[Crypto-chi] VPNs and your anonymity

[joe fuentes]

Hello everybody
Back in my corporate days VPNs were indispensable for us road warriors. From our hotel rooms we used RSA Secure ID token cards to IPSec back to our corporate intranets and access our printers, top secret servers and a bunch of other stuff.
But in my day to day use I find VPNs just handy dandy in the contexts of torrents. This is what piqued my interest again in VPNs. At one point I was using VPNs to gain access to streaming services that blocked US users. Deezer, a music streaming service from France, was the impetus for me. However since then I've found a much easier way to get to overseas streaming services and region blocked websites. It's a simple Google Chrome extension called Hola Better Internet. It permits you to assume an IP address from a variety of countries so you don't get blocked.  Whilst I don't know how secure it is, probably not, I use it to watch my favorite TVs on BBC iPlayer. 
Going back to torrents, some of the apps I use, Popcorn Time, Flixtor, it's stated it's best if you use VPNs. In fact one of these, Time4Popcorn, has a free built in VPN.  Another good alternative are seedboxes, Has anyone tried these?  From wot I understand peerblock is no good.  
Of more general interest to this group, we do have some service providers on our side. There's the case last year of a Swedish ISP offering free VPN to battle the law.  Yay!
In deference to our less advanced users subscribed to this mailing list, here's a brief tutorial on VPNs for you. 
https://www.codemy.net/posts/how-a-vpn-works
My 2¢ worth.
-Joe

oparty-chi at groups.sshchicago.org> Subject: Re: [Crypto-chi] VPNs and your anonymity
> 
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> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Sorry for the short-ish email.
> 
> VPNs *aren't* anonymous. They are at best an encrypted connection
> between you and servers someone else controls. They are great for a
> couple of things: encrypting your connection from your ISP, hiding
> your real IP and keeping your traffic from being sniffed from network
> adversaries (say in a public wifi location).
> 
> There is a great article from a (I believe Comcast) customer who used
> a VPN to encrypt their Netflix connection and immediately had better
> upload / download throughput for their (legal) streaming. That's
> because Comcast was sniffing their network traffic and throttling it
> (IsComcast a malicious adversary in this case?).
> 
> However, VPNs are great for a lot of casual browsing, (for example web
> tracking via Ad networks), cases where your traffic might blocked
> (think region restrictions in playing BBC videos) as well as cases
> where high anonymity is not needed (think Facebook, web
> pages behind Cloudflare etc).
> 
> Freddy
> 
> 
> On 02/15/2015 03:59 PM, Dan Massoglia wrote:
> > I don't use a VPN. Love TorrentFreak though.
> > 
> > On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 10:05 PM, joe fuentes
> > <joseph.fuentes at live.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> hello everybody For those of us who like to defend our privacy
> >> and use VPNs as one of our tools, here's a rundown from
> >> TorrentFreak. An update looks like will come out this month
> >> later.
> >> 
> >> Let's take a poll. Do any of you use these? if so which one and
> >> would you recommend it?
> >> 
> >> -Joe
> >> 
> >> 
> >> https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-services-take-your-anonymity-seriously-2014-edition-140315/
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> 
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> >> 
> >> 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________ cryptoparty-chi
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