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280 sats \ 5 replies \ @orthzar 16 Mar 2023 \ on: Red Pill me on VPNs please — bitcoin
It really depends what you are doing with the VPN. If you're trying to watch TV shows that are only available in certain countries, then any VPN will do that fine. If you are trying to increase your privacy/security online, VPNs are useless for that; use the Tor browser instead. An ordinary web browser leaks tons of information about itself, which makes it easy to track you across websites; VPNs do nothing to fill those holes. But the Tor browser is built to fill those holes.
If you are trying to increase your privacy/security online, VPNs are useless for that
VPNs are not useless. When you use a VPN, your IP address is much harder to associate with your identity, same as Tor. Now, Tor includes a bunch of other protections on top of that to avoid other fingerprinting attacks, and Tor has less risk of a single entity seeing all your traffic due to its onion design. But to say VPNs are useless is ridiculous hyperbole.
Anyway, pick a VPN that's likely to not be keeping logs like Mullvad or IVPN. Mullvad in particular is likely to be trustworthy by the fact that they're actively funding genuine privacy improvements. But don't stress over that: your ISP may be keeping logs too. In some countries they're even forced to by law.
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Use a VPN on the host and a VM with different browser and OS as guest that uses the host VPN network, so guest uses NAT. Create a snapshot of the VM and start browsing privately, don't login to any service or if you need to, with a fake identity.
When you're done with browsing, revert to the previous, clean snapshot to remove any track on the virtual disk.
You could even start another VPN on the guest, I use https://lnvpn.net/ to get a temporary VPN for a few sats.
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🤔 I know that's absolutely the case with browsers like Chrome et. al., but what would you say about so-called privacy-first browsers like Brave? Same judgement?
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Brave is nowhere near the level of privacy/security of the Tor browser. Brave was created to enrich Brendan Eich and co. (cf. Brave includes a shitcoin, BAT, which is heavily pre-mined). Plus, you can get all of the benefits of Brave through Firefox + uBlock Origin.
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this. and if your're looking to improve your browsing privacy on clearnet you can use arkenfox on desktop or Mull on Android (deblobbed firefox+arkenfox+torbrowser patches) + uBlock origin on both
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