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The truth about VPNs? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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So I'm pretty recent to the high seas but I've seen a few posts now about "stop relying on your VPN" and "people that think VPNs will protect them are naive" and so on.

So since I believe knowledge is our greatest weapon/tool/super-power, can we get some answers regarding what exactly the doomsayers are getting at? ELI5 why VPNs wouldn't protect your anonymity.

Is it about logging? The country your end-point is in? Something more technical?

Ultimately I'd like to be fully armed in order to keep making the best choices for my fledgling ship as it navigates the vast, stormy seas.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think this is not how it works. It's like saying: I'll connect a physical lock to my laptop and I'm more secure. (Many PC laptops have on the side a standardized connector for physical locks which is often used in electronics stores)

Better to go a step back and to consider your Threat Model. What are you doing? What are things that could likely happen right now? Is adding to your security/backing up your Threat Model or is it making things worse because it's adding stuff that you don't need, making workflows so complicated you're likely to misconfigure?

To give a more practical example, there have been a lot of conspiracy theories about Antivirus software. In some sense the nay sayers are right and it actually adds possible holes since they tend to run with elevated privileges. On the other hand, does it really matter for your use case? If you download random stuff online, you should probably install one. (Probably also for your fellow humans so your computer doesn't end up being a botnet host) But if everything on your computer is hand-picked (TM), you might be actually right and they decrease security.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You shouldn’t even to it that way. If you run possible malicious Software, the antivir has a chance to miss it. If it’s a new virus. Run everything in a sandbox and check if it calls some kind of control server and let the antivir check it in said sandbox. Than you can transfer it to your main PC