Question

To the VPN users here, I have been always using VPN as soon as I am out of my own network, ie. cafes or hotels, now I came across an interesting article

https://arstechnica.com/information...

which tl;dr basically describes the first impact seconds, which happen before the vpn connection is actually established.

Do you (or your vpn-client) take any precautions to prevent that? or are you just sure that everything is using tls and doesn't auto sync?

@teganburns Care to explain why socks should be better than vpn?

@linuxxx wanted to tag you anyway, because you use mullvad vpn iirc

@Bitwise I wish I would have linux on my laptop, since setting up iptables would be pretty easy, the windows firewall though, I am not sure how that would work out, since as they mention too - can be quite a fiddle, especially since often some newly installed programs just allow themselves in the firewall, bypassing the default setting of "not allow"..

@teganburns https://thatoneprivacysite.net search for "BlackVPN" and "Mullvad", they use the maximum encryption everywhere.

I believe you are refering to the fakeVPNs that use hacked together proxy clients, else theres really only hit-logs, not actual data they can grab afaik? (what can operators log besides IP, connection time and other basic client metadata?)

I am not too informed in what way some remote host could actually eavesdrop on openvpn having full physical access (especially; can they modify the server, without the client failing to auth anymore because of some mismatch?) - but thats the case for both diy and bought vpn.

In general theres always trusting somebody, either the host of your root/vps or the vpn seller.

@Bitwise I think I did something similar once by getting the TV mac and then spoofing it to get unlimited internet, because the hotel was charging like 30 bucks for 500MB, which is just delusional, that was the time I used debian on my laptop though 😔 (no need for Adobe Experience Design, VS etc. back then)

@Bitwise Would be still interesting to know though how much a physical access to ones vps/root can do in terms of openvpn.