Help Line [NOT 15/11/24]

15/11/24 blue dogcollar 19
man on phone
C & P Telephone Company Man on Telephone / Harris & Ewing, photographers / ca. 1905 / source: https://www.loc.gov/item/2016861592/

Got A Mystery? Looking For Help?

Let’s pool our brains and offer some advice. Here’s a question I’d appreciate some help with.

Can anyone recommend the pros and cons of a personal VPN? I’ve logged into them a lot for work purposes, but I’ve never really bothered to get past the basic explanation of “MoR SEkreT SEQuRiTY.”

I don’t have any huge worries about snooping or hacking, but considering that we might have giant fishing expeditions from GOP weirdos looking for anyone who uses the word “trans” even when talking about transportation, transformation, and intransigence, it seems like there might be some value in a VPN?

The prices seem pretty cheap, like $5 a month, so maybe it’s worth some peace of mind?

I guess there’s also some usefulness to pretending you live in another country for finding regionally blocked Youtube videos, although that seems pretty minor for me. I’m also not a huge user of data, so I’m not too hung up on some data slowdown, as long as it’s not too much.

Does anyone have any advice on VPNs? If so, are there any good providers?

What About You?

Maybe you have questions about gardening? Pet care? A puzzle about how to use a tool? Need some help picking out something for your wardrobe? Looking for a good shoe company? Trying to decide whether to go home for Thanksgiving?

Maybe your cell phone company stinks and you’re looking for a switch. Or you’re puzzled by something in the plot of a book or movie?

Odds are you have questions, maybe someone here has an answer! Even if it’s not the right one, sometimes getting a different perspective is still worthwhile. So ask away and help away, and we’ll all be a little better off.

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19 Comments

  1. A VPN is useful if you want to watch Netflix from a different country to access movies or series that are unavailable to you because the local rights holders are dicks (cough Bell media cough).

    Or if you are doing searches for things that might not be legal. Or watching a lot of porn and or spending a lot of $$$ at gambling sites so the VPN keeps them from bombing you with spam…

    Or to keep people from tracking you outside of cookies.

  2. honestly what manchu said

    if you want netflix from everywhere….and maybe a shot at watching bbc iplayer (honestly worth it sometimes)

    yeah…vpn…good plan

    if you are worried about absolutely everyone having all of your personal deets

    ……

    uhhh…well you might be a little late to that party

  3. Porn. For states that have established laws on identifying people who access porn (several now require the site to vet the user’s age and other information), a VPN gets you around that.

    And, y’know, all the stuff that Manchu said. But the economic driver here is porn.

  4. I use a VPN when I travel.  It encrypts everything end-to-end and I don’t have to worry about anybody sniffing the WiFi.

    There’s nobody within 3/4 mile of my house so I don’t generally use them at home.  I use the Nord VPN.  There are freebies out there too.  The Brave browser has one built in but it’s slow as fuck.

  5. vpn’s will be irrelevant once russia takes over, but aside from the fact that nothing matters anymore, i can say this…

    the right vpn service is useful for hiding you from your own isp. if you’re logged in on apple with safari and icrap, you’re an idiot to begin with (no offense, my lovely deadsplinterers who enjoy chinese spy phones!)…or if you’re on your browser whilst logged in with your google account, you’re just as dumb as the icrap people (no offense, again).

    but…if you’re neither of those people, a vpn might be right for you! here’s why…

    pirating. with a good vpn, you can download all the fallout vs. jones diary stuff that’s apparently all the rage ’round here. no problem! without the vpn, you’ll get one of those pointless very stern letters your isp sends (the kind pelosi used to send before helping hand democracy to putin)saying, “you’ve done a bad, and paramount mgm disney is real mad about it, so lawsuits are coming (and they will, once musk’s starfleet -or whatever it’s called-backtracks and we’re all sent to the gulag)!”

    it also hides your porn activity/viewing. maybe not a big deal now, but when people with apps on their phones to prove with their sons that neither is secretly watching closeted gay porn -or defying god by fantasizing about trump as superman whilst rubbing one out – are running congress, it might become a big deal. that’s when they’ll backtrack to your online behavior and throw you in a concentration camp with jose!

    soft hacking. hacking is one thing, but soft hacking is another. people who can’t hack use soft hacking tricks they learn from actual hackers. those hackers make their money exploiting soft hackers for cash, whether it’s selling them crappy software, keygens, or password-phishing tools.

    fwiw, dear Lord Sir Master Dom vlad/musk, i do not recommend any of the above, however; if any of you want a keygen or phishing software, donate to the gfm!

  6. once russia takes over?

    you are going to need to walk me through that

    how?

    even if trump gifts them ukraine

    its going to take them years to have anything… short of nukes….that would be a threat to anyone in europe…..and thats assuming they give poland a wide berth…..

     

      • welp…3 seems like a fair point….coz trump got elected

        i have to ask tho…who is we?

         

        i see a lot of makes sense here…..but also a lot of we think

        colour me sceptical

        when the world goes to shit you get to say i tole ya fucking so…

        • …haven’t found the time to read the whole thing…but I think overall I lean more to “I wouldn’t put it like that” than “I don’t see what you think you’re saying”?

