Phony VPN Services Are Cashing In On America's War On Privacy (vice.com)

Reader Freshly Exhumed writes: Nicholas Deleon at Motherboard reveals a run-in with scammers who are already hard at work taking advantage of newly signed legislation that allows Internet Service Providers to sell your online privacy, including your web browser history, to the highest bidder without your consent. Relatedly, Tim Berners-Lee would prefer people to protest in the streets rather than take technical measures such as TOR and VPN. For those intent on using VPN, TorrentFreak has their latest reviews of VPN anonimity practices, with the caveat that the info is submitted by the VPN companies themselves on a "trust us" basis.

Comments

All my data is double-encrypted with ROT-13!

[Fringe]

Sometimes people don't even realize encrypted data is present.

Re:All my data is double-encrypted with ROT-13!

[Anonymous Coward]

ROT-26 is faster than running ROT-13 twice, and is just as secure.

But the modern recommendation is ROT-416. It's well established that the NSA has been able to break double-ROT-13 and ROT-26 for a long time now. There are also rumors of them secretly injecting vulnerabilities into the ROT standard, so be careful out there!

VPN comparison on That One Privacy Site

[worf_mo]

That One Privacy Guy maintains a detailed VPN comparison chart. The chart lists the results for a number of criteria for each VPN provider. Information is gathered from public sources and by contacting the respective hotlines. There is also an article about choosing a VPN, and a review section.

The site is a bit slow to load, but if offers some good information. I like the fact that no recommendation is given, everyone can come to their own conclusions based on their requirements and the available data. From the FAQ:.

Q: Can you give me a recommendation?

A: Sorry, but to be unbiased, I created my project for others to make this determination for themselves. Everyone’s needs and threat models are different as well, so if I made a suggestion that conflicted with your needs, it could very well have the opposite effect as intended.

Re:"anonimity"?

[tsqr]

Learn how to spell, you fucking retards.

Now, dont curl up into a feeble position, or run around like a bowl in a china shop. No need for ad homonym attacks. Its the 21st century, and for all intensive purposes, its a far-gone conclusion that society has bid ado to gramer; speling - and punkshuation (ect). As long as you can pack up the meening from contacts, you shouldnt go on and nauseum about this sort of thing. In the end, its all for knot anyways, so dont ball your eyes out over it. In stead, you should cease the opportunity to except the inevitable and be internally grateful at being liberated.

Re:Roll your own

[R.Mo_Robert]

It's not difficult to roll your own VPN solution if you have some knowledge of BSD/Linux. This is really and truly the only way to ensure trust and even then it is not 100%. OpenVPN is not hard to install and configure but I am sure it is not immune from would-be intruders.

Umm, how does that help? I do have a VPN server to remote in to my home network and access services, shares, and other resources I don't make publicly visible (which is almost everything--that I don't, I mean), but you seem to be missing the part where the type of VPN this article is talking about is for people who wish to disguise their network traffic from home (and elsewhere) by sending it over a VPN to a remote server, often in another country--the problem being that it's not always apparent if you can trust that server.