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
    7•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 ☭
      5•2 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
        4•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 ☭
          5•2 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.

      • Marxism-Fennekinism
        2•2 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?