this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Mildly Infuriating

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A VPN isn't going to protect you from malware or trackers. I'm not sure how they can get away with this marketing.

If you want to boost your security focus on your web browser

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[–] [email protected] 72 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

ispot.tv is on one of my DNS blacklists, it seems to be an advertising service?

Many VPNs have built in traffic filtering that does block common malware, phishing, and tracking domains/IPs.

Their advertising claims still do get a bit ridiculous though.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, they’re not completely telling the truth, but they aren’t exactly lying either.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

They literally aren't saying anything. There are no verbs in this advertisement; the narrator is speaking in noun phrases, not sentences. So he's literally saying nothing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

A bit is a little understatement.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago

Plot twist, practically ALL advertisements are misleading

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Good luck trying to explain to normies what a vpn is in 30 seconds.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A VPN does this, but for your internet connection:

two phone receivers, with the speaker of one against the microphone of the other

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

It lets my internets 69??

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Internet providers, governments and criminals can see what you are doing online, With VPN they can't anymore.

Thats basically it.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

...they can't really? Only the domain name is visible to the ISP, and criminals are either stopped by https or won't care about a VPN.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Everything's visible for HTTP, and in fact some ISPs inject their own ads into HTTP content. HTTPS is harder for malicious actors, but your ISP can tell when you're visiting pornhub.com, and will happily provide that to the government. With encrypted SNI it's somewhat harder, but if you're visiting an IP address of 1.2.3.4, and that IP address is solely used by pornhub.com, it's not hard to guess what you're up to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yes, I'm aware. IP addresses are come colocated to hell and back, and every site uses https. I'm sure your ISP is getting some real interesting data watching you visit the same 4 sites.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Not all isps are bad.

Mine have their own free vpn service which encrypts all traffic and hides your IP. So even if the government want anything on you they can't give it to them.

On top of that they are notorious for not giving the government anything. They also have competitive pricing.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah I don’t buy it.

Instead of tapping individual connections, you now only have to tap the traffic to/from the VPNs exit nodes. Then you correlate incoming packets with outgoing packets (e.g. based on size, timing, etc) and you know the origin of the traffic.

Bonus is that it acts as a filter, people using a VPN want to hide their traffic so you specifically want to watch those people.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

If a VPN is big enough, you can't really do that sort of correlation due to the level of traffic involved. I guess that would work for visitors to https://www.woman-inflates-a-balloon-and-sits-on-it-and-pops-it.com/, but wouldn't work at all for google.com

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

With a VPN it's harder for some and impossible for others. But don't for a second think nobody can see what you're doing. I don't want to go into the whole tinfoil provacy rabbithole but with things like browser fingerprinting it's all moot

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yes but for most normal people it's enough and people that are on that kind of watch list usually know what they need.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can pretend to be somewhere else to watch some geo locked content

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

MLB.TV thinks I'm from Seattle so I can watch games that would usually be blacked out, works great

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

They have some additional services they advertise that supposedly deals with these, though I'd imagine they require installed software which would give them more visibility into systems than I'm comfortable with.

For trackers and to some extent malware, they could potentially block some by disallowing outgoing traffic from the VPN to known tracker IP's/domains or C&C hosts/networks, but I could see that being fairly infectivity overall with potentially for false positives.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They're probably referring to their DNS ad and malicious domain filter.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Came to say this. It's a feature they provide so they aren't falsely advertising but it's also nothing special.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All ~~Nord VPN~~ ads are.

FTFY

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Eh. Proton is Pretty honest

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I thought the 'security' angle was just a smokescreen anyway. Isn't it actually for accessing region-locked media?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

VPNs are great for avoiding the nastygrams that your ISP forwards to you from media companies. They get sent to some company that doesn't care about US laws instead, and probably laughed at before being deleted

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Eh, the problem is, most of these big vpn providers end points are well known by most isp's.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use my VPN on public networks for additional security

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Nowadays everything is encrypted by default. You don't get additional security with a VPN.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not everything is. HTTP and unencrypted SNI are still around.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Name a popular service that isn't encrypted but using it might expose you in a legitimate way.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, not really with these, per se. My own VPN, Wireguard, routes back through my pihole service to double down on it's filtering. For the most, I'm not trying to obfuscate my ip. If I wanted to do that I'd use tor or something. I just don't want my traffic to be easily snooped on when I'm connected to wifi that isn't mine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And HTTPS does that. It's encrypted.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yes but I use more than web traffic stuff on my phone.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, if you access things on the internet you could be sued for, your IP will not appear in the logs of your ISP or the webserver you connected to.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Sure. But they can't advertise on that point. So they claim it's for malware and tracking protection even though that makes no sense.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I think it keeps your isp from knowing what websites you're going to?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They used to say NordVPN would boost your game's latency in their ads so I'm not surprised

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Technically? This irony or am I missing something?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Using a VPN generally increases your latency. Latency is...bad. They are advertising a negative consequence as a positive feature, banking on the target market not having enough understanding of the terms in play.

Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You might understand it better but the frog is dead.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I cancelled my subscription once all my water turned to jello