cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/35967051
Most people turn to a VPN for one reason: privacy. And with its verified badge, featured placement, and 100k+ installs, FreeVPN.One looked like a safe choice. But once it’s in your browser, it’s not working to keep you safe, it’s continuously watching you.
There’s no such thing as free vpn. Any idiot who falls for this quite frankly deserves it.
You can’t trust extensions these days. Granted if you are using a “free” vpn, you are the product.
Sure THIS will protect the children!
/s
There are things on the internet that are free and fine to use. VPNs are not one of them. They have ongoing hosting and bandwidth costs. They are not eating those costs without recouping them somehow.
How the fuck else do you think a for profit company is offering free tech?
Free trial with limitations is a classic method that has worked well
I’m saying it’s literally a free VPN. But they’re q company. If they’re offering you free shit, you’re the product.
God that ai image the article uses is such shit
The dingy color scheme gives it away immediately. AI thinks comics should look dingy. Are all LLMs trained on comics printed on old newspaper or something?
It’s similar to something we’d do on purpose in the mid 2010’s, deep frying, when people made satirical MLG compilations they would throw memes in as many filters as possible, making a piss yellow slowly cover the meme the more filters you used.
Ubiquiti router with all traffic (excluding streaming sites and video games) encrypted via Mulvad. Checkmate atheists.
Also PS, if you’re not paying for the product you’re the product. Checks notes: I’m not paying for Lemmy?
PPS reminder to donate to Lemmy/PieFed
Whats more is that, anyone who creates a server can scrape all the data on fediverse. It’s every AI company’s wet dream.
And any comment you delete will still be visible to server admin.
Lemmy currently does have these privacy issues
OMG! They will know all of Hue Manne’s secrets!!!
Meh you’re not wrong, but I just wanna browse content and not see ads. Capitalism is gonna capitalism, but I just want it to leave me alone. There’s a good chance I’m gonna regret this later lol.
excluding
Why?
- Minecraft, to keep my ping down
- Streaming, because Netflix and others will aggressively block VPNs
Didn’t netflix encourage vpn’s for like a decade?
I havent paid for streaming in forever, because i dont want to give art-mangling archive-destroyers my money, but that’s amazing.
No idea tbh. All I know is most streaming services block them now since they often have different content in different regions.
That seems so fuckkng tedious. Why are you paying them for that sevurity compromising bullshit? They’re absolutely selling your juicy juicy data.
Valid on the Minecraft.
Honestly I’m mostly leeching off my friends lol. And my cell provider bundles Netflix.
It’s not super tedious. Every time something doesn’t work, I just add it to my VPN exclusion list. I don’t really care if my ISP snoops on Netflix tbh.
The VPN blocking doesn’t really bother me. It’s the enshitification of streaming services that bothers me. E.g. why does every paid service now trying to show me ads.
Btw, a lot of Lemmy instances also don’t play nice with a VPN. Probably to block bots. PieFed is likely the same.
if my isp
Oh honey it’s so much worse than that.
And fuck those lemmy instances? Might consider blocking communities hosted on them.
I’m looking to expand beyond my edge router X. What router do you use?
I’m using a cloud gateway max with a single U7 Wall Pro AP. 10/10 performance for my medium small sized apartment.
Nice! I was looking at the max version of the cloud gateway, I think it will do everything I need. Thanks for sharing, glad you’re happy with it
pay an illustrator, ai slophorse.
Any free VPN is a scam.
is ProtonVPN a scam then? no.
Most are, but not necessarily
Honestly I thought their vpn was only on paid plans. Kinda impressed they offer it free. I assume it’s a way to get people into the ecosystem and also use their email and etc
I believe windscribe also has a nice free plan
Proton isn’t.
Didn’t even know they offered a free vpn. I thought it was only on paid plans. Shrugs, I already use mullvad
andy yen is a pro big tech fash so yeah it is
He’s not and you know he’s not.
Unless you sign up for a VPS free trial yourself and set it up. I have two Oracle always free instances running right now
Ya if you are hosting it yourself then pretty different. I use them for a basic Nextcloud server myself. Their ARM servers are dirt cheap even when you have to go above their free generous cores and ram.
be forewarned, oracle is known to randomly just delete free VPSs out of nowhere with no warning.
Yes, that’s why I upgraded to a paid account even though my VPSes are free
What’s the point of setting up a VPN like that?
You can get around the censorship of the country you’re in
Never use VPN add-ons for your browser. Unless you get them along with your paid VPN. You should run your entire network through the VPN, not just a browser.
I use my paid vpn extension (Nord) to select a Country for twitch.tv which isn’t served ads. However I would all my traffic go through that specific vpn as it causes trouble with other appe/pages. So being able to cnveniently switch my IP per domain is pretty nice sometimes.
It is a paid VPN luckily though. The issue is with “free” VPN browser add-ons.
There’s also different adblocker rules and extensions for twitch ads.
Curious, what country doesn’t get twitch ads?
Well that is actually quite dynamic as sometimes advertisers suddenly choose to place an ad in somen fringe country like czech rep. or Georgia. Mostly those small eastern EU countries are not attractive enough for advertisers. For some reason I also never get ads with Luxembourg IP, even though they are one of the richest countries in the world. Probably too small of a traget audience.
