Free VPNs

What is your opinion on free VPNs? On Fdroid there are so many and some of them don't even need an account. I am currently using Calyx VPN and it seems to work. How do these guys make their money? Who is funding them? Very shady...(USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST, You should always elaborate on your opinions rather than just spilling the soykaf.)

They only have like 2-5 routers that are very slow. I recommend just using Orbot since it's faster, and perhaps switching to one of those free VPN's if Tor is blocked on whatever site you're going to access.

>>85956 >>85957 A VPN is only as good as your trust in them. I wouldnt trust a free VPN for much of anything, though I try to avoid absolutes, so there probably is some use case. If you cant afford $5/month, then just use tor or make your own VPN, but the trick would be finding a public free unconnected to yourself server/machine to set it up on. Servers cost money, and most devices or machines are behind a NAT, in which case you would need a method of transversing that. Which comes back to needing some type of public free relay server. I would like to develop an opensourced cross platform silent program that automates all this to help anyone borrow any device's IP that they may have access to. If enough people used it, it could make IPs meaningless and VPN/tor node censorship impossible.

>>85959 >most devices or machines are behind a NAT, in which case you would need a method of transversing that I don't know about their privacy options but services like Taliscale exist just for that >I would like to develop an opensourced cross platform silent program that automates all this to help anyone borrow any device's IP that they may have access to well guess what, this is already created and is called Tor >if enough people used it that's the problem

Why does a VPN relies on trust, but Tor doesn't?

>>85961 non-expert opinion warning. with Tor the protocol alone ensures a large amount of anonymization even if there is a small number of bad actors hosting nodes. a VPN is a single black box that could easily be tracking your every move, and you really can be sure about it. I personally don't trust VPNs a lot. I trust that Tor is fine enough, but I don't make my life depend on it. feds could be keeping all kinds of exploits and backdoors hidden from the general public. i2p seems like a better option, but I am not an expert so I can not say this for sure. i2p maybe needs a bit more security research.

>>85966 >you really can be sure about it "can *never* be" is what I meant to type

>>85956 > What is your opinion on free VPNs? On Fdroid there are so many and some of them don't even need an account. If you need anonymity, use Tor. If you need to pirate something or bypass a georestriction, install one of the free VPNs, turn it on for the task, then disable and remove it when you're finished. > I am currently using Calyx VPN and it seems to work. How do these guys make their money? Who is funding them? Very shady... Calyx VPN is funded by the Calyx Institute (https://calyxinstitute.org/), a non profit designed to educate the public about privacy and security. They were founded by Nicholas Merrill, one of the first people to challenge the USA Patriot Act statute (info from their about page). They sell Pixel phones with CalyxOS pre installed and wireless SIM hotspots with unlimited internet. Look into them yourself more, if you like. If you need a free VPN, use them or Riseup.net's VPN (disclaimer: I use Riseup). If you need a VPN but don't know how to set one up yourself, look at Backyard Bandwidth's VPN: > https://backyardbandwidth.com/ If you want something more reputable, Mullvad is one of the gold standards: > https://mullvad.net If you can run a GitHub script and are comfortable buying a server, go here to find a cheap server: > https://lowendstock.com/ Then set up Wireguard (wg-easy) on it for a web-based UI: > https://github.com/wg-easy/wg-easy And there you go. If you like, you can (read: should) set up SSH keys, a proper firewall, built in ad blocking, and the like. You can also use this (archived) Ansible playbook for inspiration for what else to add: > https://github.com/notthebee/ansible-easy-vpn Alternatively, if you want a more private experience, you can look here for VPS providers that don't do KYC: > https://kycnot.me/?t=service Hope that helps.

>>85969 >If you need a free VPN, use them or Riseup.net's What if I am a MAGAtard?

It's ok for, you know, second vpn in your vpn/proxy chain.

>>85984 Get arrested like the J6 turds.

avoid the ones based in US/UK/Canada and to some extent major european countries

Calyx gets money from donation based sales and government grants from their non profit status. >>85966 i2p hardly has exit nodes so it is only used for p2p stuff like torrenting while limiting the seeders you can connect to because they have to use it too or can be used for messaging but Im not sure how to set it up for that and it would require the other people you talk to also using it. Im not aware of any programs that use it by default.

>VPN >smartphone Only use it to get around region locks and DMCA laws. There is no privacy on phones.

>>85969 This is good to know, I didn't know Calyx other than for CalyxOS until this thread (I currently use a mix of Tor and Riseup). I would use Mullvad but I'm stingy. >>85985 I feel like a proxy chain of free VPNs would just be sickly and slow, might as well use Tor alone at that point. I guess if Tor is derezzed on your site of choice it could be useful though.

>>85961 >>85966 With TOR you have 100% probability of being 50% protected. With a VPN you have 50% probability of being 100% protected.

