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 :)
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If you’re looking for a VPN, check out Mullvad.
It’s just €5 / $5.25 / £4.15 a month. They haven’t changed that price since launching in 2009. So they’ve also been around a while. Does everything you need a VPN to do. And they’re based in Sweden, which seems to have some good privacy rules. They also don’t keep logs.
No port forward though (I understand why but it is still annoying)
What would be the benefit of port forwarding?
Is this something you could do on your router on your side, making it so it doesn’t matter if they dont do it?
Torrenting, can reach more peers. Especially helpful for older, less popular torrents.
Do new torrents bypass this somehow, or is it just by sheer volume and popularity ?
The latter. Seedboxes are becoming more popular these days, which might be good for future torrent preservation. But if you have a niche or old school taste, you are gonna have a hard time without port forwarding.
Sadly doing it on the router would not be enough. Not a problem if you are browsing of course. But if you host, needs to listen on a specific port or whatever it gets annoying. And obviously piracy.
Tailscale is the best VPN that exists rn.
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I like how the article boils down to, “Except for some isolated use cases, Tor is far superior to a VPN in both cost and safety,” and a lot of the comments boil down to “YEAH VPNS ARE GREAT GET A VPN.”
It is okay to read the article before writing a comment, guys. In some circles, it’s even encouraged, because you might learn something.
Except many services are very aggressive to Tor exit nodes, namely Google and Cloudflare. Everytime I just met with CAPTCHA after CAPTCHAs, and eventually I gave up on the site.
Yeah, I should cut ties with Google but cutting YouTube on NewPipe is hard. I’m on Proton and watching YouTube is already hard.
I’ve had the same experience with vpn’s requiring a captcha for every second website I visit.
You may want to give Freetube a try, which may avoid that issue (especially if combined with libredirect).
Got the captcha endless wave yesterday using freetube on linux until I changed VPN nodes. I don’t think it’s proxying (not checked though)
The latest captchas and cloudflare-turnstile approve you because the google-cloud flare networks have already determined who you are as an individual and just wave you through.
Tor gets the checks because they don’t know who you are and are seeing you for the first time. Getting a captcha means your privacy strategy is working.
I don’t know if your full of shit or this is legit. I really think this is legit.
It’s a massive oversimplification. But with captcha systems everywhere, they’re able to see you visit a newspaper, visit the journal site, try to download a journal pdf, and captcha is able to easily conclude that you’re a human and have automatic approval.
Maybe if you’re going straight to a site for the first time today it would measure your single mouse click. And then from there tracking you across the Internet, assuming you’re online for maybe 6 hours like 99% of connected humans.
Tor blocks all the fingerprinting, and anonymizes the ip address. Captcha is only able to see a computer arrive at the website requesting access. Captcha’s only tool is to give challenges which the bots are able to beat. So they make you run the challenge multiple times, seeing how long it takes your or randomizing how many times you’re willing to do them.
Source: some tech YouTuber did a mini documentary about it. You could watch it yourself I assume.
The hell it does, it’s the exit node’s IP address, nothing anonymous about that… and that’s the problem, they know it’s a Tor exit node so they’ll give you extra shit for it.
It is working so well that I get an infinite loop of it on the same page.
Yeah the whole logic of “If I protect my privacy effectively, I won’t be able to use Google services anymore! O woe” is a little bit strange to me.
Consider posting the text of the article in the comment section if you feel so strongly about this.
Don’t just use Tor, use VPN on top of it.
If you use tor frequently, you’d eventually get a bad “roll of dice” on the nodes and get 3 government run nodes. Its not a matter of “if” but “when”, roll the dice enough times, and the holes in the “swiss cheese” eventually line up.
If you are using Tor, also use a VPN along with it. It might make the traffic a little slower, but its worth it in case you get 3 NSA nodes.
Doesn’t it mean there’s only 1 node NSA has to attack - your VPN?
Kinda renders Tor over it pointless.
Better than 0 nodes, and this is not counting that they already attacked 3.
These fucking things always tip-toe around the issue anyone wants a VPN for: Piracy.
Are you pirating shit? Yes? Use a VPN.
Are you pirating shit? No? Guess what, use a VPN!
I mean, legit true though. A lot of ISPs are selling your data now too.