Do you not run into issues doing this? I’m constantly having to split my VPN or disable my VPN for certain logins to work, such as banks, government sites and shit.
For some games and websites I have to turn it off yeah. Or at least switch the server to one that isn’t blocked.
It’s a shame that websites are allowed to track and block VPNs.
Seperate browser for Clearnet /KYC
For example “mullvad-exclude trivalent”
I actually go further and have seperate VMs with different networks (VPN1, VPN2, whonix, i2p, or clearnet
That way split tunneling feature Is not needed and I can have 2 mullvad clients on lockdownmode connected at once
What’s lockdown mode. I use PIA because it was cheap about 5 years ago and never had any issues so I havent shopped around. I don’t have a dedicated IP which I would have liked, they offer them but I haven’t convinced myself I need it yet. I figure if anyone else (not family) needs to access a site that points to my IP I’ll do it then.
Maybe I haven’t been understanding/using caddy and such properly, but how do you really get multiple servers running without 80/443 not having overlap. Like right now I have 53 for my Pihole internally, 8096 Jellyfin, 3923 for a file server, can’t remember what my RustDesk server is on, but I wanted to set up a Piefed instance, and obviously I’m running into issues with ports overlapping because I must not be understanding how to forward / reverse proxy them properly.
Do you set up caddy on your individual VM’s and use a separate IP for each. Can I just tie a URL from NOIP to a specific port outside of 80/443 somehow?
Most people don’t need to run everything though a VPN. That just slows everything down. You would normally only use them to access resources on a private LAN such as when working from home or accessing your self hosted services when away from home.
That’s a completely different VPN than what the rest the comments are talking about
That’s why I temporarily disable it for some websites
Not to be confused with “Tor Browser” (not a VPN, just providing clarification)
Unfortunately that means disabling my entire network VPN anytime I need to bypass a VPN block. And also makes switching between different servers significantly more complicated.
use either Mullvad (yes, I know, the GUI sucks) or set up your own VPN.
the mullvad cli is very quick and easy. it’s a lot faster than what it was. OR set up your own wireguard VPN on your server, again very easy to set up.
Those two are for pretty different use cases, no? First is for general internet access - for semi-anonymity or to skip Geo blocks. Second is when you want to access specific services you host yourself.
What about proton?
it’s FreeVPN.One
VPNs are wild to me. “Hey! Pay some company to promise not to watch you so you can pretend to be private and not have some company watching you.”
Generally speaking, if you’re paying for a VPN, then you should be paying for a provider that is no log. Free VPNs, you get what you pay for, which is nothing. So you don’t really get any security with that.
I’ve watched this go down long enough in enough industries to know better than to believe their claim of not logging.
You’re being watched. Hell, your data’s probably being handed over to cops without your knowledge.
How do we know the “no log” VPNs don’t log our activity?
Also any recommendations? I can’t find one that says they don’t log and refuse to cooperate with 14eyes.
I’d say a police raid to the offices of Mullvad with the police returning empty handed is a pretty good guarantee
ProtonVPN is no log and so is Mullvad I think. Basically it’s mostly reputation, some also pay for outside audits of their systems so they can more effectively boast.
No log vpns probably do cooperate with authorities, but the fact that they are no log means they don’t provide anything. They get a warrant for logs and identification, they comply and send a letter “we have no logs, or way to trace the identity of a user”.
And character is like a tree and reputation is a shadow of it, and it takes a hell of a lot less to bring it down than to grow it up.
Best you got is recurring audits
Many VPN companies post audits, and build up reputations. Not that I’d recommend it specificlly (since I only use it for a lifetime subscription I bought in a sale), but FastestVPN advertises the former.
…I guess it depends what you’re doing, too. If you’re, like, a government whistleblower, you might want to look into Mullad layered with something else instead of a more traditional commercial provider.
better than having a company that is directly known as watching you and sending all of it to your government
some companies have built a strong reputation
Knowing a company is watching me because it’s openly known, is to me better than paying a company to not watch me and likely risk them simply selling out eventually like they all do.
It’s funnier when you stupidly expected them to protect you, PAID them for it, and they don’t.
It’s like 23andme. Too fucking funny and everyone deserves it for their stupidity.
VPN companies have a low interest in selling user data. Their business model is pretty profitable already, and any leak of this would instantly kill the brand.
There’s no reason for proton and mullvad to sell user data. They would be legally liable and they would break their profitable companies
It’s like 23andme
fucking DNA stuff that was even written in the privacy policy iirc so meh, not the same
simply selling out eventually like they all do
would love to get examples of this. I have a lot of counter examples
What’s better? The devil you know or the devil you don’t?
the devil you don’t
You’re saying the reputable company is a devil we don’t know? If you want to be dishonest, try a bit harder.
What you should say is “What’s better? The devil you know or the unknown entity that claims to be an angel (and that hasn’t been caught doing bad things since its existence, a few years)?”
Hey, you know when people in the UK were saying that the online safety act would drive teenagers to use dodgy vpns? This is what we meant.
This is the reason I’ve always been skeptical of all those Video Download Non Plus Ultra Pro 9000 extensions, also in Firefox. I’m like yea right. Next thing I know I’ll be getting copyright infringement and piracy notices plus cease-and-desist letters.
