What creepy stuff will your ISP do once the FCC allows them to spy on your internet usage?

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/03/20/toxic-monopolies.html

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ProXPN… Ridiculously easy to use VPN software that blocks your ISP from spying on you.

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What’s a vee pee en?

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(I should add that I say “ridiculously easy to use” because a friend of mine was complaining about the fact that he was getting noise from his ISP about his use of certain bittorrents and I told him about ProXPN. He’s not terribly techie, but the next time I spoke to him, he mentioned that he was really happy with the service and he didn’t require any help setting it up. Of course, any VPN solution is probably equally as effective at preserving your privacy.)

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Are you referring to the Free or Paid version…just out of curiosity?

I subscribe, but I am pretty sure that my friend went with the free version.

PIA is also very simple to use. I’ve been using it for a month now and I like it very much so far.

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Was coming in to do a shout out for PIA. Never had any issues with them and they encrypt the traffic rather well.

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I have a dumb question: What’s the privacy advantage of using a VPN headquartered elsewhere, such as a Five Eyes or Nine Eyes member nation?

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What’re they going to see?

An hour every week spent searching for “ISP that respects my privacy”

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What I’ve been looking for is a vpn that automatically engages on my phone when I connect with a WiFi network that isn’t my home (or otherwised whitelisted).

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I’d worry about a company’s logging policy more than their headquarters location. A company that keeps no logs of user activity is best. Of course, you have to trust that the company is telling the truth about their policies.

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Seems like a lot of people have been wanting that for a long time based on search results. I’m surprised none of the major VPN providers have implemented it.

There are kludgy, complicated ways to do it using Tasker and OpenVPN but it should be a built-in option for any decent VPN. Even if they were to provide a plugin for Tasker I would be satisfied.

This is the safe for work version:

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The makers of ProtonMail are in the process of developing a VPN. It’s in beta at the moment, and if you have a paid ProtonMail account you get access to it. It’s very easy to use.

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Since email is sent in the clear over much of the Internet, aren’t the benefits of end-to-end encrypted email only good if the sender and the recipient are both using the same service? An email sent to another isp loses all of that security. Or are they somehow doing something different?

I believe you are correct. (except: replace ‘ISP’ with ‘email client’)

“What creepy stuff will your ISP do once the FCC allows them to spy on your internet usage?”

Call you at all hours of the night and try to talk you into being one of their customers again.

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I hope that was safe to Like!

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yes but.

most MTAs use opportunistic encryption. so typically the server2server communication is not clear text, but MITM attacks are easy(ish) as there are no central instances (like CAs with HTTPS) or another mean of knowing the identity of the other side before-hand

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