I’ve been noticing over la last few years that is is becoming more and more difficult to login to accounts, whether a bank account, a membership account, sometimes even browsing websites for shopping, through my VPN server. Is this just my impression or is there something going on now whereby there are services that keep list of VPN servers that are then sold to backs so that these parties can keep out anyone from trying to login via a VPN. It feels like the general consensus is VPN=malicious rather than "VPN=“this guy is just trying to protect his privacy”. I use AIRVPN but was wondering if there are VPN services that are more sophisticate and try to circumvent these VPN server blocks? It becoming a real pain to the point I’m wondering what it the point of paying fro a VPN is I’m finding myself having to login through my ISP IP rather than my VPN IP.
On a certain level, privacy always was a luxury. Through most of human history, you lived bumcheek to jowl with othet people. The trick is, now it’s a different beast. Corporations have the ability to be much more powerful in their invasions. As for your specific situation, there are some VPNs that try to hide that you are using a VPN. I think proton has something like that. I forget what it’s called. And you could technically go VPN on VPS and get a much easier time but you’d have to switch it out all the time if you wanted anonymous-at-server browsing, and you’d have to pay for the privilege which comes back to privacy as luxury.
Because information is worth money.
Generally browsing via VPN is not equal to more privacy. It just tells the websites you’re where the server is instead of where you are, while the server might log your full browsing habits even though they promise not to. While legitimate interests, like, ripping you off because you live in a rich country or making sure you’re not in a criminal country, makes browsing with VPN a bad experience.
Instead, you could fake your location at least in Firefox’ about:config.
// fake geo location (HB Zürich here) user_pref("geo.prompt.testing", true); user_pref("geo.prompt.testing.allow", true); user_pref("geo.provider.testing", true); user_pref("geo.provider.network.url", "data:application/json,{"location": {"lat": 47.377, "lng": 8.540}, "accuracy": 2700.0}"");These are small potatoes to the real problems.
I worked at Dollar Tree a year ago and got a letter saying my SSN and birthday was breached by Lockton. This is the second time this has happened and it’s ridiculous they’re still holding on to my data even though I never consented.
If simply functioning in society is going to require me to buy lifetime identity threat protection then I don’t know how privacy isn’t a luxury. Simple: don’t live.
Everything starts as a luxury until the working class bands together and demands it. 40 hour workweeks, overtime, sick days. These are workplace examples, but the concept holds true everywhere. In a capitalist society things like privacy aren’t considered until someone starts exploiting them for profit, at which point people start to get serious about protecting it. And this rule applies 5x in any tech realm, as governments are notoriously slow to build legal protections in new and fast moving sectors.
All that was to address your title, which is only tangentially connected to the rest of your post. Regarding the body, companies have absolutely started to equate VPN with bad actors. Still worth having. I just whitelist the services I have to.
I don’t do shit online. Don’t shop. Set appointments. Don’t Google. Don’t do email. I am nearly a hermit though
Check out this guy online telling us online that he doesn’t do anything online.
Must be nice to not do anything at all. Independently wealthy I guess. Since you are basically not functioning in this world. Never applied for a job I guess.
No reason to assume that. Outside of big cities, many businesses don’t even have an online existence.
From the infosec practitioner perspective the number of bad actors coming from public VPN pops is exceptionally high compared to any other random IP, so they get put on a naughty list. We often cut out entire countries just because they have such a high ratio of bad 2 good traffic, particularly if it’s a country that we have no real expectation of user traffic originating from.
It’s not so much a VPN bad, but just that you’re hanging out with others that act bad. Kind of the Nazi bar thing but for hackers. If you set up a private VPN somehow on a random cloud host you likely wouldn’t see the same issues, how to keep the ownership anonymous though is another problem.
And in recent years, VPN abuse by malicious actors has gone WAY up. Well, either that or the ability for InfoSec practitioners to trace the threat actor back to the VPN has gone up. Or a combination.
