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.
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.
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?
Yup. You gotta read the fine print folks. You can all got to stack social and pick up 5 years of adguard vpn with no log policy. Its not the best out there, but its not horrible either. And at around 26 quid for 5 years, it aint bad.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
it’s FreeVPN.One
What about Firefox? Looks like it exists for more than just chrome. I know because I literally used it this week for the first time ever due to being on vacation in a state that wants my photo to view porn… I couldn’t believe this shit actually exists now.
First mistake: using Chrome.
Malicious extensions are also found in Firefox, and every other modern browser is Chromium.
Except for all of the WebKit ones
Not unexpected
good thing they got rid of adblockers to make users safer tho
not on firefox they didn’t
TIL Chrome makes Firefox.
you mean google? no, its mozilla for now.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
That’s why I temporarily disable it for some websites
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.
Not sure about the current situation. However in general Twitch uses server side injected ads (SSAI), which are basically unblockable. They can however be bypassed (using different methods, each having it’s own pros and cons). Anway there is a very active twitch ad blocking community that will explain everything: https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions Most reliably is having either an http proxy or a vpn in a country that is not served 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.
I guess the P in VPN stands for “Public.”
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.
