this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Not what you want to hear but:
Putting ALL of your traffic through a VPN accomplishes little to nothing... and may actually compromise you. Understand that we all have a digital fingerprint, as it were. A mess of tracking cookies but also lining up "personas" and the like.
An example I like is that Jim in Botswana is known to login to the same account as Jim from Sweden and Jim from Alabama. Also, Jim from Alabama has used some of the same VERY distinct language as Sophie Smith's little brother. And Sophie Smith went to Polk High in 1997. And if this sounds crazy: THIS is why there is so much research into how to aggregate and analyze large swathes of data and stuff like LLMs largely came out of this as a bonus.
If you put all of your traffic through a VPN you are more or less making it easy. Jim from Sweden blah blah blah AND that same IP downloads a lot of copyrighted tentacle porn. Which has now greatly increased your risk vector in the event an example needs to be made.
Put traffic that needs to be VPN'd through a VPN. Put traffic that needs to be Tor'd through Tor (although, also do some research on the various attempts to compromise that...) and so forth. But the key is to not mix your "good" traffic with your "bad" traffic.
So you like copyrighted tentacle pork and went to HS in '97, eh?
Sorry just kidding. In all seriousness: This is a wonderful explanation on internet privacy nowadays, but I don't know if TOR should be trusted. Surely we've all read some time that some nodes are under control of bad states and other bad actors who use those nodes to put some malicious payload into your traffic, right? But luckily, I personally don't see the need to use TOR rn.
Yeah. I have a LOT of issues with Tor's design. And the philosophy and its tendency to be used for heinous shit like CSAM makes me just not want to deal with it. Why should I help mask the scum of the earth's behavior?
And while it has historically been used to protect some journalists and activists, Signal, twitter, and proper opsec/dedicated hardware have very much taken over for that. In large part because people have realized that masking your route to a destination doesn't help if you are connecting from home and have been identified at the destination.
But people get REALLY pissy about Tor. Likely because it makes them feel smart to be "one step farther".