So, recently, a person in the US was arrested for stalking people.

The evidence was some data from google, a work computer and from a VPN provider.

Let's take a quick look at that VPN provider. It (PureVPN) says on their privacy policy page that they do NOT store logs.

Guess from what VPN provider the FBI got those logs? Yes, PureVPN!

Althouh I'm happy they got this creep off the street, it still means that PureVPN has been lying to its entire customer base.

I personally hope that their reputation will be destroyed now because this should never happen.

A screenshot I took from their privacy policy page is attached below.

Keep your eyes open when choosing a VPN provider!

So the new mass surveillance law will be going into effect from the 1st of January.

Of course, since I'm very keen on my security/privacy, I'm going to implement some precautions.

- A few vps's connecting to tor, i2p and VPN provider so that I can always use a secure connection.

- Setup anti tracker/ads/etc etc shit on the VPS's. Probably through DnsMasq and the hosts file.

- Use Tor browser by default. I've tried this for a while now and damn, the tor network has become way faster than only even a year ago! Some pages literally only take a few seconds to load.

- Wipe my laptop, encrypt the harddrive and at least put QubesOS on it together with probably a few other systems.

- Ungoogle my new phone, use it with VPN by default.

- Get rid of all non encrypted communication services. I think that only leaves me with a few account removals because I haven't chatted unencrypted for nearly a fucking year now.

If anyone has any more ideas, please share!

Tonight I want to try to setup an openvpn server with mysql based authentication because I'd love to somehow setup/become a vpn provider.

Of course there's a huge ass legal part but let's first make sure I know the technology of the top of my head!

Just ranting this out because I'm excited 😊

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

You know what would be nice? Being able to Google anything to do with VPNs without having like 90% of the results being links to how-to-setup-VPN-client pages from every goddamn obscure commercial VPN provider in existance.

If I wanted to know how to setup a VPN client to work with Crazy Dave's House-o'-VPN-n'-Cloud-Hosting's paid-for service, I probably would have Googled for that, not general things like "openvpn ethernet bridging". Why am I getting so many commercial results? Either nobody sets up their own VPNs, or the VPN companies have SEO'd the keywords good and proper.

*WILD THOUGHT*

Whom would you provide your personal info for?

The ISPs or VPN Provider?

Oh boy, finally something to rant about.

I got hired in a "small" company (not even 2000 people in it), then got "shipped" to a way bigger company. Basically, I work for this company (the french biggest internet / phone service provider) but in the name of my own. And this since last wednesday.

First off, I'm fucking stupid. After leaving the big company that I was in before, I swore to myself that from now on, I would work for smaller companies, mainly because I couldn't stand the inertia that big company have. You ask for something, you get it a month and a half after. The old company has about 6000 employees... This company has 98k people in it. Fuck. My. Life.

Now, to the rant: Orange (the company) decided that they had to move their office somewhere else. They set up a lot of things so that all we needed to do was to put things in boxes, to work somewhere else until next monday, then we could go to the new office on tuesday morning.

Keep in mind that I have been there for 8 days: I keep learning how they do their stuff. For example, if I need a specific docker image, I can't get it from the Docker Hub, the download will fail. However, if I hit an Orange subdomain's registry, I will get this image from a mirror. Because fuck logic.

When we join the company, they give us a Windows laptop ("yeaah we have useless but required Orange softwares that don't run on Linux" "Yeeaaah fuck you") that have a specific VPN allowing us to use the Orange network and, in theory, you can download docker images or clone orange repositories from that network.

In practice, you can simply just go fuck yourself. Why? Because whenever you want to curl, wget or pull anything (or even pip install), your connection keeps being shut down while it waits for the response's header.

The worst part? According to my (new) boss's evasive answers, the way to fix that works with glue, sticks and the power of the Force.

WHY THE FUCK DO YOU ENFORCE US A SHITTY OS FOR DEVELOPMENT, WHEN THE TOOLS YOU SHOVE IN IT WITH A FAKE SMILE DON'T EVEN WORK, AND WE HAVE TO HACK OUR WAY TO FUCKING WORK?

This user is asking Facebook to add a built-in VPN, this is really cracking me up 😂😂😂.
Some users are just confused, WTF.

!dev && rant

Looking for a song's lyrics... A very complicated task apparently. Blinding Lights by The Weeknd for whoever's interested.

Firefox: just one small thing to keep going, sorry we just updated our CA certs again. Screw you, close the browser. I will not restart it for you but I will tell you that I would. When you restart the browser, you will lose whatever search you were just doing. Sucks for you bastard! Enjoy the update.

Go to Genius Lyrics, please turn on JavaScript to run this "app". Done that? Okay now solve this CAPTCHA please. Um.. let me just leave that ingenious site.

