this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
100 points (95.5% liked)

Privacy

32482 readers
235 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 5 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week 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.

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

You'd be surprised how terrible politician priorities are

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

CGNAT

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week 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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

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

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

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

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

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

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week 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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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

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

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)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week 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.

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

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week 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.

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

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week 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.

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

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

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

Don't just use Tor, use VPN on top of it.

If you use tor frequently, you'd eventually get a bad "roll of dice" on the nodes and get 3 government run nodes. Its not a matter of "if" but "when", roll the dice enough times, and the holes in the "swiss cheese" eventually line up.

If you are using Tor, also use a VPN along with it. It might make the traffic a little slower, but its worth it in case you get 3 NSA nodes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Doesn't it mean there's only 1 node NSA has to attack - your VPN?

Kinda renders Tor over it pointless.

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

Better than 0 nodes, and this is not counting that they already attacked 3.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week 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.

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

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week 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?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

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

Do new torrents bypass this somehow, or is it just by sheer volume and popularity ?

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

The latter. Seedboxes are becoming more popular these days, which might be good for future torrent preservation. But if you have a niche or old school taste, you are gonna have a hard time without port forwarding.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week 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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week 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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Tailscale is the best VPN that exists rn.

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

Why did you not include DPI spoofing?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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.

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

Getting around deep packet inspection.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Tor has plans for free/mo.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week 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)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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 ›