I pirate and seed shit from Mexico no issues without VPN… My only headache is CGNAT.
I am so sorry. How do you usually circumvent that bs ?
Depending on your ISP sometimes you can just call them, ask to opt out of cg-nat and they will do it for free.
For seeding? Out of luck as I don’t have a VPS currently, I used one to open my ports with some hacky ways using Wireguard and IPtables stuff, if there is a better way I would like to know lol.
Now I just constantly seed in hopes that people with the ports opened can access my stuff.
For accessing my files, Zerotier and Tailscale have been a godsend.
I also happen to have IPv6 support and I can access some exposed services through it without too much hassle, Plex and Bitwarden are two big examples.
Just so you know Proton VPN has port forwarding if you can afford them.
No issues yet…
Sadly the country has a lot of other shit to worry about, I don’t expect that to change in the short or long time lol.
You’d be surprised how terrible politician priorities are
and you don’t live in a third world country 🙃
Hooray for third world freedom. I’ve been raw-dogging torrent for years.
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I love the ultra paranoid path Proton offers. It reminds me.of GoldenEye.
You -> VPN Server 1 -> VPN Server 2 -> TOR -> endpoint.
“Good luck, I’m behind 7 proxies!”
vyper has plans fo $3/mo
Windscribe $2/mo. Also supports Wireguard. I don’t even use their dumbass client, I just export a profile for Wireguard - which is quite a bit faster than OpenVPN
Tor has plans for free/mo.
And Tor sucks. You shouldn’t use it for torrenting, it’s frequently targetted by intelligence agencies for IP unmasking, etc.
True.
I would take issue with “frequently,” in the grand scheme of things, but yes. It is a sufficient level of protection that state intelligence agencies have to have specific methods, which sometimes work and sometimes don’t, to try to specifically attack one specific actor on Tor if they care enough to do it. In contrast to a VPN, which any bumbling fuckhead in more or less any jurisdiction can generally defeat with a single subpeona, and even a fairly stupid intelligence agency can defeat without blinking.
Your axioms don’t add up to your theorem. There are cases where a VPN is better, torrenting being one of them, that part is true.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2024/10/tor-browser-and-firefox-users-should-update-to-fix-actively-exploited-vulnerability
This was just in October. This is only the latest in a long history of Tor being a target for attacks. Sorry you’re ignorant of that fact, but Tor is quite possibly the worst choice for any task. A VPN will always be faster, more reliable, and more secure.
Here’s another in January: https://www.securityweek.com/tor-code-audit-finds-17-vulnerabilities/
And, it’s basically the only service where it relies on freely added Tor exit nodes, where anyone can set up a node and start siphoning off data – as data between the exit node and your end path is NOT protected.
Granted, this is the same for VPNs, but anyone can set up their own Tor Exit node. VPNs have a business incentive to make sure not just anyone is in the chain for access to that data.
I can fully saturate a symmetrical gigabit connection with my VPN. I can’t touch a fraction of that with Tor.
Tor is for oppressive countries where anonymity and misdirection are more important than performance. It’s literally worse than a VPN in every single way unless you’re concerned with a major country coming for your head. And even then - Tor isn’t going to save you.
I typed up a long sarcastic response as to why this isn’t true, but I think I’m going to let you keep believing these things. If you think VPN-using browsers do not have vulnerabilities that need updates to fix actively exploited vulnerabilities, or that data is protected between the exit node of a VPN and the end path, then I’m going to let you keep thinking those things. I’ll never stand between a person and their dreams.
Read your own damn article:
For Fucks sake…
VPN is not “a browser”, it’s a network stack. It is separate from whatever you use for a browser. If you use Tor, you still use a browser. So your argument is absolutely coming from an asinine point of view where you clearly don’t understand the technologies behind each.
Actually, I should have said specifically: It is true that Tor is slower and unsuitable for some applications, streaming and torrenting being two of them. It was more your statement that it is somehow less secure that I was disagreeing with.
See how language works? You need to relax man.
Why did you not include DPI spoofing?
What?
Getting around deep packet inspection.
I guess it refers to things like GoodbyeDPI. A lot of people use it to watch Youtube after it got “slowed” rather than using a VPN.
Edit: also realized that meant obfuscation protocols like VLESS because VPN protocols are stupid easy to block.