By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

Forums - General Discussion - Do you use a VPN?

 

Do you use a VPN for your Internet use

Yes 30 42.86%
 
No 33 47.14%
 
What is a VPN? 7 10.00%
 
Total:70
malistix1985 on 12 August 2017
Zkuq said:
malistix1985 said:

Yeah a free one is generally not adviced but a paid one makes a lot of sense if they have good policies and they turn you in you still have an agreemenent they didn't keep and it puts you in a much better position.

Obviously I understand people who use and not use them but when you have region locked content, pirate content or when you just want to be safer on the internet in general its really a good idea to pay up. I am happy to see a large percentage of VGChartz users are also on board with protection their internet usage :)

Hiding something (e.g. piracy, your general browsing when using public WiFi) and getting around restrictions are the two only things that come to my mind when I try to think of good reasons to use VPN (for general use). For almost everything else, VPN offers pretty much no benefit. If you have a reliable VPN provider (i.e. a good paid one), it shouldn't hurt to use VPN for other stuff either, but if you're using a free VPN, you should only be using it when you really need it and disable at all other times.

Just to clarify it for others: If you think you're protecting your internet use by using a free VPN, you're probably just endangering it unless you're turning it on only when you really need it (e.g. to circumvent regional restrictions or hide piracy and then disable VPN when you're done). A VPN service costs money to run, and if you're not paying for the service with your money, you're paying for it in some other way. It could be ads, or it could be your data, but you're paying for it somehow.

FYI: I have been using ExpressVPN since 2010 and I use it because of the work I do on my computer mostly but I also use it to purchase products from different regions because they are cheaper that way and I use it to access other countries their digital stores and so forth.

Its also been very usefull to connect with friends from the US in certain games and get around limitations, all around its been usefull and yes obviously when you pirate series and other stuff its essential and I would personally never advice anyone to use a free one either, so good point by you.

But when you use a VPN either you have a bad provider which doesn't value your security *aka not paid scam* or you have a good one and if people want to know what you are doing they need to really really want to know to do the effort thus making most activities very safe and secure by having a good paid VPN provider.




Twitter @CyberMalistix

Around the Network
VGPolyglot on 12 August 2017
Ka-pi96 said:
malistix1985 said:

A commen way to track people downloading copyrighted content is for the company to distribute it themselves by doing this they gain access to the data of other peers and in that way they know who downloaded the content.

When you use a VPN one adress is connected to hundreds or more people and the data behind it is encrypted making it unable for them to see who you really are. 

Does that even work? I mean, surely either the company would then be breaking the law for distributing pirated content in the first place (which seems to be much more heavily policed than people downloading the content), or it would be considered entrapment in which case they wouldn`t have a chance at successfully prosecuting someone for it anyway.

I don't think it works like that. They own the copyrighted content, so they can leak it on the internet. Also, they're not police officers, and they're merely providing the opportunity to download it, instead of coercing people into doing it. Also, and probably most importatnly, the courts are much more likely to side with a large corporation with millions upon millions of dollars han some guy/girl downloading content who doesn't have a vast amount of savings.



vivster on 12 August 2017
malistix1985 said:
vivster said:

A few clarifications.

Masking your identity:
Your anonymoity is at the mercy of the VPN host as much as it is at the mercy of your ISP when you don't mask it. If someone is determined to track you, they have the ability to find you depending how much the VPN host values your anonymity. It certainly blocks individuals but it won't do too much against bigger corporations and the government. Again, really depends on the ethics of the VPN provider. If you don't do anything illegal and you have data protection laws in your country then your ISP is as strong as a protection as any VPN host.
Add to that, that your IP is just one part of the huge amount of information you leave on the internet. Trackers and cookies work in your browser, so VPN does nothing to protect your identity here.

Protection against attacks:
No one will DDoS you. No one will directly hack you. So it's protection against a non-existing threat. And if someone DDoS attacks the VPN provider you will still be affected because you have to use a diffrent one.

Add to that the drawback of increased latency and incompatibility with some applications makes this  an unnecessary hassle, especially for gaming.

But if it at least gives you a good feeling I guess it's worth it for you.

Ofcource you are at the mercy of a VPN host and it has to do with their reputation if they do/don't share. For many people when downloading or being active on the internet however their data can be traced even with no data from their ISP. The most usefull thing a good VPN does is encrypt your data and share a IP adress over multiple users of the VPN making it only trackable when your VPN host does decide to share information, which would make them lose any credibility to all their users.

Your ISP cannot track the encrypted data once you use a VPN, in details this:

"A VPN accomplishes two things: first, it re-routes all your internet traffic through a server in a location of your choosing, which changes your IP address to one used by hundreds or thousands of other people (assuming your VPN uses shared IP addresses, which most do). This adds a significant layer of anonymity and makes it much more difficult for anyone to track you. Second, a VPN encrypts all your traffic before it leaves your computer. That means your ISP cannot monitor your activity, nor can anyone else. And because all your traffic heads to the VPN server first, ISPs can’t even tell where it’s going.

