VPN Services and Sufficient Velocity

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?

www.cnbc.com

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.

Yeah 2017 was like 4 years ago and I remember this happening, but I remember other things as well:

www.cnbc.com

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.

Biden signing an executive order to start government agencies on dealing with a lot of problems including this one you are talking about

www.brookings.edu

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.

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.

www.natlawreview.com

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


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.
 
There are multiple valid reasons to use a VPN starting with avoiding censorship in some countries and moving on down the list of various privacy concerns, but what I don't get is does Sufficient Velocity offer support to TOR users?

As for using a VPN most of them only shift around the contact surface so only if you need that changed do they actually help.
If by support you mean ban multiple Tor nodes, then yes.
 
While I'm leery installing an extension from Cloudflare that wants access to data from all my sites both because it seems kinda counterproductive to using a VPN in the first place and Cloudflare's kinda... not great, I tried it and it just does not work at all in current Firefox, at least (haven't tried other browsers), failing to register generating more passes at all.
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.
 
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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.
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
To reiterate: some random internet forum is not going to convince me to let my ISP and the government monitor my web traffic 👍

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.
 
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