cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/35967051
Most people turn to a VPN for one reason: privacy. And with its verified badge, featured placement, and 100k+ installs, FreeVPN.One looked like a safe choice. But once it’s in your browser, it’s not working to keep you safe, it’s continuously watching you.
God that ai image the article uses is such shit
The dingy color scheme gives it away immediately. AI thinks comics should look dingy. Are all LLMs trained on comics printed on old newspaper or something?
It’s similar to something we’d do on purpose in the mid 2010’s, deep frying, when people made satirical MLG compilations they would throw memes in as many filters as possible, making a piss yellow slowly cover the meme the more filters you used.
Never use VPN add-ons for your browser. Unless you get them along with your paid VPN. You should run your entire network through the VPN, not just a browser.
Do you not run into issues doing this? I’m constantly having to split my VPN or disable my VPN for certain logins to work, such as banks, government sites and shit.
For some games and websites I have to turn it off yeah. Or at least switch the server to one that isn’t blocked.
It’s a shame that websites are allowed to track and block VPNs.
Seperate browser for Clearnet /KYC
For example “mullvad-exclude trivalent”
I actually go further and have seperate VMs with different networks (VPN1, VPN2, whonix, i2p, or clearnet
That way split tunneling feature Is not needed and I can have 2 mullvad clients on lockdownmode connected at once
What’s lockdown mode. I use PIA because it was cheap about 5 years ago and never had any issues so I havent shopped around. I don’t have a dedicated IP which I would have liked, they offer them but I haven’t convinced myself I need it yet. I figure if anyone else (not family) needs to access a site that points to my IP I’ll do it then.
Maybe I haven’t been understanding/using caddy and such properly, but how do you really get multiple servers running without 80/443 not having overlap. Like right now I have 53 for my Pihole internally, 8096 Jellyfin, 3923 for a file server, can’t remember what my RustDesk server is on, but I wanted to set up a Piefed instance, and obviously I’m running into issues with ports overlapping because I must not be understanding how to forward / reverse proxy them properly.
Do you set up caddy on your individual VM’s and use a separate IP for each. Can I just tie a URL from NOIP to a specific port outside of 80/443 somehow?
Most people don’t need to run everything though a VPN. That just slows everything down. You would normally only use them to access resources on a private LAN such as when working from home or accessing your self hosted services when away from home.
That’s a completely different VPN than what the rest the comments are talking about
That’s why I temporarily disable it for some websites
Unfortunately that means disabling my entire network VPN anytime I need to bypass a VPN block. And also makes switching between different servers significantly more complicated.
I use my paid vpn extension (Nord) to select a Country for twitch.tv which isn’t served ads. However I would all my traffic go through that specific vpn as it causes trouble with other appe/pages. So being able to cnveniently switch my IP per domain is pretty nice sometimes.
It is a paid VPN luckily though. The issue is with “free” VPN browser add-ons.
There’s also different adblocker rules and extensions for twitch ads.
Not sure about the current situation. However in general Twitch uses server side injected ads (SSAI), which are basically unblockable. They can however be bypassed (using different methods, each having it’s own pros and cons). Anway there is a very active twitch ad blocking community that will explain everything: https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions Most reliably is having either an http proxy or a vpn in a country that is not served ads.
They’re not unblockable.
Every now and then Twitch wastes money on circumventing adblockers, but a few weeks later ublock filters will be updated to block that again. I’m currently watching without any ads or third party add-ons besides regular uBlock.
Curious, what country doesn’t get twitch ads?
Well that is actually quite dynamic as sometimes advertisers suddenly choose to place an ad in somen fringe country like czech rep. or Georgia. Mostly those small eastern EU countries are not attractive enough for advertisers. For some reason I also never get ads with Luxembourg IP, even though they are one of the richest countries in the world. Probably too small of a traget audience.
Not to be confused with “Tor Browser” (not a VPN, just providing clarification)
Sure THIS will protect the children!
/s
Any free VPN is a scam.
is ProtonVPN a scam then? no.
Most are, but not necessarily
Honestly I thought their vpn was only on paid plans. Kinda impressed they offer it free. I assume it’s a way to get people into the ecosystem and also use their email and etc
I believe windscribe also has a nice free plan
Proton isn’t.
Didn’t even know they offered a free vpn. I thought it was only on paid plans. Shrugs, I already use mullvad
andy yen is a pro big tech fash so yeah it is
He’s not and you know he’s not.
Unless you sign up for a VPS free trial yourself and set it up. I have two Oracle always free instances running right now
be forewarned, oracle is known to randomly just delete free VPSs out of nowhere with no warning.
Yes, that’s why I upgraded to a paid account even though my VPSes are free
Ya if you are hosting it yourself then pretty different. I use them for a basic Nextcloud server myself. Their ARM servers are dirt cheap even when you have to go above their free generous cores and ram.
What’s the point of setting up a VPN like that?
You can get around the censorship of the country you’re in
There are things on the internet that are free and fine to use. VPNs are not one of them. They have ongoing hosting and bandwidth costs. They are not eating those costs without recouping them somehow.
it’s FreeVPN.One
How the fuck else do you think a for profit company is offering free tech?
Free trial with limitations is a classic method that has worked well
I’m saying it’s literally a free VPN. But they’re q company. If they’re offering you free shit, you’re the product.
pay an illustrator, ai slophorse.
There’s no such thing as free vpn. Any idiot who falls for this quite frankly deserves it.
Hey, you know when people in the UK were saying that the online safety act would drive teenagers to use dodgy vpns? This is what we meant.
good thing they got rid of adblockers to make users safer tho
not on firefox they didn’t
TIL Chrome makes Firefox.
you mean google? no, its mozilla for now.
I guess the P in VPN stands for “Public.”
First mistake: using Chrome.
Malicious extensions are also found in Firefox, and every other modern browser is Chromium.
Except for all of the WebKit ones
You can’t trust extensions these days. Granted if you are using a “free” vpn, you are the product.
Stopped reading as soon as I saw an AI image for the article.
Isnt that at the top?
Yup. Spent about 1.5 seconds on that site before closing it out.