Using a quality VPN is key; don’t settle for a “free” service or VPNs that log your activity, cap your bandwidth and data, or don’t provide sufficient DNS leak protection. "

See, that is kinda bullshit. Pure VPN marketing.

First of all an ISP will not track every single packet and its source and destitnation, let alone layer 7 headers. That's ludicrous. And even if they would try to do it it would maybe stored for a week max.

Second, all sensitive information between your PC and website is end-to-end encrypted via SSL/TLS anyway, so they can't even read your fucking google searches. Traffic that's not encrypted is usually not worth protecting anyway. The big exception would be DNS but you're free to choose any DNS server you like and even encrypt your DNS traffic for free and without VPN. So the encryption the VPN offers is useless and just adds overhead. The important information you leave on the internet is stored on the web servers you visit and not with your ISP. I mean do you know how many servers world wide know your email and home address?

Third, who exactly do you think you're protecting yourself from? Malicious hackers don't care about random individuals, the government doesn't care about non-criminals, corporations track you with other means.

So all in all, the only useful functions of the VPN is being used as Proxy to access content you're geoblocked from, which is a legal grey area anyway. A VPN or its way better alternative, TOR, are nice tools but you shouldn't oversell the benefits.

 

Little question from me. Did your VPN provider ask you to install any certificates for their services? If so, they may be reading your encrypted SSL/TLS traffic that no one else can.



If you demand respect or gratitude for your volunteer work, you're doing volunteering wrong.

malistix1985 on 12 August 2017
Ka-pi96 said:
malistix1985 said:

A commen way to track people downloading copyrighted content is for the company to distribute it themselves by doing this they gain access to the data of other peers and in that way they know who downloaded the content.

When you use a VPN one adress is connected to hundreds or more people and the data behind it is encrypted making it unable for them to see who you really are. 

Does that even work? I mean, surely either the company would then be breaking the law for distributing pirated content in the first place (which seems to be much more heavily policed than people downloading the content), or it would be considered entrapment in which case they wouldn`t have a chance at successfully prosecuting someone for it anyway.

I know for a fact some companies do it and no its not illigal to distribute content they own trough software (P2P) which they own.
There are also some excamples of companies who put games online (mad games tycoon was a brilliant one) for people to download but cripple their own content. 

Either way there are many ways for companies to find out who is downloading what look at the mess with the Kodi anti-piracy campaign, law firm can track users who stream illegally because some of the plugins got in to their controll.

VPN stops all of these companies from never knowing who you are because they don't use the data from your ISP and don't use any real political steps to find out who you are. Its discusting right now on the download scene.




Twitter @CyberMalistix

malistix1985 on 12 August 2017

See, that is kinda bullshit. Pure VPN marketing.

First of all an ISP will not track every single packet and its source and destitnation, let alone layer 7 headers. That's ludicrous. And even if they would try to do it it would maybe stored for a week max.

Second, all sensitive information between your PC and website is end-to-end encrypted via SSL/TLS anyway, so they can't even read your fucking google searches. Traffic that's not encrypted is usually not worth protecting anyway. The big exception would be DNS but you're free to choose any DNS server you like and even encrypt your DNS traffic for free and without VPN. So the encryption the VPN offers is useless and just adds overhead. The important information you leave on the internet is stored on the web servers you visit and not with your ISP. I mean do you know how many servers world wide know your email and home address?

Third, who exactly do you think you're protecting yourself from? Malicious hackers don't care about random individuals, the government doesn't care about non-criminals, corporations track you with other means.

So all in all, the only useful functions of the VPN is being used as Proxy to access content you're geoblocked from, which is a legal grey area anyway. A VPN or its way better alternative, TOR, are nice tools but you shouldn't oversell the benefits.

History really shows us VPN's do work. When Germany was hit by letters of copyright claims with people having to dich out hundreds of euro's people who where behind a VPN where not getting those letters.

I am not trying to oversell the benefits especially not for people who use the internet in a regular way but these people are mostly talking about downloading copyrighted content and when you do it the companies who get their information on downloaders generally will go after the easiest targets and try to scare the rest of. Thats just something you can see from countries where downloaders have been punished in the current/past.




Twitter @CyberMalistix

Around the Network
VGPolyglot on 12 August 2017
Ka-pi96 said:
VGPolyglot said:

I don't think it works like that. They own the copyrighted content, so they can leak it on the internet. Also, they're not police officers, and they're merely providing the opportunity to download it, instead of coercing people into doing it. Also, and probably most importatnly, the courts are much more likely to side with a large corporation with millions upon millions of dollars han some guy/girl downloading content who doesn't have a vast amount of savings.

