• There has been a recent cluster of spammers accessing BARFer accounts and posting spam. To safeguard your account, please consider changing your password. It would be even better to take the additional step of enabling 2 Factor Authentication (2FA) on your BARF account. Read more here.

VPN's

JesasaurusRex

JesasaurusRex

On a break
Joined
Feb 16, 2004
Location
Kens Moms House
Moto(s)
Are Gay
Name
Poopy McPo
Which ones you guys using and which you staying away from. Y and y. Prefer free but not against the idea of paying for a good one.
 
I was just playing with the openvpn.org offering. They made it super easy to install. It's commercial but free with 2 clients.
 
What do you want out of a VPN?

All free services suck and are selling your data.

A lot of pay for services suck and may be selling your data.

I use 3-5 different pay for VPN clients, though currently using VyprVPN as my go to. It also works the best for me when working in China, though coworkers have had good success with Astril.
 
Last edited:
I also have a few of my own VPNs set up in a few different data centers across the world.

There's also the option of a SSH tunnel/proxies, which also run off of remote severs.

On the cheap, you can set up an EC2 instance on Amazon and make your own VPN/Proxy.
 
The widely advertised one over the past week works very well in terms of performance (private internet access). Still getting 200mb/s+ performance over the VPN link when it is connecting through its various servers here on the west coast. $40/year, can run a handful of clients at once, can set up with whole-house router if desired. Can choose manual locations from all over the world.
 
Last edited:
aciurczak said:
The widely advertised one over the past week works very well in terms of performance (private internet access). Still getting 200mb/s+ performance over the VPN link when it is connecting through its various servers here on the west coast. $40/year, can run a handful of clients at once, can set up with whole-house router if desired. Can choose manual locations from all over the world.
Click to expand...


Do they explain anywhere what enrcyption they're using? Do they open themselves up to audits?

Most VPN companies promises are empty, as they don't open themselves up to any auditing that would verify their claims of privacy.
 
The encryption is chosen by the client. There aren't many options in the client, it's pretty barebones, but's that's one of them. Default is AES-128, AES-256 is an option, along with a handful of others.

I don't disagree about your point of empty promises as the baseline to be expected across all VPN providers, but you need to couple that with the absolute intentions of the incumbent ISPs to monetize your data to the greatest extent legally and financially possible. It's an unknown risk vs a known risk, there is no safe haven. That said, larger is better than smaller, more users is likely better than fewer users, more publicity is probably better than less publicity, and US-based is probably better than somewhere outside of our legal domain. PIA seems pretty decent. I know there are quite a few others to choose from as well.
 
1. Take out cash from an ATM
2. Go to a Safeway nearby
3. Purchase Amazon gift card with cash
4. Download Tor Browser
5. Use Tor Browser to go to Private Internet Access and purchase with gift card
6. Go to 10minutemail.com to receive PIA's username / password registration
7. Write them down on a post-it, use to log in
8. Burn post-it.
 
aciurczak said:
The encryption is chosen by the client. There aren't many options in the client, it's pretty barebones, but's that's one of them. Default is AES-128, AES-256 is an option, along with a handful of others.

I don't disagree about your point of empty promises as the baseline to be expected across all VPN providers, but you need to couple that with the absolute intentions of the incumbent ISPs to monetize your data to the greatest extent legally and financially possible. It's an unknown risk vs a known risk, there is no safe haven. That said, larger is better than smaller, more users is likely better than fewer users, more publicity is probably better than less publicity, and US-based is probably better than somewhere outside of our legal domain. PIA seems pretty decent. I know there are quite a few others to choose from as well.
Click to expand...

Agreed on most counts, not sure a US based VPN is more secure. I use VyprVPN and they're based out of Switzerland, a place that valued privacy more than the US does.

Also found this website relevant.

https://thatoneprivacysite.net
 
That's a good resource, thx! I don't think the US choice means more security per se, I just think it potentially means more helpful oversight. Not necessarily legislative (which would be a bad thing), but more legal. I.E. if they are found to be doing any number of nefarious things with user data, they have much more accessible assets to lose, and therefore a motivation to protect them.

That's coupled with the downside of potentially being more easily compromised than one sitting on an island in the middle of nowhere under nobody's legal jurisdiction. But that second type of location has, for me, more unknown risks to accept.
 
