this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
739 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
58303 readers
15 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I just think VPNs are over hyped. At the end of the day if someone is monitoring both sides it was game over a long time ago. Also there is no way to know what is on the other side of a VPN.
What would be interesting is a paid I2P or Tor exit proxy.
Oh yeah, people thinking that VPNs are the end-all of Privacy and Security against eavesdropping in the Internet aren't really informed enough to understand that there are quite a lot more attack vectors than just a person's IP address.
That said no-logging VPNs do remove one from the "low lying fruit" category for things like legal companies sending "gimme money because we detected you infringing our copyright" letters to people doing file sharing using things such as bittorrent. This is because they remove the easy way for such companies to get a person's information when detecting file sharing from a specific IP address: one thing is getting the target by a process as simple as sending an e-mail to a local ISP demanding the identification of a user using a certain IP at a certain time due to copyright infringement (using the laws made for just that purpose during the last couple of decades in several countries), a whole different ball game is to first having to get a Court Order in an altogether different jurisdiction to force the VPN provider to install some kind of wiretap-equivalent to catch such a user at a later time for a case of Copyright Infringement - it costs way too much, takes way too much time and has way too much risk of being laughed out of court (methaphorically speaking) to be worth it for a case of non-commercial Copyright Infringement, especially if there is an overabundance of easier targets.
As with everything else in this world, VPNs are good tools for certain jobs, not some kind of silver bullet for Privacy and Security against eavesdropping.
My philosophy is that a VPN is strictly better then your ISP logging all your traffic, and is part of basic data hygiene.