/cyb/ - cyberpunk and cybersecurity

I was just reading on this the other day and it basically comes down to trust.
Are you willing to trust another company to keep your id anonymous and your traffic secure vs. doing it all yourself? Also, how convenient is it for you to maintain that system and and ensure all other systems you need to interact with along the way are also trusted?

I actually do use a VPN (not the one you're advertising) but it's more to have some peace of mind when I use the internet or want my communications to be private. Not that my activities are risky but I just hate that disgusting feeling of being watched without my consent.

The only reason I trust them is that they are not exactly "friendly" with my state and are outside the jurisdiction of the 14 eyes. They can log whatever (despite their claims that they don't) but I know that if a problem were to arise, they wouldn't just hand anything over to my local authorities without a fight. I wouldn't have to do any of this if I trusted my government in the first place but here we are, losing more and more of our privacy every day.

complete control; also you now have a VPS for other tasks.

get vps, install openvpn, profit.

For some people though that's overkill and and off the shelf VPN service suffices for their requirements. I personally like Cryptostorm, all the rest of the services out there scream 'lol we keep logs'.

>>399

Running a VPS just for a personal VPN, under most circumstances, is rock fucking stupid.

With either a VPS or VPN provider, you still need to trust the service with your traffic.

But with a dedicated VPN service, especially the popular ones, your traffic is mixed in with a ton of other VPN customers once it hits the clearnet. All that traffic coming and going through just one or a few IPs makes it extremely difficult to tie you to your traffic. Exponentially so if a VPN is honest about a no-logging policy.

With a VPN running on a VPS, it would take a competent investigator about two seconds to find your IP and hosting provider. If your meatspace identity is tied to that VPS account, it's game fucking over when your VPS provider gets hit with warrants or one's national equivalent. If you're the only person using that VPN, then it's super game fucking over.

>>404
You make good points; but the same points could be said for absolutely anything which is going to result in a police investigation. That's just opsec fundamentals and I still wouldn't trust a commercial VPN provider to that task.

If all you're doing is bypassing local mass-metadata collection (such as what is used in Australia) or bypassing netflix geo-blocking then bouncing via your own VPS is a complete non-issue.

>>405

Yes, that's why I said under most circumstances. There's some cases where VPN-via-VPS makes sense. But not many.

>>403
Incidentally, thank you for the recommendation of Cryptostorm. I've been looking into various options now, and they seem pretty solid.

>>412
I've looked a little bit into VPNs lately and while cryptostorm seems good at first, there are some things like this which make them seem shady
https://www.reddit.com/r/VPN/comments/2nhop2/mullvad_setup_comes_with_server_private_keys/