Surveillance of the internet for UK

firstborn said:
I forgot about my sub to PIA for a VPN I used on all my work related travels. It's coming to an end so thought it appropriate in this thread to ask what is the best option these days for a VPN these days? ExpressVPN seems to be at the top almost if not all review lists.
Click to expand...
I'd recommend AirVPN, 3 year plan is €99 (£85) which works out at £2.36 a month. You don't need a real email when creating an account and they accept Monero as a payment method. Connection speed and reliability is excellent, and they are one of the most transparent/trustworthy VPN's out there. ExpressVPN is at the top of review lists because they pay for it, which is one of the reasons it is so overpriced.

burtie said:
I don't download movies as you wouldn't download a car would you
Click to expand...
I would if I could.
 
Rainmaker said:
Ironic that that particular quote is attributed to Goebbels in reference to the SS et al. Any state-led mass surveillance is a worrying breach of civil liberties, and it's even more mind boggling to see people on supposed tech sites saying they have nothing to hide and don't care. Why should we be subject to blanket monitoring? What happens when it's decided something you do legally today is no longer acceptable tomorrow, and it's a simple matter of querying the huge cache of logs to see who to single out next?

What happens when it's inevitably abused, hacked or worse? There are a million reasons and ways this type of activity is wrong and can go wrong, but no concrete results to show that it does any good. Can 'they' point to a single example of it providing tangible benefit? Nope. Why does allowing some busybody at the local council access to my web searches, emails and shopping habits aid national security? Hint: It doesn't.

The NSA and GCHQ were hoovering up the entire Internet traffic before 9/11, 7/7 and the Manchester bombing but what did that help? You're not going to stop hushed conversations in mosques, coded drops between far right groups or any other type of ages-old conspiracy. You are, however, going to wield an awful lot of potential power and leverage over a decreasingly free populace. Ask the Stasi, CCP and friends. I can't quite believe it needs explaining on a forum such as this. We're already one of the least 'free' of the so-called democratic nations, and mass surveillance should be opposed at every step and turn.
Click to expand...
The last time this came up I passionately defended privacy and tried to outline the dangers of the "nothing to hide" attitude.

It did no good. Idiots gonna idiot.
 
One of the biggest problems as well when it comes to these kind of things is a seeming blindness to the fact that bad people don't abide by the rules - the more you tighten your grip with this kind of thing the more slips through your fingers - the less competent can still be caught with less invasion of the every day person, the more competent will simply make more of an effort to cover their tracks potentially resulting in the more dangerous ones being less easy to catch.

While people have options you can't force them to play by your rules.
 
Bouton Aide said:
That's what you think.
Click to expand...
Yes and no, transparency is a matter of fact not opinion, but it is one of the reasons I think they are trustworthy. Also because they are one of the longest running VPN's set up by a group of activists in 2010 long before VPN's were popular, and they don't have any known shady business practices that just screams untrustworthy such as paid reviews. Mullvad is another good VPN but they are more expensive. Of course you can never know with absolute certainty that any VPN does what they say and doesn't log your activity, but you are going from something that you know is logging your activity (your ISP) to something that says they don't.
 
d_brennen said:
Having a VPN just changes who has your data. All the VPN companies that say they don't log, just lol
Click to expand...
Multiple VPN companies have already been subpoena'd in court and proved that their no logging claims are correct. If they are not legally required to keep logs and it goes against their business model to do so, why would they? You can't know with absolute certainty that any one particular VPN doesn't keep logs, but people that say all "no logs" VPN's actually keep logs are paranoid conspiracy theorists.
 
DeliciousStorage said:
Multiple VPN companies have already been subpoena'd in court and proved that their no logging claims are correct. If they are not legally required to keep logs and it goes against their business model to do so, why would they? You can't know with absolute certainty that any one particular VPN doesn't keep logs, but people that say all "no logs" VPN's actually keep logs are paranoid conspiracy theorists.
Click to expand...

If you're running a VPN company, it's absolutely in your buisness interest to have logging, and I'm not even paranoid. I only use a VPN on my phone so I can utilise my PiHole back at home. Virgin just don't get my DNS queries :p
 
d_brennen said:
If you're running a VPN company, it's absolutely in your buisness interest to have logging, and I'm not even paranoid. I only use a VPN on my phone so I can utilise my PiHole back at home. Virgin just don't get my DNS queries :p
Click to expand...

Customers go to VPN because there is no logging lol for the majority anyway. If they are caught logging that wouldn't be good as we have already witnessed with some VPNs. :p
 
DeliciousStorage said:
How so? If your business model is based on "no logs" and you get caught then say goodbye to that business. It would be absolute stupidity for them to take such a risk.
Click to expand...

Troublesome users? Neckbeards running pornography websites with terabytes of illegal material through your network, being in a country that can legally compel you to gather information on uses (UK and US are notable here). The lists go on, not to mention the technical reasons.
 
d_brennen said:
Troublesome users? Neckbeards running pornography websites with terabytes of illegal material through your network, being in a country that can legally compel you to gather information on uses (UK and US are notable here). The lists go on, not to mention the technical reasons.
Click to expand...
https://torrentfreak.com/private-in...ing-claims-proven-true-again-in-court-180606/
https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-ovpn-responds-to-movie-companies-court-injunction-200707/

I wonder why neither of these were keeping logs if as you say it's in their interests to do so. I guess the pros of advertising a "no logs" service outweighed the cons of not being able to identify troublesome users.
 
They stuck to their guns and said no, doesn't prove no logs. Others have caved to local law enforcement as previously mentioned, and logs magically appear from these no log VPN. If you ran a private VPN company and a man in black appeared in your bedroom one night, gun in your mouth, and said you better start logging users or else, what are you going to do?

Anyway, to the majority of normal people (loose definition, including myself in there) it doesn't matter. But claiming no logs just because they say so is disingenuous, privately run VPN companies aren't a privacy silver bullet. And really, we shouldn't need to go to them to ensure our rights
 
VPN companies want to make as much money as possible, and as such - if they can get away without keeping logs, they will - because keeping logs costs money, and it gets very expensive, very quickly.

Many of the VPN companies have their head offices in places like Panama, or the British Virgin Islands - places like this don't have any laws on data retention, so they're simply under no obligation to keep logs.

That said - there may be other companies offering VPNs which are closer to home which might operate differently, but if you care about privacy - do your homework before you sign up for one.
 
VPNs basically sit in the security through obscurity category, which coincidentally is not a good method of security. I'd rather my traffic be coexisting with the millions of others than have an endpoint provided by a smaller (in comparison to a Telco/fixed line internet provider) VPN provider. I reckon VPN provider is much more at risk of opening a backdoor for multiple reasons, too.

Edit: happy to be educated on the technicalities of what I said but I guess it is more of a philosophical point. 256bit encrypted Usenet has been around for donkeys, not felt the need to VPN it too.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom