[conspire] VPN

[Ehud Kaldor]

Now that the giants have spoken, I want to bring up a few (arguable) points:
I'll start by agreeing that yes, if you are targeted by a gov agency, a VPN
discussion such as this is like building a sand castle against a tsunami.
But if not, there are benefits to using a VPN service to *augment*
anonymity. It's true that someone in that chain (the VPN provider) knows
where you are coming from, but still they will probably not preemptively go
and report you, even if they will respond to a subpoena. Make it a non US
provider (like *proton in Switzerland) and that makes it an international
headache to get such logs.
Another benefit of a provider is that your exit traffic is multiplexed with
many others, which makes it even harder to untangle.

Also, and I apologize up front, calling a VPN service a "glorified proxy"
is a privileged statement. In this country the <insert name of infamous
secret service> does not take you to re-eduction because you said something
on Twitter, but there are many places where that's the case.

But to come back to the original question: if the user case is to get from
home to work, then yes - a VPN *service* is not the right solution. It is
the workplace that should be providing a VPN to their employees. And if
it's a non technical place and you are the only techie there, it is pretty
simple to set up a wireguard endpoint in the office, which you can connect
to from home. The heuristic here is that if you control both endpoints, you
shouldn't use a service. But if you just want the first hop of your traffic
to be more opaque (even just to avoid Comcast's snooping DPI), a VPN
service is a good layer (asking with tor and more).

* Yes, I'm aware of the proton case not to long ago. I heard their take on
that, and find it plausible, not to mention that of all the other cases of
VPN providers, they, at least, did not lie down and assumed the position at
the first knock on the door. Again, if you are targeted, a VPN service will
not save you.

On Wed, Dec 8, 2021, 04:07 Ivan Sergio Borgonovo <mail at webthatworks.it>
wrote:

>
>
> On 12/8/21 07:35, David Vincent wrote:
> > I've been keeping this link around for just such an occasion.
> >
> > https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29
>
> Yes... still while proxies would be a more reasonable solution for most
> of the problems a VPN claims to solve... I'm not aware of such a
> geographically distributed offer.
>
> I agree with the "honeypot" thesis but I argue if once a government
> agency has gone on a hunting sphere if this does make any difference.
>
> I really don't feel the need to access geographically restricted content
> with strict time constraint and this seems one of the few reasonable
> uses of commercial VPNs.
> But people restricting content geographically could actually block VPNs
> and they don't care that much since many sites can and do block tor.
>
>
> --
> Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
> https://www.webthatworks.it https://www.borgonovo.net
>
>
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