Got reminded of this while reading about ProtonMail. The reason I haven't gotten into proper #piracy is that I don't have a VPN for torrenting, and the reason I don't have a VPN is that I don't #torrent. So it would be nice if I got a good VPN while #degoogling myself.
Will ProtonVPN rat me out to Comcast? I know some VPNs don't hide what you're downloading from your ISP, for reasons I don't fully understand.
The new app only officially supports limited distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora). The CLI isn’t updated to v4 yet. You can still connect to the VPN by downloading the config files (OpenVPN or Wireguard) and connecting through, e.g., wg-quick protonvpn.com/support/linux-vpn-setup/
It’s weird, because despite not having port forwarding on Linux I’ve never had any problems torrenting.
Port forwarding is not a cover your ass privacy feature, it’s a compatibility feature.
I just did a quick search and yes, Zorin OS is based on Ubuntu so it will be able to work with all the regular Ubuntu packages such as those provided by Proton VPN.
You definitely have a point with the public facing posts. However, I will disagree with you on two points.
“Harmful content” does not seem to apply here as the article implies that specifically posts criticizing government policies were flagged.
Even so, harmful content could just as well be classified through existing procedures such as members of the public filing complaints rather than simply “keeping score”.
It’s a bit different when your employer is the government as they should be held to a higher standard.
“We can disclose only now that we had a server in Toronto seized in 2015, initially without our knowledge. Maybe a court order was served to the datacenter. For about 10 days we did not understand what happened to the server, which did not respond, while the datacenter did not provide information....
Especially the way they snake around why they didnt disclose it. “We can only disclose now”. Why? They made it clear they didn’t receive a court order or anything that would prevent them. They specifically mention that it was only an informal phone call from a police department.
What do you mean by a failed warrant canary? In most cases there is no clear failure because there’s no clear plan in place to maintain them.
For example, if a website has a statement “we have received 0 warrants”. When was that published? Yesterday? A year ago? More? Even if it has a date, say 6 months ago. What does that mean? That they only update it every year? Or maybe there were meant to update it they just forgot, maybe they aren’t allowed to update it due to a gag order.
Due to the way each website does things differently with no clear guidelines, there isn’t actually a defined failure case.
While you can find examples of companies doing it correctly, it’s also easy to find companies who do not. Also, some update theirs seemingly daily but don’t actually state this. Sure, you can check and see that it was updated “today”, but what if it doesn’t get updated and you don’t know its “typically” updated daily. Again, no date for the next update.
These are all examples of companies who do not explicitly specify when the next update will be: kagi.com/privacy nordvpn.com/security-efforts/ cloudflare.com/transparency/
This is a great idea! I wish more websites did warrant canaries, and those that do often fail to maintain them or plan for the case when a gag order prevents them from updating an existing canary. The only thing I would suggest is making it more clear that being in an alpha stage means that the product should not be relied upon in critical situations.
I did this for the longest time until I realised that because AdGuard works best as a virtual VPN, it is unable to run alongside an actual VPN. Luckily my VPN (and many others) support ad blocking too.
Another benefit of using uBlock Origin is the ability to use the cosmetic filters so you can remove elements from the page that aren’t served as ads in the typical sense. As an example when you’re reading an article and there’s an obnoxious box half way through that says CONSIDER SUBSCRIBING etc. It’s not loading any external resources, it’s just inlined HTML. But you can enter element picker mode and if you are able to uniquely target that element you can filter it out.
That’s not what I’m talking about. I meant to say that AdGuard on mobile (Android) runs by pretending to be a VPN in order to intercept all connections and filter the ads out of them. This works great to remove ads in apps, etc.
However, because it hooks into the VPN interface you can’t then run another VPN (for example Proton VPN) because Android only allows one VPN to run at any time.
Oh you’re talking about AdGuard VPN not solely the main AdGuard product. Definitely not ideal. It doesn’t offer the same level of features as my current VPN who offers ad blocking anyway. Not to mention a few suspicious quotes from their website:
AdGuard VPN protocol uses the most secure and fast encryption algorithm to date – AES-256
From the very outset, we resolved to develop and deploy an in-house VPN protocol instead of picking a canned solution — that’d be too easy
We are going to make our protocol implementation publicly available in the future. Sadly, right now we don’t have enough time to prepare the project
we collect data about how you interact with our services, how much traffic you’ve used, and for how long have you been using our services
ADGUARD SOFTWARE LIMITED is a company registered in Nicosia, Cyprus, registered office is at Klimentos 41-43, KLIMENTOS TOWER, Flat/Office 25, 1061, Nicosia, Cyprus and acts as the data controller when processing your data
Considering Cyprus telecommunications laws it doesn’t seem like the safest place to headquarter a telecommunications privacy company.
The top/1st line is the first service and it cascaded down as each subsequent service starts. Left to right is time elapsed. Bright red line is time to start that service. Shorter is better.
UK government keeping files on teaching assistants’ and librarians’ internet activity (www.theguardian.com)
AirVPN discloses server seized in 2015 (airvpn.org)
“We can disclose only now that we had a server in Toronto seized in 2015, initially without our knowledge. Maybe a court order was served to the datacenter. For about 10 days we did not understand what happened to the server, which did not respond, while the datacenter did not provide information....
Simplifying warrant canaries - Purplix canary (lemmy.nz)
Github: github.com/WardPearce/Purplix.io...
DNS-based tracker blocking vs local app-based tracker blocking, (kerala.party)
which is more effective, useful, and efficient?
TIL You can use `systemd-analyze plot > plot.svg` to plot the service startup time to find bottlenecks (lemmy.world)
Apparently the reason my computer has been taking 2 minutes to boot was a faulty network mount