Merged Should I have a VPN?

[Wudang]

Th Brave browser is good but I deleted it after learning more about the owner

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Turned mine on. Will report back if warranted.

 

[arthwollipot]

Online anonymity and privacy are a myth.

 

[Thermal]

Online anonymity and privacy are a myth.

Not from everybody. If I can keep spammers and advertisers from bugging me, I'm pretty ok.

Goggles famed profiling seems to be slipping lately. Like, I'm currently geolocated at places I haven't been in weeks. It's oddly reassuring that they ain't as good at keeping tabs as they are cracked up to be. Google, if I am understanding all this right, thinks I am several different people in several different locations. Their data harvesting seems way, way more fragmented than I would have thought.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Online anonymity and privacy are a myth.

As a refugee from the tyranny of the Wheelmen of Aldebaran I resemble that remark.

 

[Frank Newgent]

Turned mine on. Will report back if warranted.

You'll want it if'n you go to China.

 

[Mongrel]

Th Brave browser is good but I deleted it after learning more about the owner

For me it was the constant pushing of crypto-currency

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

You'll want it if'n you go to China.

Tsingtao count?

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Shanghai is pretty nice this time of the year. Hong Kong too. Awful traffic though. I'd rather use Tor, though, if I wanted the Chinese government to not know that I watch anime. Some of which is made in China.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Shanghai is pretty nice this time of the year. Hong Kong too. Awful traffic though. I'd rather use Tor, though, if I wanted the Chinese government to not know that I watch anime. Some of which is made in China.

They ruined Hong Kong with that damn tunnel. I loved the ferries.






Ferries!, not fairies. Calm down.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Well, what can I say? Some people just have to go and dig a hole

 

[Wudang]

They ruined Hong Kong with that damn tunnel. I loved the ferries.

I flew in at Kai Tak. That was …… interesting.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I flew in at Kai Tak. That was …… interesting.

When our boat teams "forward deployed" we flew out of SeaTac. That was on the 11th. We crossed the International Date Line. Boom, it was the 13th. My birthday was the 12th.

So, yeah, the old carp came to mind: "So I didn't do what I was supposed to do, Chief. Whatcha gonna do, take away my birthday and send me to Vietnam?" That's exactly what they did.

 

[Frank Newgent]

Shanghai is pretty nice this time of the year. Hong Kong too. Awful traffic though. I'd rather use Tor, though, if I wanted the Chinese government to not know that I watch anime. Some of which is made in China.

I was referring to websites China routinely blocks. Nobody cares about anime.

List of websites blocked in mainland China - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

A good VPN, something you have to pay for, installed before you go to the mainland will enable you to visit website and use your apps.

 

[plague311]

While Google may know every site you've visited, that's not necessarily true of me. I use Firefox and Brave Browser,and on Firefox have uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger installed. I use Pi-Hole for DNS and have blocked a lot of Google sites in my hosts file.

Hosts file? Lol are we stuck in the early 2000's on this forum or what? There are a dozen better ways to block sites, especially if you use a pihole. Some habits are hard to break I guess.

Hiding all visited sites from the ISP is more difficult, but they aren't required to keep logs. They may be forced to if they're served with a court order.

I know they keep DHCP records for a few years (maybe only one?), but they don't keep individual website hits. That actually would be covered by a VPN.

 

[catsmate]

This is a red herring, and not a good one. We're talking about internet in 2026, not in 1996.

First, ISP's only have the MAC address of your gateway\router, not your individual device. Which is what Thermal was referring to, I believe.

Websites haven't used ActiveX in forever because that "rave" was a security risk that no one would put up with. Even Microsoft Defender would instantly remove\block anything that gives out system details without user approval.

That WiFi in the cafe would also only get your WiFi MAC Address, but your cellular signal uses a different identifier.

There is no standard, non-software related way for a company to get your MAC address. It would require, as someone mentioned later, specific approval and something to be installed to get it.

MAC addresses are layer 2 traffic that are stripped at the router. It doesn't get sent on.


Yeah, back when...this isn't that time anymore. It doesn't happen, and now browsers block such information from going unless, again, specifically approved by the user. Browsers don't even gather MAC address information by default.


All of which would be blocked by even the most basic security that's built-in to any phone or laptop.


There are so many things preventing it from being sent via payload. I don't know if you work in networking or network security, but this seems like the working knowledge of someone who hasn't been in the game in 15 years. It's pretty outdated.

It's also ridiculously easy to spoof a MAC address.

 

[Wudang]

For those interested and on lower budgets, you don’t need a Raspberry pi you can use the much cheaper esp32. I may buy one to play with.

 

[Blue Mountain]

Hosts file? Lol are we stuck in the early 2000's on this forum or what? There are a dozen better ways to block sites, especially if you use a pihole. Some habits are hard to break I guess.

For me, updating /etc/hosts is faster than updating pi-hole. And I can put comments in it saying why and when a site was added.

In addition, /etc/hosts is the first thing the resolver checks. For example, I have all 253 IP addresses in my local network in the file as h1, h2, h3, ... h254. It's more handy to type than 192.168.1.1, etc.

Please do not be so dismissive of legacy tools.

 

[Wudang]

I use this curated hosts file and cron.

ETA also it's a source for pi-hole.