>>86931 Unironically thought I switched to my 4chan tab when I saw this post lol

Some questions. Thanks in advance. 1. I understand Mullvad takes cash and for that reason is more anonymous. Some have said this is an illusion as the postal system is fully traced down to the stamp they know everything. Anyway lets for sake of arguement assume Mullvad is not doxxing your envelopes.... they are still seeing your real IP on their side right? So if their active servers are compromised or surveiled by law enforcement they still got it all? 2. Brings me to my second question: is it possible to somehow layer multiple separate vpn providers? So that in the above scenario there is still several layers of obfuscation

>>88383 Instead of layering multiple VPNs, layer multiple different systems. I'm currenly running: VPN by default for everything, I2P over VPN (via port forwarding), Tor Relay over VPN (via port forwarding). I'm planning to add IPFS, Yggdrasil and DIY shadowsocks proxy on a cheap VPS. This is just for normal web use, for hardcore privacy it's possible to use something like: You -> I2P -> Tor -> Shadowsocks -> VPN -> Destination. This is a bit tricky to configure, but not as hard as it seems. Locally there is tor relay, i2p, and ss client, i2p uses tor port, tor uses ss client port, ss server on your vps is using vpn under for example standard wg-quick connection, and that's basically it.

>>88385 You just blew my mind friend. So much to learn... Currently using proton vpn secure core. But as I use a paid plan and used my real name and credit card I feel like I need to start again from scratch and nuke it. They take cash payment as stated on their website so it's definitely doable. I guess then I should not use proton drive, proton pass, proton mail if I want to hide my identity from proton AG...

>>88386 Proton VPN is a decent VPN imo, but for real privacy yeah, you have to at least use it together with other systems. If someone is investigating your chain of proxies, lets say they got to the ProtonVPN level, they lets say find some way to legally get to the ProtonVPN and even if provider complies (they claim to have no-log policy atm), the best investigators could get is a list of all IPs that were using this particular endpoint at the time. Which itself is rather probabilistic in nature. Even if there are just two users, you can't prove which one made the request.

>>88388 I didnt understand your previous post at all. Will research those protocols you mentioned. I was mainly wondering if layering vpn providers oved VM's is more secure/private than tor browser. Which is easier for them to deanonimize you? Them

>>88389 If we assume perfect conditions, you need at least 3 layers of VPNs to be as private as using Tor. But I have no idea how much of Tor network is compromised and how bad. And Tor Browser itself is a big concern as well. You might want to check latest audits and news regarding Tor Browser safety. I'm not using Tor through Tor Browser, I'm running my own relay in podman container and connect to it from regular Firefox using Multi-Account Container extension to specify proxy port for Tor container - a group of tabs in my browser that run through Tor. I also have another container for I2P, and all other tabs outside those containers just run through normal VPN. My main interest is availability, I'm not particularly focused on privacy, and I have a lot to improve in that regard. For example I didn't install any extensions to prevent browser fingerprinting, which is a massive concern.

>>88390 I considered also my operating system regarding privacy. For several months I considered qubes os, but it seemed too complicated.

heres one option set up an alternative network using xrays and beta radiation which you ricochet off the the atmosphere, we can modify our routers or crate peripherals for the routers it could almost feel the same

>>88390 You realize that Tor isn't just 3 proxies and that's it, right?

>>88385 think about it for a moment. Your ISP sees I2P, you're added into the high risk watchlist category the gov starts doing entry/exit and timing analysis on your IP to I2P and using a sybil attack (50%>I2P nodes are gov owned) the government can detect that you are then accessing Tor with an 80% certainty. (Tor is a well established honey pot) they then transfer the attack to their sybil attack on the Tor network and perform trivial entry/exit timing analysis on that they then with a 100% certainty know that you are using Tor to connect to a custom Shadowsocks server. Shadowsocks is for cencorship bypass not mass surveillance bypass these are 2 different things. You are most likely the only person on Earth sending more than 1GB of data per day through this VPS server you are paying money for. If it's not XMR the VPS server can be forced to give up your personal data to the feds. I2P is compromised, Tor is compromised, Shadowsocks is like wearing all red and going to a funeral. You'll need multiple shadowsocks servers and vpns with multiple people using the exact same setup you are using or you just standout thinking that you've actually accomplished something The VPN and the shadowsocks server need to be paid with XMR and the I2P & Tor nodes need to be switched every 40 seconds for you to have a chance.

