The service I’m using removed its Russian endpoints shortly after the Ukraine conflict broke out.

I neither know nor care if they did so of their own volition or were forced to do so: either reason is a huge red flag NATO flag against being able to trust them.

  • Marxism-Fennekinism
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    2 years ago

    Piggybacking on your question, anyone know any good VPNs that tunnel INTO Mainland China (not HK)? I WANT to browse the Chinese internet but a lot of their content, namely TV shows, are geolocked and I’m having trouble finding torrents in some cases. China also has Chinese and Western servers for a lot of things, TikTok for example, where the Chinese version is a lot more based and the Western one is pretty libshit.

    • @MunrockOP
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      42 years ago

      I think Douyin (Chinese tiktok) and Weibo (Chinese twitter) you can access from anywhere.

      Alipay is also an excellent alternative to Paypal. It has zero transaction fees, but that (and how easy it is to link a bank account) may be different in different parts of the world.

      Download Huawei App Gallery (their version of the app store) if your Android phone’s native app store doesn’t have them.

        • Marxism-Fennekinism
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          2 years ago

          Actually, I wonder if I can use a phone number of one of my relatives in China, while geolocated in Canada. Like, is it geolocked by IP address on top of needing the right area code?

  • @holdengreen
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    2 years ago

    Wonder if a decentralized VPN could work as a thing where people just put it on their servers. Might be bad for security idk.

    • Marxism-Fennekinism
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      2 years ago

      Tor.

      Also, anyone can get a VPS in almost every country and run an OpenVPN or Wireguard server without any authentication requirements, which you can do by literally just installing it from your server distro’s package manager. All that’s needed is a place for people to share the domains/IP addresses of their servers.

      But yes, this would be bad for security as you’d have no way of verifying if the server isn’t running a bugged implementation of the VPN protocol or isn’t actively logging everything (which, BTW, is also a problem with fediverse instances that I don’t see enough people who “switched to the Fediverse for privacy” talking about). A VPN like this might be okay for torrenting, watching geolocked shows on streaming sites, hiding stuff from your ISP’s marketing team/university/employer, and confusing basic web trackers, probably, but not great for serious privacy or anonymity. Tor has mechanisms built in to safely handle one node being compromised, but even that’s not perfect. For example, if all three nodes on your Tor circuit is compromised by the same entity, you’re flat out screwed.

      • Arsen6331 ☭
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        52 years ago

        Well, you could verify that the implementation isn’t bugged because your package manager will get it from a repo where it is verified cryptographically, and you get to set that repo, but it very well may be logging everything.

        • Marxism-Fennekinism
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          2 years ago

          The issue is, how do you verify that on someone else’s server? Everything the server reports to you can be adulterated. If you were running your own VPN server, it’d be fine, and possibly even more preferable than commercial VPNs for some use cases.

          • Arsen6331 ☭
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            52 years ago

            Oh, that’s what you meant. Yeah, that would be a problem. You’d need to make sure you only use encrypted protocols like HTTPS and SSH to mitigate that.

          • @holdengreen
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            32 years ago

            My openvpn’s broke. Maybe related to getting VZN 5g home internet…

      • @holdengreen
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        22 years ago

        Decentralized DDoS protection would be very useful…

        • Marxism-Fennekinism
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          22 years ago

          How would that work though? Doesn’t DDOS protection fron places like cloudflare depend on running through a proxy server with a lot more bandwidth than you?

          • @holdengreen
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            22 years ago

            I think it would require users to pool resources and use keys or something to restrict content…

    • @MunrockOP
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      22 years ago

      I was looking at Mullvad earlier and it doesn’t list any Russian servers on the ‘server status’ list on their website

  • lemmygrabber
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    72 years ago

    You can use tor and specify the country of the exit node as Russia

    • Marxism-Fennekinism
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      That’s not advisable for hard anonymity because that lack of randomness in exit node location can help fingerprint you.

      And if their goal is to view Russian geolocked content, it’s also not great, because most sites, especially the media streamy ones, block everything having to do with Tor. For viewing geolocked content, my advice is almost always to get a VPN going anywhere so your ISP with your personal info can’t see the traffic, and then torrent it.

    • @MunrockOP
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      2 years ago

      Yeah, tor is excellent for protection* but it’s also horrifically slow for low-security things.

  • @holdengreen
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    52 years ago

    sketches me out when registrars like namecheap are going ukraine flag. I get some of these companies have ukrainian employes and stuff but it doesn’t make me trust them any more.