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celebratedrecluse wrote

the third use case is that you trust the VPN provider, which is true either if you run it yourself or your have reason to trust a third party.

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quandyalaterreux wrote

if you run it yourself

Totally defeats the purpose then since it ties your identity and your entire traffic to a single VPS.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

perhaps you have a different use case than others do, then

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quandyalaterreux wrote

Isn't not tying your identity to your traffic the least thing one can expect in order to have any bare privacy online?

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celebratedrecluse wrote

Well, if you are sharing the VPS properly, hopefully you and your trusted groups are staying safe together. You're right, there are significant drawbacks in theory compared to a commercial or widely used vpn, but you can also assure a much greater degree of control over the server than with a commercial vpn as a service.

I just don't trust the commercial ones, so when people talk about using a VPN, I try to encourage them to take their own matters, into their own hands instead. So for certain use cases, I think it can be good, but you're right to bring up how you have to actually have an anticapitalist network and sharing project going on in order to have any serious efficacy with this strategy.

Although I'm curious to hear your perspective on this further. I understand you are very interested in alternatives like Tor to tunnel traffic in more trustless ways and a larger network, however I think also there are some longstanding on and off problems with Tor's servers being run by mailicious actors. What are the ways forwards for secured networking, in your honest assessment? Because I see this as increasingly under threat and at risk of just really disappearing, if it already hasn't basically.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

A tangent thought

what are the uses of forking the tor network? What might be the risks? Creating private invite only communities might be better in some ways, but is quite threatening to the current model of how tor works to the point i question the ethics of even using the code to essentially split the network and potentially really socially harm it.

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[deleted] wrote

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celebratedrecluse wrote

it's hard to make a blanket statement like that, but i agree, certain VPN providers may be reasonably calculated to be less likely to disclose your data to entities within a given person's threat model.

I think running your own VPS and using it to route an openvpn connection, paid with burner cc payment, is generally a better solution than market-based VPNs. I think this because I am very much inclined to distrust markets. It would be great to put together a plug-and-play solution which allows a non technical user to deploy this on a VPS of their choice.

On the other hand, you can have great success with market based solutions, until you don't. Nothing like some good old DIY, so upvote for this post

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