The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
Huh. That's weird. No idea.
-
For all readers and writers
After much ado, our new tagging system is here and being rolled out to the userbase. Read more here!
VPN Services and Sufficient Velocity
- Thread starter CmptrWz
- Start date
Dmol8
The Undead Unhinged Lunatic of the Web
- Location
- Belgrade,Serbia
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
If you live in the United States, you should be afraid of your ISP. I know 2017 feels like it was an eternity ago to most people, but have we really already forgotten that early in the Trump administration, Congress made it legal for your ISP to sell your browsing history?
Congress just cleared the way for internet providers to sell your web browsing history
The House voted to overturn an Obama-era FCC rule that required ISPs to get permission before sharing users' browsing history with other companies.www.cnbc.com
Yeah 2017 was like 4 years ago and I remember this happening, but I remember other things as well:
Biden signs order to crack down on Big Tech, boost competition 'across the board'
The Biden administration's order argues that the biggest companies in the tech sector are wielding their power to box out smaller competitors.
www.cnbc.com
Biden signing an executive order to start government agencies on dealing with a lot of problems including this one you are talking about
Restoring non-discrimination to the 21st century’s most important network
Trump’s FCC killed net neutrality and disclaimed oversight of internet service providers. Reverse to Build Back Better, says Tom Wheeler.
www.brookings.edu
A think tank funded by AT&T, Comcast, Charter Communications and Verizon has come out with a post in favor of Net Neutrality because at this point the anti-trust actions of the Biden Administration (sparse as they have been so far) have them scared to the point of wanting to run for cover under the previous set of government oversight.
Maine Internet Privacy Law Survives Challenge
Maine’s internet privacy law has survived its first challenge from internet service providers earlier this month. As we previously discussed, here, this law prohibits the sale of certain in
October Trial Possible in Maine ISP Privacy Case
Maine's internet privacy law is going to court on October 5th and has a good chance of wining that trial.
So while yes there are plenty of reasons to hide one's own digital footprint to avoid exploitation and one of those should be so one's ISP can't track you, the US ISPs are currently in deep shit and trying to get out of it precisely because their exploitation of the 2017 decision by the Trump Administration was the straw that broke the camel's back.
So no don't simply be afraid of your ISP if you live in the US. Be pissed at them and act on that rage.
Cadis
Proud Capoeria Angola Quintal Capoerista
- Location
- United States
If by support you mean ban multiple Tor nodes, then yes.
Dmol8
The Undead Unhinged Lunatic of the Web
- Location
- Belgrade,Serbia
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Is the logic in banning those so that banned posters can't get around the ban? Or something else like those TOR nodes being malicious actors?
Cadis
Proud Capoeria Angola Quintal Capoerista
- Location
- United States
the latter.
I figure that this is relevant enough to the thread's purpose to post, but not relevant enough to put in the first post:
View: https://youtu.be/9_b8Z2kAFyY
View: https://youtu.be/9_b8Z2kAFyY
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'd like to clarify that the Privacy Pass extension isn't "from Cloudflare". As far as I can tell only one person on the Privacy Pass team actually works at Cloudflare and the extension itself is open source (BSD licensed) and is just the client implementation of an open protocol based on sound cryptographic principles. Cloudflare can be seen to be the top promoter and backend provider for the protocol but nothing fundamentally ties it to Cloudflare or any proprietary Cloudflare technologies.
I admittedly would like to see a world where the providers weren't hardcoded into the Privacy Pass extension and could register themselves at runtime or something like that instead, but that's altogether a minor quibble.
With regards to it not working -- two providers are listed in the Privacy Pass extension popup: Cloudflare and hCaptcha -- I'm currently able to collect passes for Cloudflare but not hCaptcha.
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Eh, I just kinda stopped caring because for some reason Cloudflare got like 5000% less annoying on VPN for me at a certain point and only interrupts when I haven't used the site for like a day or so. I can deal with that.
- Location
- California
To reiterate: some random internet forum is not going to convince me to let my ISP and the government monitor my web traffic 👍
Good for you. I don't care as this thread obviously isn't for you at this point.
Also, I'm not going to trust a random poster on an internet forum that seems to be shilling for VPN services in general by repeating the claims that only the VPN providers seem to be making.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
I watched part of the video and it mostly seemed to be saying "VPNs don't prevent you from getting malware." Which, duh, a VPN just encrypts your traffic, if you download a virus then whether it was encrypted in transit doesn't matter, but some VPN services have been offering "thread protection" as part of their app (which in my experience has mostly just involved blocking connection to sketchy websites) which might be making some people think that VPNs also do the work of an anti-virus program.
Basically, VPNs don't protect your computer from malware, they encrypt your communications and conceal your location from the websites you talk to and conceal what websites you're communicating with from your ISP. If you're already aware of that, then the video is redundant.
Basically, VPNs don't protect your computer from malware, they encrypt your communications and conceal your location from the websites you talk to and conceal what websites you're communicating with from your ISP. If you're already aware of that, then the video is redundant.
- Location
- West
They collect data by following your digital fingerprints, only two things VPN's are good for are obfuscating your point of origin before they follow your digital presence via cookies and hardware signatures.
The second thing they are good for are bypassing geo locked content and really should not be used for security. Because the sites you visit while using VPN's will collect usage data that they later use A.Is or other systems to match other data to you.
We are all people who have preferences for what web content we consume, some of these site will sell what data they have accumulated to ad agencies or similar companies. These companies have massive databases filled with user data from shopping sites to blogs. Once they match you to a set of data points they push ads to that user related to what they have gathered. They don't need your IP address, having it helps but more often then not most people's IP will change every day.