Theres a lot of reasons to use a vpn that arent just privacy related anyways, like I vpn into chinese servers to get around the firewall (it blocks outside requests or shows different results to westerners) so I can read specific chinese news articles. Proton is probably the most secure choice for that (vpn into hong kong seems to do this fine). Tor traffic seems to not yet be fully obfuscated a lot of sites block it its also slow as fuck
Fundamentally one company gets all your information whereas before it was all companies get all your info, its also been audited and shown to only store your ID in a visible way so
Of course if you're using an OS or browser that has a ton of telemetry that can be used to track you, I'm personally not a privacy absolutist, I'm more concerned about weird sysadmins stealing nudes and knowing my IP or something than a nation state cracking down on me (which they can do anyways)
If you're using a giant ISP like spectrum or Verizon they can absolutely track vpn traffic as it passes through their networks and beyond as isps often share (sell) this data to third parties.
Krolden is taking issue that they can see the vpn traffic at all, as in they can see that youre using a vpn (re: ISP knows who you are) and can sell that info to third parties who will now use your identity associated with that IP address (because ISP sold them info that the VPN connection came from you)
theres ways around this of course and its actually somewhat easy to measure how big your fingerprint is. most sites of course wont have access to this paid info so reducing fingerprint is only useful to hide from google or cloudflare, and even then they wont know specifically what data you have, just what IPs you accessed. also since so many people use the same VPN it makes it very difficult to track you, you need to have a large fingerprint which can be mitigated by using linux (or with piracy, having a separate server that doesnt fuck with anything but torrents and so on)
ISPs can also tell if youre using i2p or tor so ultimately its just a masturbatory argument, of course nothing is perfect, we all know that the only way to be truly secure is to steal internet from someone else without them knowing who you are, and you also need to be sure they dont have cameras and you have a sophisticated setup with qubes + vpn + (maybe) tor depending on what you want to do. this is of course an absurd amount of security for looking at pig poop memes on hexbear
It's not that they can see you using a vpn, it's that it is basically useless (and possibly counter productive) if you're trying to keep your browsing habits unlogged.
this is of course an absurd amount of security for looking at pig poop memes on hexbear
yes entirely. im just kinda anal about such things and try to make sure people that whatever they do on a network of physical hardware they don't control can be got to at some level. even if it is encrypted they're still collecting it in hopes to crack it in the future.
If you wanna go real meta then if the people tracking you have a useful traffic fingerprint of you then they could technically track you through whatever network you connect.
And now we're getting back to the original point of this new secret protocol, it hides that its vpn traffic, at least to current systems. I've been able to visit sites that normally block me or limit me. From what I can tell it reduces speed by half or so but if your speed is already good its usable, whereas something like TOR drops it all to a crawl, like 300kb/s if youre lucky. Dial up shit. This new protocol implementation good for daily driver obfuscation
It just sounds like TLS tunnel obfuscation as a way to get around ISP blocks. While this can no doubt be a useful feature It's not going to do anything to keep your traffic safe from tracking, and if it does it probably wont work for long once they know what to look for in the netflow data.
Also this is apparently not an open source protocol so afaict it can't really be audited, It runs solely on protons services.
To be clear, when i talk about 'your data' I also mean the metadata you generate on every hop between you and the server you're trying to connect to.
Yeah I edited to say that, if you are an edward snowden or something you really need to just not have any computers and sneak into libraries with a usb with qubes on it or something if its absolutely necessary to get on the internet
Theres a lot of reasons to use a vpn that arent just privacy related anyways, like I vpn into chinese servers to get around the firewall (it blocks outside requests or shows different results to westerners) so I can read specific chinese news articles. Proton is probably the most secure choice for that (vpn into hong kong seems to do this fine). Tor traffic seems to not yet be fully obfuscated a lot of sites block it its also slow as fuck
Fundamentally one company gets all your information whereas before it was all companies get all your info, its also been audited and shown to only store your ID in a visible way so
Of course if you're using an OS or browser that has a ton of telemetry that can be used to track you, I'm personally not a privacy absolutist, I'm more concerned about weird sysadmins stealing nudes and knowing my IP or something than a nation state cracking down on me (which they can do anyways)
Those other companies (your ISP, Cisco, the feds) are getting this data anyway whether or not you're using a vpn.
Region spoofing is really the only good reason to use any of these global corporate vpns.
The point of vpns is to prevent your ISP getting the data
If someone is running all their traffic through a VPN, how is their ISP still getting all their traffic data?
I never said all their data but definitely enough metadata to track your activities.
Just demonstrated you do not know what you're talking about with this comment.
If you're using a giant ISP like spectrum or Verizon they can absolutely track vpn traffic as it passes through their networks and beyond as isps often share (sell) this data to third parties.
It's encrypted data ffs. They can see precisely nothing without the means to decrypt it.
Krolden is taking issue that they can see the vpn traffic at all, as in they can see that youre using a vpn (re: ISP knows who you are) and can sell that info to third parties who will now use your identity associated with that IP address (because ISP sold them info that the VPN connection came from you)
theres ways around this of course and its actually somewhat easy to measure how big your fingerprint is. most sites of course wont have access to this paid info so reducing fingerprint is only useful to hide from google or cloudflare, and even then they wont know specifically what data you have, just what IPs you accessed. also since so many people use the same VPN it makes it very difficult to track you, you need to have a large fingerprint which can be mitigated by using linux (or with piracy, having a separate server that doesnt fuck with anything but torrents and so on)
ISPs can also tell if youre using i2p or tor so ultimately its just a masturbatory argument, of course nothing is perfect, we all know that
the only way to be truly secure is to steal internet from someone else without them knowing who you are, and you also need to be sure they dont have cameras and you have a sophisticated setup with qubes + vpn + (maybe) tor depending on what you want to do. this is of course an absurd amount of security for looking at pig poop memes on hexbear
It's not that they can see you using a vpn, it's that it is basically useless (and possibly counter productive) if you're trying to keep your browsing habits unlogged.
yes entirely. im just kinda anal about such things and try to make sure people that whatever they do on a network of physical hardware they don't control can be got to at some level. even if it is encrypted they're still collecting it in hopes to crack it in the future.
If you wanna go real meta then if the people tracking you have a useful traffic fingerprint of you then they could technically track you through whatever network you connect.
And now we're getting back to the original point of this new secret protocol, it hides that its vpn traffic, at least to current systems. I've been able to visit sites that normally block me or limit me. From what I can tell it reduces speed by half or so but if your speed is already good its usable, whereas something like TOR drops it all to a crawl, like 300kb/s if youre lucky. Dial up shit. This new protocol implementation good for daily driver obfuscation
It just sounds like TLS tunnel obfuscation as a way to get around ISP blocks. While this can no doubt be a useful feature It's not going to do anything to keep your traffic safe from tracking, and if it does it probably wont work for long once they know what to look for in the netflow data.
Also this is apparently not an open source protocol so afaict it can't really be audited, It runs solely on protons services.
To be clear, when i talk about 'your data' I also mean the metadata you generate on every hop between you and the server you're trying to connect to.
Yeah I edited to say that, if you are an edward snowden or something you really need to just not have any computers and sneak into libraries with a usb with qubes on it or something if its absolutely necessary to get on the internet