Bit of an uphill fight with captchas everywhere. Do people here conduct all online activity over VPN whenever possible? Only for the sensitive stuff? Or perhaps the inverse because the bank already knows you? Maybe when travelling or getting around region blocking? Something else?
The one provided by my work aside, I realized that I don’t have any consistent rules around using VPN. Except sometimes, you know, when downloading ISO’s for my favorite distos.
Pretty much always. If someone blocks my VPN, I just don’t go there or don’t use that. Sucks but it is what it is. I’m just not willing to enter your site bareback.
Mine is on pretty much all the time. Capchas are indeed annoying, but I’m choosing to see that as something which helps me to be more intentional about my use of the internet.
My bank and government portal don’t seem to care about it, even if my traffic is coming from a random country on the other side of the world because I’ve forgotten to route through one of my VPN’s domestic servers. Online freelancing platforms, on the other hand, have instantly banned my accounts, and I’ve had problems with corporate social media (which I try and use for my business).
Whats this with vpns using capatchas?
My client device having the right encryption key is the authenticator for me.
going around government censorship, being safer from being tracked
I get the idea but all of it depends on placing your trust in some company who’s entire business model is to sell you privacy.
If you live in an area with such heavy censorship then can you trust the business that is legally allowed to advertise and sell to you?
I personally think such company is way more likely to sell my data on the dark web then the government has resources to investigate what web domains i have visited.
They aren’t legally allowed to advertised and sell. Having them installed and selling them is a crime. (China, Iran, many other countries)
It is a valid use case. But thats not my usecase by far, which is what was asked.
My comment is slightly directed at people i know irl that are not very technological and believe that surfing the web is inherently not safe, but completely safe one you pay to connect to name_tm.
My apologies if it felt condescending for people who have good reason to tunnel outside there local jurisdiction.
Do you know of a guide for a setup like this?
I have a router with opnsense which has q plugin for wireguard making things quite easy for me.
A router is usually also always online and sits at the center of a network so it is the best place for it but there is nothing stopping someone from setting it up with commandline on a home device.
https://www.wireguard.com/quickstart/
There are many online video guides that cover different ways to do it (like docker)
In all casss you first setup a main server on the device that stays home and from it you generate a peer per device you want to connect. (A bunch of settings/codes) Sometimes a peer is a qr code that your device can scan (wireguard app for some devices) otherwise you have to manualy type.
Once set you can just leave it on. The only exception i found is some apps for local payments, presumably because they require both devices to report the same location to perform a transaction.
I use a VPN 99% of the time, i turn it off when i need to access archive.org, or watch something on the public braordcasters streaming platform
yeah sure the captchas are annoying but it’s not like websites load within 10 seconds anymore
I only wish protonVPN was a good as the one i used previously, but i cancelled it cause it had ties to israel
You might want to check into split tunneling.
Permanently on. Anything I can’t access without it I generally find an alternate with very few exceptions. I have a quarantine virtual machine I use for the couple of websites that are worth making an exception for.
always on
98% of the time. I hate having to turn it off to look at my local grocery store’s website but I have done it before.
Always. The captcha drive me crazy though.
Most of the time, but I would emphasize always in airports or public wifi
always except for banking, government stuff, job searching. that’s when it looks more sus.
I am more inclined to use a VPN if I want government ibfornation. And that is really disappointing.
Fortunately I rarely have to interact with a government website for anything.
Basically all the time.
Mostly just for torrents, one machine on my local network is always using a VPN to connect to the external internet. I would use it for more things like private web browsing, but without substantial additional setup I think my web browsing is guaranteed to be fingerprinted regardless of whether I conceal my IP so until I bother to set that up it doesn’t seem like there is much point.
All the time basically
On at all times at the router level. Because it’d be annoying to selectively disable it. My VPN isn’t really an anonymity feature anyway; I have a dedicated browser profile for things like banking where I intend the fingerprint to be associated with my government identity.
