this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
127 points (97.7% liked)

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

54746 readers
218 users here now

⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.

Rules • Full Version

1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy

2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote

3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs

4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others



Loot, Pillage, & Plunder

📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):


💰 Please help cover server costs.

Ko-Fi Liberapay
Ko-fi Liberapay

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I think the big issue with commercial VPN's are that you are trusting your traffic through someone else's infrastructure where they're typically a target for malicious actors.

If you want to be relatively sure of your privacy, use something like a cloud vm from for example digitalocean and install wireguard on it using https://pivpn.io

I have a home vpn where I connect to my home lan using the wireguard vpn app on my phone. Which means I get more privacy since mobile providers often slurp up dns queries to sell to advertisers and also it allows me to use my pihole for adblocking on my phone.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

For piracy/illegal activities, note that digitalocean account & ip is directly tied to you, unless you manage to create one completely anononymously

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

At the end of the day arguments for or against a particular solution are going to depend on what threats a person considers most important to protect against and where they're willing to put their trust.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

And if all you're doing is downloading torrents, your need for protection is pretty low as all you're trying to do is hide your IP address from some corporate lawyers.

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

So one of the lesser mentioned benefits of commercial VPN's is that they have shared IPs. If you are renting a VPS from like DigitalOcean, it's much easier to prove that the IP browsing a website belongs to you when that IP is dedicated to your VPS that is paid for by you.