Probably for the same reasons that healthy food is a luxury. Make it easier and far less tedious to get the shitty end of the stick. Most of the proles will just give up and accept it, especially in a world that seems to put instant gratification at the top of the TODO list over self-reliance and self-respect. In other words, fashion over function.
If they can surveil our conversations and control what we see and hear, then they can advertise shittier foods, which then puts us in the pockets of insurance and pharma once we develop conditions and diseases from said shitty food. Once you’re in that loophole, it’s already been said by the pharma execs themselves, “healing your customers is a bad business model.”
In most of the USA healthy food is not a luxury. There are luxurious or expensive healthy foods, sure, but the main issues I see is a lack of nutritional science education and lack of personal control.
People will still buy"lite" food full of sugar because they are told they are low on fat. Or will eat stuff full of artificial sweeteners because they are told they are low on sugars. Despite the fact that we know that artificial sweeteners are bad for gut health. We know seed oils ate bad, bit you have literal magazines obfuscating this with BS stories where they will try to put lipstick on a pig and confuse less Academic readers with weird takes that may go over the years if people who have not studies the subject. It is insidious, if you ask me. It is hard to thinkk or see that money interests do not have a hand. I mean, changing things for the better would 100% affect their bottom line. So, why not lie or obfuscate until they absolutely cannot?
The reality is that eating healthy takes some work and personal accountability and people can also be lazy. Since corps go out of their way to lie to people, either fully or by omission. Just like most tech corps do.
Most legalese is not hard to understand. But people are too lazy, or ignorant, to bother or care. Anyone who is reasonable and took the time to read say Apple’s or Google’s ToS would 100% try to avoid using them as much as possible. Why? Because trying to care about your privacy is work and can be less convinient. Sometimes people want a shine device for ego points. So no common sense needed. And the acri9ns needed to minimize those corp’s surveillance takes a bit of work too.
The USA has a capitalistic, convenience problem that has been propagandised by Corps in order to give them the impression that why bother XYZ if we can make it easier and convinient for you, it will only cost your privacy. And since privacy can be at times an abstract concept to many it does not register as important or as serious a risk to lose it.
People who live in say, countries like the old Easter block are far more aware of the propaganda being thrown at people today, for example. The way the UK and Germany are are not that different in many ways as the CCP and the old soviet union. You are 100% correct with the bias for instant gratification.
I try and give the general population a little more credit on these food issues - it appears to me that the main factor is time. People do not have enough time and energy to prepare every meal from whole fruits/veggies/whatever. Certainly laziness/lack of food education is an issue, but working eight hours plus an hour commute each way (like in the DC region) knocks out ten hours of your day already. Now adding on top of that the time it takes to think of a meal idea, purchase the goods, and prepare them, and this becomes an exhausting affair - one that never ends! And three meals a day? People need more free time to take care of themselves.
Fair. Time can also be a factor. Albeit you would agree that coupled to that there is also a sense of misconstrued set of priorities. Being fit is one of those things that there are no shortcuts for. Also, one had to pick and chose want is best and sometimes compromises must he done. Which I think it is a big issue who have been sold the lie that they can do and be whatever they want, which is for one not true. Also, there are only so many hours in a day, so clearly something had to give. Which in general to many it may he their health, whether they are aware of it or not.
There is also the fact that today’s society is not focused overly in quality of life but in profit and production. That is a grander issue that need to be address or we are just going to have unhealthier people who just die earlier.
From my own point of view, I have studies nutritional science and do not find it neither hard nor stressful to plan my diet. That is just me, bit I also took the time to learn. Again, time is once again the tricky one. Maybe I watch less TV, maybe I play less video games, or spend less time on my phone, but that time to take of my health has to come from somewhere. Again, we cannot do it all.
Yup, it does not end until we die. So, the best thing we can do is cherry pick what priorities matter the most to us and that we not happy but content.