>>88539 >I2P is compromised, Tor is compromised Everything is compromised, even TLS/SSL

>Your ISP sees I2P, you're added into the high risk watchlist category the gov starts doing entry/exit and timing analysis on your IP to I2P and using a sybil attack (50%>I2P nodes are gov owned) the government can detect that you are then accessing Tor with an 80% certainty. (Tor is a well established honey pot) they then transfer the attack to their sybil attack on the Tor network and perform trivial entry/exit timing analysis on that they then with a 100% certainty know that you are using Tor to connect to a custom Shadowsocks server. That's interesting so this how they catch the high profile criminals on tor... But this doesn't make tor useless. I am using tor as a cyber condom to navigate the modern web. Like how condoms do not fully protect you from aids tor doesn't fully protect you from the government. It is highly effective against anything else. For example using tor browser is better than using putting firefox behind 12 proxies because you still have a unique browser fingerprint. Tor browser doesn't have this problem. Maybe using mullvad browser with 12 proxies would be better than tor? By using tor you are raising your security level to such a degree that only government can find you. If your threat model doesn't involve hiding from the cia, then it is as secure as it gets. Combining vpns, proxies, ssh tunnels with tor is an interesting concept but I doubt its effectiveness unless you need to hide that you are using tor.

>>88539 > Your ISP sees I2P This is why running Tor + I2P through a VPN on a VPS is better. > gov starts doing entry/exit and timing analysis on your IP To even start doing this timing analysis they need to control exit node, VPS, and the site you're accessing. This is extremely hard to achieve in practice even for CIA. > You are most likely the only person on Earth sending more than 1GB of data per day through this VPS server you are paying money for. Laughable. Even cheap VPS providers nowadays give you dozens of terabytes bandwidth per month and people always ask for more. Maybe 2 out of every 3 VPS orders are used for torrent seedboxes.

Also, you're missing a very important point: the biggest win here is wasting feds time on needing to do some of the most advanced and complex cross-continental spy ops imaginable, just to find out all you've been doing is watching a funny video of kittens on youtube.

>>85956 Unless you're from a third-world soykafhole trying to bypass DPI why would you need a VPN anyway? If privacy is your concern, they aren't secure by nature. especially the commercial ones. The only use case that comes to my mind (other than >>88729 kek) is circumventing some region-specific laws, mostly regarding copyright. And honestly i wouldn't be that picky if that was my only concern >For your question Unironically Cloudflare's WARP. Since they own the whole fuarrrking net, their vpn is pretty robust against counter measures. (ofc considering the above) In fact today erDogan has ordered additional censorships again over some random conflict happening here. The only working vpn i could find was the cloudflare's.

>>88735 I see a lot of folk have this terrible habit of approaching security as O() notation. You think that if something is theoretically compromisable then you should consider it as already compromised from the start. This is a fine model of thinking for theoretical cryptographer, but not for an end user. Otherwise there are zero general purpose options for privacy and security.

>>88735 > Cloudflare Cloudflare might be the biggest glownigger in the whole Universe. They require sites set up CF certificates, they decrypt and analyze and log all traffic to the sites however they want. Bypassing TLS is something that even intelligence agencies couldn't dream of. Read this before recommending their products again: https://0xacab.org/dCF/deCloudflare/-/blob/master/readme/en.md

>>88736 Valid point. But still, even in a practical sense, I don't think you would gain anything in terms of privacy by using a commerical VPN other than hiding your traffic from your local ISP. Besides, if you were really on a watchlist, I highly doubt you would "make things harder" for the feds by relaying your traffic over a datacenter in Europe. >Otherwise there are zero general purpose options for privacy and security. There are things that provide more reasonable anonymity/privacy, even for end users. My point is commercial VPNs shouldn't be considered as one of those things. >>88737 I'm aware of what cloudflare is and that's why I recommended their warp service for temporary censorship circumvention tool and nothing else. Normally I resort to zapret for this, but sometimes the goverment chooses IP-based bandwith throttling. And the only VPN service that has reachable IP ranges currently are cloudflare's.

>>88738 >Assuming you don't already host something like wireguard on a VPS and just want a free VPN to masturbate

>>86606 No harm in using a VPN on a smartphone. If you're using mullvad on a PC it allows up to 5 devices, I don't see why you wouldn't.

>>88738 Can't you just use Tor to not need to rely on Cloudflare?

>>85959 >I would like to develop an opensourced cross platform silent program that automates all this to help anyone borrow any device's IP that they may have access to. If enough people used it, it could make IPs meaningless and VPN/tor node censorship impossible. to a noob like me it sounds like you want to make any device like a smartphone to be usable as a starting point for a vpn but all phones are tracked so you really need to have a ton of people passing through the same device to use the quantity of connections as a screen but then again whos responsible of the phone since theres a name attached to it or you use a burner but arent they too limited?

>>88740 >mullvad what is this? is it complicated to set up?

>>85959 >I would like to develop an opensourced cross platform silent program that automates all this to help anyone borrow any device's IP that they may have access to. that's called tor/i2p/whatever else. and it's not going to work for the exact same reason as before >>89025 that's vpn provider. if you have low level of the schizophrenia hormone then setting it up is as hard as tapping a button on your touchscreen. or a mouse click if you're on a computer

>>85956 You want anonymity use Tor/Orbot If you want to change your geolocation you can also select your Tor exit node country. If you want something faster, just use mullvad.