Port forwarding, got a good deal, reviewed well. It exports Wireguard and OpenVPN files easily, so you are not tied to their Eddie client. I’m happy with it so far.
Douglas Spink was arrested. He was then removed from the team, no longer having access to anything. Df has been the main guy for the past couple years - but that’s cryptostorm becoming a honeypot, in your opinion?
Doesn’t hurt to be overly paranoid, but this is to the extreme.
I have nothing invested in proving it one way or another. It is something I saw a few years ago, and thought I’d mention it now to warn others. If you think it went from honeypot to non-honeypot, then by all means use it. At the end of the day, you cannot fully trust any traditional VPN because they can do what ever they want and we’d be none the wiser, despite all the big claims. VPN’s are for watching geoblocked movies and stuff like that. That’s about it. If you want privacy, you’ll have to look into other things.
You just seem very passionate about the subject. Almost nobody would take that much time to argue in the favor of a small, relatively unknown VPN. But also you suggest that I’m incorrect when I say VPN’s cannot be trusted ultimately. Only someone who was interested in maintaining the “VPN is private” illusion would say that.
Anyway, I don’t care if you do work for a VPN or maybe even own your own. But it’s gonna be hard to push it in privacy forums cuz there are a lot of people who know better. Well, there are also a lot of people who don’t now that I think about it… ;)
I used to have Mullvad but it recently disabled portforwarding-support. Now I ditched it in favor of Proton since I already had a Proton subscription running. I am still looking out for a VPN that supports portforwarding though, in a way that a non-tech-savvy person like myself can run it on Linux. No idea where and how to do that now.
Really? Can I ask why? I’ve been using them for both and had no issues that I’ve seen, but if they have some flaws in privacy I would like to know what they are.
I don’t. Your ISP can hardly see anything you do online. Almost all websites are encrypted with HTTPS and if you are concerned about them seeing what domains you visit you can just change your dns server to quad9 or something else privacy respecting. A more valid usecase for VPN is preventing websites from tracking you IP address, downloading “Linux ISO’s” or bypassing geographical blocks and for that I used mullvad but I am looking for something else now that they blocked port forwarding.
I wont go into much detail but ISPs can act as intermediaries in https calls and TLS would work only between you and the ISP and then ISP and the requested server. Software like Zscaler does similar stuff you can look it up if you want
I’m familiar. Other than key exchange for encrypted connections, the whole point of HTTPS/TLS is establishing who you’re connecting with is who they say they are and preventing man in the middle attacks just like you described.
If your traffic was being intercepted by something like Zscaler it wouldn’t be able to provide the proper signed certificate of that web address and your browser would throw a mismatch error. IT departments using such intermediaries for https traffic inspection only get around this by installing the intermediaries’ root CA on your system so it’s not flagged by your browser or whatever you’re using for TLS traffic.
The only way someone could intercept your TLS traffic and then pass it onto you without you knowing is by having that website’s private key to sign the traffic with, which is a major security breach. As soon as something like that is discovered the certificate is revoked and a new one is issued with a different private key.
What would you suggest now? IVPN and mullvad used to be my go-to VPN providers but now that they both removed port forwarding I really don’t know what to use.
Even DNS traffic and IP address and packet metadata is extremely valuable to ISPs like Comcast and AT&T. They use it to control what you can and can’t do – for example, throttling your access to streaming video services that compete with their own streaming products or partners’ products. They spent millions to overturn Net Neutrality regulations so they can use what they know about your traffic to monetize you (steer you to their products).
Yup. An ISP could potentially gain some information based on the IPs you’re hitting and the number/frequency of packets sent and received, but that would take serious logging and analysis on their part. It’s much easier to collect data through DNS requests.
Deep packet inspection by definition requires the ability to see inside the packet, which if using HTTPS wouldn’t be possible for your ISP.
They can still see the destination IP, return IP, and port number, but that’s it. It would take a ton of storage to log all of that packet data though, and it’d be difficult to come up with a way not to double count it if it’s going through multiple hops on the ISP network.
Logging DNS requests on the DNS server would be a much easier way of collecting that data if they wanted it. I know cloudflare collects aggregate DNS query data through their public DNS server, and Google likely does too.
@just_browsing I was just bullshitting. Sure, they would need a proxy of sorts and a certificate to open your packages if you use HTTPS. I suppose the only thing that can help with carrier surveillance is a good VPN or TOR. But even then, the VPN provider is a problem in and of itself.
If you torrent copyrighted material in Germany, you definitely want a VPN. Private law firms “representing copyright holders” regularly request information about consumers based on source IPs/protocol/ports from ISPs with a court’s rubber stamp, then send out demand letters for hundreds of euros, with a risk of thousands if you choose to fight it.
Sometimes they follow up if you ignore it, sometimes not. It is horribly oppressive.
tl;dr germans who torrent from a consumer internet service should use a vpn
Excuse me for my lack of understanding, but why are there so many people looking to hide their traffic from their ISP with a VPN? Isn’t HTTPS enough? Are you afraid of ISPs resorting to DPI or MiM to spy on their users? Is customer protection so weak in the US that ISPs are free to spy on their customers using aforementioned techniques?
Edit: I just realized that I left out people leaving under authoritarian regimes, for whom VPNs are unfortunately required to evade their government.
Because HTTPS protects only things you do on the site. ISP still knows which sites you connect to. Which YouTube video you are watching to. etc. F.E. in Russia ISP’s have to keep logs of users interactions for half of year and give it to government when they need them.
Yes, because they know the IPs your packets go to, but if there are multiple websites behind a single IP they won’t know which one (unless you use your ISP DNS server, which you should probably not)
Which YouTube video you are watching to. etc.
No, because the URL is contained within the HTTP packets which are encrypted with SSL (the S in HTTPS), so unless the ISP does MiM, they cannot know which URL you are visiting.
Oh, thanks for this precision, I wasn’t aware of this. And now that I think of it, it’s obvious that the first exchange with a server has to be unencrypted
My opinion. I can’t trust any government on this planet anymore. So much fuck ups and stupid decisions. So basically every government is kinda authoritarian for me…
To me, the problem is you are instead giving over all of your info to the VPN company, and still be tracked by other means such as fingerprinting of devices, cookies/site data or browsing patterns. Is some random VPN company more trustworthy than my ISP and who’s to say they aren’t sharing the information? Plus, the could also be subpoenaed/NSLed if that’s the concern.
I’d be more willing to trust a VPN company with this data than an ISP. The former’s entire business hinges on providing privacy to their customers while the latter can just sell your data to whoever they want and most people wouldn’t bat an eye.
Legitimate questions, but why would it be worse for VPN companies?
The way I see it, I have no way of verifying the answers to any of these regardless of whether it’s an ISP or a VPN, but I do know that VPNs have a greater incentive to provide you with proper privacy because if they were found to fail at this, the entire business dies. ISPs run no such risk, especially since many of them are effectively monopolies.
They have also injected Javascript into pages (selling new modems) and add(ed) unique headers to HTTP traffic so websites could identify individual users despite their best attempts.
This must have been pre-HTTPS since you’d need to MitM the SSL certificate for that to work
Correct. But a VPN provider can also build a profile on that metadata, and transparency is often lacking in the VPN business. I live in a country with fairly good privacy laws for now and much prefer my ISP to have my metadata than someone else.
I tried Proton for a month for I’d get A LOT of “confirm you’re not a robot” when entering a lot of websites. Was really annoying. Did you ever get around that?
I used to use Proton, but it stopped working in the country I travel to work in, so I changed to SurfShark as it works as a region unblocker, on recommendation from other people here.
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