You must log in or register to comment.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
- 0 users online
- 57 users / day
- 383 users / week
- 1.5K users / month
- 5.7K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 3.13K Posts
- 78.3K Comments
- Modlog
Also, if you have a limited RAM smartphone and your VPN is operating in userspace, then all it takes is for one really large image to grace your smartphone screen for your OS to go into out-of-memory kill mode. What’s it going to kill? The foreground app you’re trying to use, or the background VPN app.
In my experience, the VPN goes down before the browser does. Mounting a swap on your phone is not the worse solution against this, but the UI starts to get really unresponsive.
I’m using Mullvad on a cheap T-Mobile phone and it never shuts down my VPN app, no matter what else is running.
The only time it goes down is if it powers down completely. Then I have to start it manually after the phone powers on.
In settings on my android, non root.
Always on VPN. Block unless active
If you are who I think you are, we’ve probably had this discussion before. Even with an always on VPN, if the system runs out of memory it will kill the VPN first before the browser. In a perfect world the traffic would still be routed into a dead tunnel. From what I’ve seen, once the VPN is killed, the tunnel device is gone and the default route snaps back to wlan
On Android, you can turn on “Block connections without VPN” and all connections are blocked if VPN gets disconnected. This also makes VPN based firewalls not work, and if you use “Split Tunnel”, the apps not going through a VPN and are connected directly to the internet, also not work.
I am not. And I’ve never had this discussion.
Always on vs the additional option of blocking internet until the VPN connects.
The second option is more system level?
Using shizuku (rish) in termux I checked the active links with VPN on and then force stopped / killed the VPN in terminal and checked again. The VPN tunnel disappeared but the dummy kill switch tunnels remained. I could not access any network connection.
*The routing table also maintains the dummy kill switch
(oh sorry, but) I’ve heard this argument before. All I can say is that in my experience, when the system is out of memory, it kills some process (e.g. the UI) which upon restarting resets the networking
You’ll be happy to know I just force killed :
Android system
Google services framework
Network
System UI
System WiFi Resources
Wi-Fi
Settings
System connectivity resources
Secure UI service
The results are the same
VPN kill switch prevents network access.
*later, when I’m connected to a PC, I’ll try killing/restarting userspace, shell, and user to see if I can get the kill switch to fail. (If I try those now it may kill shizuku which relies on shell - not sure.)
I’ll also see if I can’t force lmk to kill all the memory.
In
cmd settings list securethese may be some part of what keeps the system from allowing a connection.always_on_vpn_lockdown=1 always_on_vpn_lockdown_whitelist=
Yet another argument for root. Then you can exclude the VPN app from OOM. Or even move it into /system.
I understand why this isn’t done (moving such apps to system), since mobile uses immutable OS concept. But we still need a way to manage such apps appropriately.
I didn’t know about this feature. what’s the config?
OOM_DISABLE on $PID or echo -17 > /proc/$PID/oom_adj