments (10 replies)
[–] kitnaht@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Windscribe $2/mo. Also supports Wireguard. I don't even use their dumbass client, I just export a profile for Wireguard - which is quite a bit faster than OpenVPN

load more comments
view more: next ›