TBH I don`t think a large coproration with millions of dollars is going to care about suing some random person for downloading a file illegally. There`s literally nothing to gain from it except bad PR. Very much doubt any court would be all that interested either... just imagine being sued for illegally downloading a $1 song or something It would be like McDonalds suing somebody for taking a Big Mac without paying... except with these circumstances it would have been a Bic Mac from a "free Big Macs stand".

Well, that's why it's so easy to access and download pirated content It's futile trying to stop it since it's so rampant.



Moren on 12 August 2017

I used it once to be able to use Facebook in China.
I find little use for it otherwise.



vivster on 12 August 2017
Ka-pi96 said:
malistix1985 said:

A commen way to track people downloading copyrighted content is for the company to distribute it themselves by doing this they gain access to the data of other peers and in that way they know who downloaded the content.

When you use a VPN one adress is connected to hundreds or more people and the data behind it is encrypted making it unable for them to see who you really are. 

Does that even work? I mean, surely either the company would then be breaking the law for distributing pirated content in the first place (which seems to be much more heavily policed than people downloading the content), or it would be considered entrapment in which case they wouldn`t have a chance at successfully prosecuting someone for it anyway.

It's not entrapment if you willingly share their content, which is the case with all torrents. Downloading something copyrighted isn't really illegal in itself. The sharing makes it unlawful.

Also, they will send notices directly to you and in 99.9% of the cases people will just pay instead of fighting it in court, which is just fine with them.



If you demand respect or gratitude for your volunteer work, you're doing volunteering wrong.

vivster on 12 August 2017
malistix1985 said:

See, that is kinda bullshit. Pure VPN marketing.

First of all an ISP will not track every single packet and its source and destitnation, let alone layer 7 headers. That's ludicrous. And even if they would try to do it it would maybe stored for a week max.

Second, all sensitive information between your PC and website is end-to-end encrypted via SSL/TLS anyway, so they can't even read your fucking google searches. Traffic that's not encrypted is usually not worth protecting anyway. The big exception would be DNS but you're free to choose any DNS server you like and even encrypt your DNS traffic for free and without VPN. So the encryption the VPN offers is useless and just adds overhead. The important information you leave on the internet is stored on the web servers you visit and not with your ISP. I mean do you know how many servers world wide know your email and home address?

Third, who exactly do you think you're protecting yourself from? Malicious hackers don't care about random individuals, the government doesn't care about non-criminals, corporations track you with other means.

So all in all, the only useful functions of the VPN is being used as Proxy to access content you're geoblocked from, which is a legal grey area anyway. A VPN or its way better alternative, TOR, are nice tools but you shouldn't oversell the benefits.

History really shows us VPN's do work. When Germany was hit by letters of copyright claims with people having to dich out hundreds of euro's people who where behind a VPN where not getting those letters.

I am not trying to oversell the benefits especially not for people who use the internet in a regular way but these people are mostly talking about downloading copyrighted content and when you do it the companies who get their information on downloaders generally will go after the easiest targets and try to scare the rest of. Thats just something you can see from countries where downloaders have been punished in the current/past.

So VPN works sometimes when protecting criminals.... hooray? Doesn't really explain how YOU or the general internet user benefits from it.

In my professional opinion, the only people who profit from VPNs are VPN hosts that either charge money or run ads. They are so successful because it's very easy to scare people into believing that someone is tracking them.

It's the same scam sale networks and shit like Infowars use. Scare people to make money.



If you demand respect or gratitude for your volunteer work, you're doing volunteering wrong.

malistix1985 on 12 August 2017
vivster said:
malistix1985 said:

History really shows us VPN's do work. When Germany was hit by letters of copyright claims with people having to dich out hundreds of euro's people who where behind a VPN where not getting those letters.

I am not trying to oversell the benefits especially not for people who use the internet in a regular way but these people are mostly talking about downloading copyrighted content and when you do it the companies who get their information on downloaders generally will go after the easiest targets and try to scare the rest of. Thats just something you can see from countries where downloaders have been punished in the current/past.

So VPN works sometimes when protecting criminals.... hooray? Doesn't really explain how YOU or the general internet user benefits from it.

Its very simple, people know what they do online and on their computer and if you are doing things you want to hide you need to hide it. Personally I have many reasons but when people where discussing downloading illigally its just a no brainer for me personally that if you do that a VPN has proven to be a good investment to people in the past.

But like I mentioned before some really cool benefits right here:

You can set your region using VPN getting cheaper offers online for CD-Keys (PC/STEAM).
You can more easely set up games with friends by selecting a VPN in their country
You can unlocked content that is blocked in your country
You can download and share content more safely

and yes also if You want to protect your online data from government surveillance, ISPs, hackers, snoops, and spies.

I am not trying to sell people on VPN but I have always apriciated the service myself and I was wondering who else thinks so. Obviously if you are an average joe and just play games and don't use the computer much, it might not be worth it for everyone




Twitter @CyberMalistix