NorCalAthlete said:
1. Take out cash from an ATM
2. Go to a Safeway nearby
3. Purchase Amazon gift card with cash
4. Download Tor Browser
5. Use Tor Browser to go to Private Internet Access and purchase with gift card
6. Go to 10minutemail.com to receive PIA's username / password registration
7. Write them down on a post-it, use to log in
8. Burn post-it.
Click to expand...

nope.

https://www.wired.com/2014/07/nsa-targets-users-of-privacy-services/
If you use Tor or any of a number of other privacy services online or even visit their web sites to read about the services, there’s a good chance your IP address has been collected and stored by the NSA, according to top-secret source code for a program the NSA uses to conduct internet surveillance.

There’s also a good chance you’ve been tagged for simply reading news articles about these services published by Wired and other sites.

This is according to code, obtained and analyzed by journalists and others in Germany, which for the first time reveals the extent of some of the wide-spread tracking the NSA conducts on people using or interested in using privatizing tools and services—a list that includes journalists and their sources, human rights activists, political dissidents living under oppressive countries and many others who have various reasons for needing to shield their identity and their online activity.

The source code, for the NSA system known as XKeyscore, is used in the collection and analysis of internet traffic, and reveals that simply searching the web for privacy tools online is enough to get the NSA to label you an “extremist” and target your IP address for inclusion in its database.
Click to expand...

dammit, I may have been tagged just for reading this article :laughing
 
Got to public computer, download tor, put on USB stick.

Then, only run Tor off the USB stick.

This whole thing is really a balance of convenience vs privacy. I just like to make it a little bit harder to steal my information.
 
Last edited:
Everyone always forgets the step with the fake glasses attached to a big plastic nose.
 
Whenever we're running through some type of additional proxy for all traffic, it's going to take some level of performance hit. But it sometimes seems to be more significant in ping time than peak bandwidth. It would be unusable for gamers, but for normal internet use, even downloading/uploading the largest files, I think the article is overestimating the impact. Here are two speed tests one right after the other this morning. First one is over the VPN, second one is with the VPN disconnected. Yes, there is a very noticeable difference, but 100+mb/s is fast enough for just about any normal internet usage, including multiple 4k streams, downloading many-gigabyte movies, etc. The writer's experience going from 100 mb/s to 5 mb/s would not be usable, and I wonder if that was a normal occurrence for him, or a rare problem.

VPN enabled, all traffic running through PIA:


VPN disabled, all traffic running directly to speedtest server:


That said, his points about complexity for normal users aren't necessarily wrong, either. I have to turn it on and off throughout the day, and generally leave it off for some background jobs to run (backup jobs that are restricted with a couple methods, including limited to coming to/from a specific IP).
 
Last edited:
aciurczak said:
Whenever we're running through some type of additional proxy for all traffic, it's going to take some level of performance hit. But it sometimes seems to be more significant in ping time than peak bandwidth. It would be unusable for gamers, but for normal internet use, even downloading/uploading the largest files, I think the article is overestimating the impact. Here are two speed tests one right after the other this morning. First one is over the VPN, second one is with the VPN disconnected. Yes, there is a very noticeable difference, but 100+mb/s is fast enough for just about any normal internet usage, including multiple 4k streams, downloading many-gigabyte movies, etc. The writer's experience going from 100 mb/s to 5 mb/s would not be usable, and I wonder if that was a normal occurrence for him, or a rare problem.

VPN enabled, all traffic running through PIA:


VPN disabled, all traffic running directly to speedtest server:


That said, his points about complexity for normal users aren't necessarily wrong, either. I have to turn it on and off throughout the day, and generally leave it off for some background jobs to run (backup jobs that are restricted with a couple methods, including limited to coming to/from a specific IP).
Click to expand...

Jesus, what level of internet do you have with Concrap?

I'm supposed to see "up to 200mb/s" and the most I'll see, wired, is 112ish and 80ish wireless.

Regardless, speed was what the article made a big deal of, but I've got more issues with the internet not playing nice with VPNs.

I've been blocked by Netflix on some devices, with some VPNs, sometimes...

Same goes for certain websites, slack and gmail.

However, I do see a drop to about 30mb/s when using a VPN on my machine via wireless. Not horrible, but noticeable.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top