Next one, AZ Lyrics: Yeah sorry your IP is from a hosting provider, but we will not tell you that is the reason. You've just been denied access to the site. See you next time! Everyone using a VPS to make a VPN connection with is obviously an abuser after all.

Finally found the lyrics on lyrics.com after a long journey that was way more complicated than it should've been. It's a good song.

Oh and Firefox consumed well over a GB for just a single tab of course...
I want Gopher, BBS, IRC and the likes back.

Ok, first rant, about my struggles getting reliable internet over the past 6 years. It's not too interesting of a topic, but here we go:

I'm living in a more rural part of Germany and internet here is shit. I pay more than 50 bucks a month for 700kb/s downstream (let's just not talk about upstream...), which is meh by itself but it gets worse. Before this I had roughly 230kb/s downstream using DSL. My provider came out with a new oh-so-fucking-fancy solution for giving people faster internet without upgrading their lame ass fucking backbone and POS infrastructure from 70 years ago: they sell you hybrid internet which combines your shit DSL and an LTE connection using TCP Multicast. Not only do I get only 6 of my promised (and payed for) 50 Mbit, no, It's also a fucking piece of nonworking shit!!!

Let me illustrate:
You constantly have problems with web content (or any remote content) not loading because the host server does not support TCP Multicast. It either refuses connection altogether or it takes about 30-50 seconds to establish a connection. Think about your live when it takes two or three fucking minutes to load 5 YouTube thumbnails or load new tweets at the bottom of the Twitter page! Also, you never know if you a) have an error in your implementation of a new API or if b) the remote host doesn't support TCPMC (there's never an error for that! Fuck you!), your SSH sessions ALWAYS drop in the most inopportune fucking moments because the LTE thing lost connection, you always have to turn on a VPN if you want to visit specific websites (for example your school's website) and so on....

Oh and also, my provider started throttling specific services again these days with Netflix and YouTube struggling to display 240p, fucking 240p video without buffering when I get 600kbit down on steam (ofc the steam download is paused when watching videos). When using a VPN, YouTube 720p and Netflix HD work like a charm again. Fucking Telekom bastards

Then there is the problem with VPNs. The good thing about them is that they solve all the TCP Multicast problems. Yay. Now for the bad things:
First of all, as soon as I use a VPN, access times to remote go up by like fucking 500%. A fucking DNS lookup takes 8-15 seconds!!! The bandwidth is there but it takes forever.. because reasons I guess. Then the speed drops to DSL speeds after a while because the router turns off my LTE connection when it is unused and it does not detect VPN traffic as traffic (again because... Reasons?) And also, the VPN just dies after an hour and you have to manually reconnect (with every VPN provider so far)

And as if that wasn't enough, now the lan is dying on me, too, with the router (the fucking expensive hybrid piece of shit, 230 bucks..) not providing DHCP service anymore or completely refusing all wifi connections or randomly dropping 5Ghz devices, or.....

You get the point.

The worst thing is, they recently layed down 400mbit fiber in my neighborhood. Guess where the FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT CABLE ENDS??? YEAH, RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY NEIGHBORS HOUSE. STREET NUMBER 19 IS SERVED WITH 400MBIT AND MY HOME, THE 20, IS NOT IN THEIR FUCKING SERVICE REGION. Even though there is a fucking cable with the cable companies name on it on my property, even leading up to my house! They still refuse to acknowledge it! FUCK YOU!!!!

Well anyways thanks for reading. Any of you got the same problems? :/

No way. I hope this is a joke...else its not helping building up trust in their competence (Australian vpn provider)

New twist on an old favorite.

Background:
- TeamA provides a service internal to the company.
- That service is made accessible to a cloud environment, also has a requirement to be made available to machines on the local network so you can develop against it.
- Company is too cheap/stupid to get a s2s vpn to their cloud provider.
- Company also only hosts production in the cloud, so all other dev is done locally, or on production non-similar infra, local dev is podman.
- They accomplish service connectivity by use of an inordinately complicated edge gateway/router/firewall/message translator/ouija board/julienne fry maker, also controlled by said service team.

Scenario:
Me: "Hey, we're cool with signing requests using an x509 cert. That said, doing so requires different code than connecting to an unsecured endpoint. Please make this service accessible to developer machines and lower environments on the internal network so we can, you know, develop."
TeamA: "The service should be accessible to [cloud ip range]"
Me: "Yes, that's a production range. We need to be able to test the signing code without testing in production"
TeamA: "Can you mock the data?"
Me: "The code we are testing is relating to auth, not business logic"
TeamA: "What are you trying to do?"
Me: "We are trying to test the code that uses the x509 you provide to connect to the service"
TeamA: "Can you deploy to the cloud"
Me: "Again, no, the cloud is only production per policy, all lower environments are in the local data center"
TeamA: "can you try connecting to the gateway?"
Me: "Yes, we have, it's not accessible, it only has public DNS, and only allows [cloud ip range]"
TeamA: "it work when we try it"
Me: "Can you please supply repro steps so we can adjust our process"
TeamA: "Yes, log into the gateway and try issuing the call from there"
Me: (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

tl;dr: Works on my server

So, the Network I was on was blocking every single VPN site that I could find so I could not download proton onto my computer without using some sketchy third-party site, so, being left with no options and a tiny phone data plan, I used the one possible remaining option, an online Android emulator. In the emulator running at like 180p I once again navigated to proton VPN, downloaded the windows version, and uploaded it to Firefox send. Opened send on my computer, downloaded the file, installed it, and realized my error, I need access to the VPN site to log in.

