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Angry Jesus writes:
"The TorrentFreak news site just released their latest annual survey of VPN providers' privacy policies. The results are very encouraging: it seems that the idea that online privacy is important is becoming more widespread and the price is quite affordable, just a few dollars a month.
For nearly a year I've been using one of the VPN services on their list. Not so much for the anonymous bit-torrent capability, but rather to frustrate Big Data's attempts to track me. I typically use domestic USA end-points and switch between 10-20 of them during the course of the day. That is coupled with various privacy extensions to Firefox (blocking cookies, JavaScript, Flash, ads, cross-site includes, and randomizing my user-agent). So far, I've been quite happy with how it has worked out. Even if I can't protect myself from the NSA, I can protect myself from just about everyone else."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Barbara Celarent on Monday March 17 2014, @08:44AM
If you don't own the machine, especially if you don't control the logging on the machine, it isn't private. It doesn't matter if you have an VPN if the server is logging the packets. Those logs can be confiscated. If it isn't yours, by definition it isn't private.
As a compromise you could rent a small vserver for 8 euro a month [hetzner.de] and put softether [softether.org] on it yourself. As a bonus you can connect all your pc's on the same virtual network. Then you have fine grained control over logging and even set up a transparent proxy, etc.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by wantkitteh on Monday March 17 2014, @09:11AM
I think you may have missed the point here. Your scheme is fundamentally flawed* in that you are the only person using it so all the outgoing traffic can be directly attributed to you via the billing information for the vserver. The advantage offered by VPN services is that once the traffic is traced back to the final node in the VPN network, it can only be attributed to "A.N.Other VPN User" and not directly to any specific user.
TOR uses exit nodes in the same way to decentralize the provision of this exact principle. Running a TOR exit node on your own connection, while inconvenient at times due to the traffic volumes and countermeasures some services/networks put in place against it, also gives you the same lost-in-the-crowd protection for your own locally-sourced traffic.
(*as opposed to potentially flawed)
(Score: 4, Funny) by FatPhil on Monday March 17 2014, @10:15AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves