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I'm about to move and at my new address I'd like to start out more secured against my ISP and doxers/stalkers. Basically I think I should use a VPN/VPS for personal related traffic (email, shopping), another VPN/VPS for online communities, and then regular net access for random browsing (is all that overkill?). There's been articles in the past about VPN providers (feel free to recommend someone), but there's less about how to configure your network and computer to use them. I'd prefer to be able to use all three at once, but I've heard most people recommend configuring their routers to a single VPN to prevent leakage. But then one company could be logging all your traffic again or it would be easy to forget to switch to/from the VPNs. Is that necessary? Is there Linux-based software which completely restricts applications to certain networks or is that something I should manually setup through iptables and /etc network scripts? My primary OS is LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) and my current router runs DD-WRT, though that might change with the new ISP.
In summary, what's a good strategy to keep the different parts of your online life segregated from each other other than simply using different user names?
Thanks for your insights.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by The Shire on Monday October 02 2017, @03:29PM (1 child)
The whole purpose of the Tor network is to protect your privacy. It's not fast by any means (don't ever watch youtube with it for example), but for most surfing it should provide the level of IP anonymity you seek. For generic surfing, https should suffice to protect your data, even if the IP address remains the same. Make sure you use "HTTPS Everywhere" to insure encrypted web traffic.
Another choice is to take advantage of Amazon's micro AWS instance. Using a credit card, they will give you (last I checked) a one YEAR trial on a micro instance and you can setup a personal VPN there and route all your web traffic through it. There are various HOWTO's around the web on how to easily set that up. Since you're already familiar with linux it should be pretty easy for you. It costs $$$ after a year, but for that first year it's completely free and will give you a chance to see if it's worthwhile.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @04:31PM
Tor is great. It really is a marvel, and I wish more people used and supported it, because it's certainly the foundation for the way things should be.
However, despite the fact that performance has improved by orders of magnitude over the years, it can still be quite the bottleneck for your experience of the Internet. Not only is the Tor network significantly slower than the raw tubes, but there has also been a creeping and deliberate strangulation of Tor usage, in that a number of websites ban Tor users outright, or require tedious CAPTCHA games just to load an otherwise read-only page. Google's services has been increasingly hostile, and its "AI" security algorithms can get very confused when a user suddenly hops to another continent. Hell, even SoylentNews gets confused, and requires cyberacrobatics to work around its programmers' patent stupidity.