Technology

37747 readers

199 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

alyaza@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org

gyrfalcon@beehaw.org

rs5th@beehaw.org

coldredlight@beehaw.org

Los@beehaw.org

SemioticStandard@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social

remington@beehaw.org

You probably don't need a VPN (www.spacebar.news)

submitted 11 months ago by corbin@infosec.pub to c/technology@beehaw.org

64 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] derbis@beehaw.org 34 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Yep. BIG deficiency in this article. I don't use a VPN because of shadowy "hackers" who sit in front of their keyboards with a pistol and a balaclava. I use it because ISPs and governments have demonstrated they can't be trusted.

How about this?

I live in the United States, where I already have no digital privacy, and tunneling my internet traffic through a VPN owned and operated in another country won't meaningfully improve my privacy or safety

Uh, what? If someone wants my traffic logs in the US, now they have to go through Mullvad, which has a track record of not providing or collecting it.

They don't even know who I am, much less have all the data that my ISP has about me. So selling it would be pretty useless

Oh last edit: turns out this is the guy who was trying to well ackshually us into thinking Chrome nerfing ad blockers is not a big deal.

[–] mateomaui@reddthat.com 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yeah, part of it reads like he was paid to do it, just without including obvious marketing links so he can claim in the article that he wasn’t. Ending the article with valid use cases seems like preventing anyone saying he left out valid reasons, but after a wall of text that could make less savvy users do a “TL;DR: VPN not needed” before they got to that part. I’d respect it more if he led off with the same short description of valid uses, especially considering the article title, then pivoted to where it could be irrelevant.