In a panic, I went to my phone ready to use what little was left of data plan for security, and was met with no signal indoors. Fuck. New plan. I found a Xfinity wifi thing, and although connecting to a public network freaked me out, I desided to go for it because fuck it. I selected the one hour free pass, logged in, and it said I already used it, what? When?, So I created a new account, logged in, logged into proton, and disconnected, and finally, I was safe.

Fuck the wifi provider for discouraging a right to a private internet and fuck the owner for allowing it. I realize how bad it was to enter my proton account over Xfinity wifi, but I was desperate and desperate times call for desperate means. I have now changed my password and have 2fa enabled.

!rant,
please bare with me :)
What is the difference between having a VPS with OpenVPN and connecting to it and between registering for a VPN provider?

So, I move house with my amazing, already configured and stable router with built in VPN, DDNS, Port forwarding and DHCP addresses.

Received ISP shitty router at new address and want to use as modem only, so I go read the manual.

"Bridge mode requires you to configure your other router with PPPoE and the ISP's credentials"

Landline is not working, so I cannot call the number to retrieve my password. After 2 days of waiting, engineer visits, installs master socket, dial tone yaaay.

Call number to get password, automated voice message has such a bad sound quality that I cannot figure out if it's saying F or S, and there are two of those letters.

Put ISP router in bridge mode, set other router to PPPoE and put credentials, nothing. Try with F and F, S and F, F and S, S and S... Nothing. Put it back to dynamic IP address, it works.

I resign myself and manually configure everything I had on the good router to the ISP one. A few issues with my server and DDNS, but hey, internet works.

Start missing the other functionality, try the password idiocy again. Nothing.

Next day, go to work, talk to a colleague that lives close and has the same provider: "I just put it into bridge mode and it worked".

Go back home, bridge mode on ISP router, Dynamic IP on good router, no credentials. It works.

Why do I always overcomplicate stuff?

Long time stalker, but I finally signed up! Maybe I have dragged it out to not get too addicted, but it seems like that plan has failed.. ;)

Now for the question:
Can anyone recommend a VPN provider (well, functionally proxy) that works in (South) China these days? Because of the holidays the CCP is blocking everything they can to ensure that.. well let's not get political.

Priorities: Reliability > Privacy > Cost (trial or guarantee would be great though)

Thanks :)

Do you think free VPN providers are reliable and not tracking our personal data?

If your answer is Yes then please let me know name of that VPN provider.

What is everyone's favorite VPN provider?

Best VPN provider, which keeps no logs, allows portforwarding and is affordable? :o

So, I've been seeing a lot of people concerned about privacy around here lately.

I completely understand it, and I too, don't want all my data to be available for anyone at any given time. I get it.
However, the only way to get privacy, is to build it yourself.

Buying a phone? Who says (apart from the company itself) that it doesn't have some integrated chip, or that the os lies to you or w/e

When using your phone, who says your Sim provider isn't intercepting all your traffic with a man in the middle attack?

These sound like conspiracies, however, if you really want privacy, either build it yourself (or with other privacy activists) or let go of the comforts of technology (i know, you're not the only source of info about yourself, the only way to shield yourself is to go into the woods and live a simple life.)

It's pretty sad that these are the two options, but I've yet to find a better one.

(ps, I used to have a "no logs, no ip, no anything" VPN provider, and as soon as some agency requested info, they got it, so I wouldn't easily trust the promise of 3rd parties anymore.)

First day back at work, lunch time now. So far I've been to one meeting and done no work. I can't get on to the vpn. We get OTP for the vpn via sms. Sms is taking so long to come through that it always expired by the time I get it

The kicker? I work for a cellular provider

Help needed.
My Internet service provider shut GitHub and now it's inaccessible. I can see all Repo's and clone them via VPN but can't push data. Any help regarding how to push data through a VPN or other way would be really helpful.
Thanks.

Can you disable a VPN VNet gateway service on Azure when you don't need it?

Getting conflicting info from our cloud provider (who I no longer trust to assist because they don't know what they're doing) and forum posts about the same question on Microsoft and I don't know what to believe.

I can't experiment, because it'll probably cost the company money and I can't do shit without getting permission and submitting some kind of business case for things that will potentially cost money.