Sorry to hear about the commute, commuting is one of the worst things in western culture and studies were done that showed that commuting was one of the most dreaded things adults do today.
I use ProtonVPN and have to turn it off to log into my bank, credit card, and other financial institutions. Also I seem to have to do a lot more Captcha puzzles than I used to, and have had online orders flagged as suspicious. in some cases, it seems like they’re just trying to protect your accounts. In others, it seems like they’re throwing a hissy fit because they feel they have a God-given right to your private data.
Yup. You make yourself look like a bot, you’re gonna get treated like a bot.
Yah, they will keep demonizing privacy until we give it up. Because those who care about personal freedom are all terrorists, pdfiles and drugs dealers. Just give up /s.
Because your information is what a number of services use to make money. Even before VPNs come into the equation, you’re undercutting the service’s ability to sell you by anonymizing yourself.
That said, as noted elsewhere here, VPNs can be used by bad actors which can get you just put on a massive block list; and in addition, VPNs can be used to circumvent regional protections such as provisions on what countries can watch what content on video streaming services, which those services also want to prevent and so can block known VPN addresses to avoid.
How can we have private group computing, online shopping, when people here fail to control their individual computing (Google Chrome, iOS, etc)?
It’s not profitable.
It feels like the general consensus is VPN=malicious rather than "VPN=“this guy is just trying to protect his privacy”.
VPNs are used for malicious purposes. After all if a VPN keeps no logs, doesn’t track usage, and lets one pay with alternate currency, why wouldn’t someone use one if they were wanting to commit a crime?
For any service it’s a battle between avoiding blocking actual users, and keeping out the bots and malicious users.
A VPN with a paid dedicated IP may help, or a DIY VPN hosted on a VPS somewhere, but I’d argue it’s not really any better than just using your ISP at that point since all your traffic comes from your own unique VPN IP.
But setting up a VPN on a VPS is not really going to do much for privacy is it? It wouldn’t take much to work out who is renting the VPS and the VPS has no incentive to hold back any info if a they were issued a search warrant.
Feels like it becoming more and more challenging living on the Internet without leaving breadcrumbs all over the place.
You don’t need VPN for everything. Bank is an example.
VPN it is just a tool, not making you invisible but still many companies will not log your real IP, and using it for tracking.
Good solution is to use different browsers (those can be fingerprint) so let’s say. Chrome for banking, shopping (Google is good for adds), and use another browser like Brave with Brave search engine for reading… searching.
TorBrowser - is the most powerful when it comes to privacy (just don’t use it for banking etc.) Some website blocking VPN IP, but TorBrowser might still work. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni2%5C_BN%5C_9xAYTOR is just slightly harder to keep up on as far as being listed on the same tables as commercial VPN hosts because it’s so dynamic. Anyone can spin up a node and be a relay or, for the brave/foolish, an exit node in a few minutes.
Privacy largely comes from a plausible deniability in that the person asking for a site could be the originator or they could just be relaying a request for the originator. Freenet, or now called hypha net is similar that way.
My perspective on internet privacy has long been that while I don’t expect to be a ghost, I can make the picture as muddy as I can to make whatever profile they gather be as useless as possible.
TOR is just slightly harder to keep up on as far as being listed on the same tables as commercial VPN hosts because it’s so dynamic. Anyone can spin up a node and be a relay or, for the brave/foolish, an exit node in a few minutes.
Actually Tor relays and exits are published, public knowledge and you will be on every list that cares about listing those within hours of spinning up a relay or exit.
Interesting, I get a couple feeds that reference them but thought those where all gathered info rather than self published.
To avoid legal repercussions, probably.
It’s how Tor works. You have to publish your relay’s address or else other relays can’t find you. You can host a private/hidden guard node, but not an exit or relay.
I use a credit union, and they obviously don’t care that my login location changes from week to week. If the login comes from outside the US, then I get a flag from the fraud department.
