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Alphabet's Cybersecurity Group Touts Its New Open Source Private VPN (digitalocean.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Alphabet's cybersecurity division Jigsaw has designed a new open source private VPN aimed at journalists and the people sending them data. "Their work makes them more vulnerable to attack," said Santiago Andrigo, Jigsaw's product manager. "It can get really scary when they're outed and you're passing over information."
Unscrupulous VPN providers can steal your identity, peek in on your data, inject their own ads on non-secure pages, or analyze your browsing habits and sell that information to advertisers, says one Jigsaw official. And you can't know for sure whether you can trust them, no matter what they say in the app store. "Journalists should be aware that their online activities might be subject to surveillance either by government agencies, their internet service providers or a hacker with malicious intent," said Laura Tich, technical evangelist for Code for Africa, a resource for African journalists. "As surveillance becomes ubiquitous in today's world, journalists face an increasing challenge in establishing secure communication in the digital space."
The new private VPN, dubbed "Outline", is specifically designed to be resistant to censorship — because it's harder to detect as a VPN (and therefore is less likely to be blocked). Outline uses an encrypted socks5 proxy that looks like normal internet traffic. Once the user chooses a server location, Outline spins up a DigitalOcean server on Ubuntu, installs Docker, and imports an image of the actual server.
It's been named Outline because in places where internet use may be restricted — it gives you a line out.
Unscrupulous VPN providers can steal your identity, peek in on your data, inject their own ads on non-secure pages, or analyze your browsing habits and sell that information to advertisers, says one Jigsaw official. And you can't know for sure whether you can trust them, no matter what they say in the app store. "Journalists should be aware that their online activities might be subject to surveillance either by government agencies, their internet service providers or a hacker with malicious intent," said Laura Tich, technical evangelist for Code for Africa, a resource for African journalists. "As surveillance becomes ubiquitous in today's world, journalists face an increasing challenge in establishing secure communication in the digital space."
The new private VPN, dubbed "Outline", is specifically designed to be resistant to censorship — because it's harder to detect as a VPN (and therefore is less likely to be blocked). Outline uses an encrypted socks5 proxy that looks like normal internet traffic. Once the user chooses a server location, Outline spins up a DigitalOcean server on Ubuntu, installs Docker, and imports an image of the actual server.
It's been named Outline because in places where internet use may be restricted — it gives you a line out.
Yeah, trust the largest data mining and advertising company in the world to keep your data private... NOT.
You mean, like Google?
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When was the point of encryption ever anonymity? The point has always been to transmit data over open channels in a manner that it couldn't be decrypted. The Germans and Allies were doing it all the time during WWII, and interception was expected (if a message couldn't be intercepted, then there would be no need for encryption). One of the failures I see with networks like TOR is the misapplication of encryption for anonymity. Anonymizing data (ie. stripping out metadata) is a separate discipline. The two can certainly be combined, but they are not the same thing.
When I connect to my online banking, I have some expectation that my identity will be known. I'm not relying on the secrecy of the transaction, I'm relying on the inability of a middle man being able to gleen any details of the transaction.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.