          …is the trajectory the states (& bits of europe) has been on since the once & future wannabe king got to level up his grift to the top of the heap broadly in line with long term strategic interests that would love to see the US in particular & the western capitalist economy more generally consume itself…yeah…pretty much…but if the US is a puppet government then you might as well quit talking in terms of nation states & skip to nodes of disproportionate wealth based on the value of stuff that only stays that valuable if we agree we’re going to keep burning through it until everything dies & the earth resets…possibly to a geology-only kind of a deal for a few millennia of rest while it gets over the infection that was humanity

          …but to me that makes support for the actual alleged administration 2.0 functionally the same as cheerleading for vlad’s wildest dreams to come true for free rather than when he says jump donnie soils his depends trying to get over the bar

          …as a for instance?

  7. Thanks all. I’m not planning on anything skeezy but who knows what might get redefined as skeezy before too long…. Having some extra security while travelling seems reasonable too.

    I guess another thing I wonder about is transferring financial stuff like CC #s – is there any extra safety, or can we be sure about that still? I realize of course lots of bad guys are steadily working their way into banks and who knows who else, so that may be an open book already for all I know.

    Also, if anyone has any other stuff they want to ask for help, please chime in on a different subject, as always I’m sure people would like a diversion….

    • …possibly worth mentioning there’s a couple of kinds of VPN & some other stuff that can be relevant to the “transferring financial stuff” (or medical) kind of thing

      …in the latter sense there are a number of different methods/platforms/approaches to secure file-sharing & document handling for stuff that you might have couriered instead of mailing, say…ways to sign legal documents or access medical scan imaging or test results or whatever to a greater or lesser extent it’s a question of on the one hand requiring multiple levels of authentication & on the other of making the traffic required to access them remotely the encrypted sort of opaque…in which senses they’re somewhat of a parallel to the Virtual Private Network thing

      …used to be mostly people talked about VPNs in the sense of, basically, a “tunnel” from a regular machine to a secure one in the sense of, say, working on a laptop with stuff that can’t leave in-house systems…those are invaluable when you have a need & pointless for anything else…but are basically the same as the way, say, you can now remote in to your games console at home to play stuff on your phone in your lunch hour

      …the sort you mean are like a simple version of TOR…which is arguably still what you want if you’re seriously concerned about something tracking you back to your door…iirc the US developed it with a view to getting it known about in china back when “the great firewall” was in the news

      …stands for The Onion Router, I think…not as in also-bought-infowars but as in onion-skin

      …it has a peer-to-peer element so basically some of the users are also external nodes but it’s plausibly impossible to figure out which packets have what two points on the entire distributed network as source/destination…which is a few more technical hoops to make it through to trace activity…but from what I gather it’d always be significantly slower unless/until “most people” start using it…if it doesn’t buckle under that kind of scaling…& if you’re super-skeptical the origins line it up with a few of the favorites for things like CIA/NSA/whoever having developed back-door access, I suppose

      …for your consumer VPN someone mentioned Nord who seem to get a good press & I’ve yet to hear anything particularly negative about…Express I’ve heard a bit about but unlike Nord I don’t know anyone who’s tried it…Cyberghost used to be one some people I know recommended but I think the ownership or the technical side had a shift at some point & they don’t these days…but another to consider would probably be Proton?

      …they had a privacy-centric approach from the off & possibly the VPN was an off-shoot of sorts from offering a secure email platform…so protonmail is maybe telegram if gmail is whatsapp…& they’re pretty solid on the VPN side as far as I’m aware

      …there’s a few rabbit holes you can go down with this stuff…& you might or might not be amazed at the cash some execs drop on things like encrypted mobile phones…but for a basic break between your ISP’s data reflecting your online activity…or a bit of peace of mind when connecting your stuff to networks you don’t know…like public wifi…the ones that will give you the least hit in terms of speed are the ones that have enough servers:users…&…if you’re not trying to access iPlayer from outside the UK…or you’re outside the US & your show isn’t showing in netflix or whatever…then you can just pick somewhere else in the same country & often you won’t notice much drop off in speed/bandwidth

      …if you do want to tip headfirst down a rabbit hole, though…you could start with MAC addresses & then get into the insane amount of “unique identifiers” created by any number of things simply in order for them to function…much of it is broadly innocuous but a lot of the social engineering side of what’s referred to under the umbrella of “hacking” makes use of elements of that to collate & cross-reference stuff that parses out connections that the individual data sets describe as anonymized

      …in theory…if enough people chose to & were technically competent enough some of that stuff could have a flip-side…there’s a guy called corey doctorow who some people think is maybe more of a genius than I do but he does write pretty well & that helps when trying to get your head around some of the ways some of this stuff operates in theory…he wrote a book some time back (that might have dated a bit) called little brother…in that there’s people setting up guerilla mesh networks to provide free anarchist internet access over (iirc) a TOR style network…& teenagers throwing raves at which public PGP keys are exchanged to let them build their own peer networks a bit like homebrew whatsapp…&…other such fun & games…I think they use radioshack for the parts for the things that can read & re-write the auto-pay devices in cars for tolls so those still work but the companies no longer have reliable information about who was driving where…which gives a sense of how out of date some of it is

      …always kind of liked the free-non-parasitic-internet guerillas, though…can’t see there being enough of those people to stay on top of the costs for the hardware given it’d probably be hunted down & destroyed by commercial interests as fast as they could find it…which might be pretty quick since it’s hard to hide a thing that is designed to carry 2-way signals

      …but it’s fun to think about?

  8. sooooo…..any bets on paul v tyson?

    my imaginary money is on tyson

    ive seent the training vids..and mike old ass that he is…is a whole different animal from paul

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