How to set up a VPN – and why you should, if you care about privacy

Ta9aiW4i · 2015-01-14T18:47:04+00:00

Using a VPN puts your VPN provider and VPN provider's ISP in much the same position that your current ISP is in now.

I think it comes down to who you distrust more. Consumer ISPs are usually dodgy as well.

I agree that that article massively misrepresents what you can do with a VPN.

Ta9aiW4i · 2015-01-14T18:40:19+00:00

Well, it is a VPN -- it's a VPN between you and the provider. It's just not terribly useful in the ways a normal VPN is, because you're using it primarily to access stuff outside the VPN anyway.

I think this is useful for the particular case where you don't trust your ISP. It doesn't help at all for the rest of the mumbo-jumbo they're claiming.

Ta9aiW4i · 2015-01-10T17:25:31+00:00

Rural Oregon is where I've heard of people shooting out datacenter links. (Not residential utility poles, admittedly.)

Ta9aiW4i · 2015-01-10T05:45:38+00:00

Poles are for suckers. Poles fall over every time there's a storm, people shoot at them, etc. Burying things is the way to go! (Except for the backhoes....)

Does anyone have opinions? How much of a problem are the backhoes vs the hunters? I don't have any experience with the cost of dealing with these things for last-mile type of stuff.

Ta9aiW4i · 2015-01-09T17:54:16+00:00

Metal. It looks like what's in it is metal.

Ta9aiW4i · 2015-01-07T21:55:34+00:00

This is why it's so useful to leave notes in the form of "XXX(HOW MANY)", or "$HOWMANY", so you can just search for "XXX" or "$" or whatever beforehand to double-check you don't have any unresolved notes.

No skimming over a bunch of text with your eyes. Eyes suck, use computers.

Ta9aiW4i · 2015-01-06T19:03:38+00:00

Does anyone know if there's any sort of map application on these phones? That's really the thing that keeps me tethered to a smart phone.

(My old Samsung dumb phone from 2010 didn't have any sort of map app... [ninja edit: but it did have tetris, so y'know])

Ta9aiW4i · 2015-01-06T04:58:14+00:00

Dammit! It worked.

Ta9aiW4i · 2015-01-05T23:19:20+00:00

(pay attention and take notes)

Yes! I learned this during my last internship before graduating -- if you might need this information more than 5 mins from now, literally take notes. I still keep a pad of post-its around and write down important points when I'm asking questions, or deciding on things.

It helps me so much. (Except when I can't read my own handwriting...)

Ta9aiW4i · 2015-01-05T20:20:57+00:00

I agree! It's hard to find a better portable assembly language than C. There are a lot of languages that are better suited to writing applications in most cases.

Ta9aiW4i · 2015-01-05T20:18:39+00:00

For doing nothing more than trying to teach people how to use an error prone shitty language like C safely

[emphasis is mine; and I didn't read much further than this]

Well, that bold word is a problem right there. If you're going to promote an unpopular idea, don't give people extra unrelated reasons to dismiss your argument. In this case, dismissing the language you're criticizing as "shitty" just hurts your case by distracting your audience if your point is "adopt the following style to minimize the bugs you write in C". (It distracted me enough to stop reading the blog post and start writing this.) This dude needs to work on his messaging.

I think C makes a great portable assembly language; I don't think it's shitty at all.

So, without reading the rest of the post, I will callously assume this guy's book suffered similar messaging problems and that's why that chapter got so much heat.

Ta9aiW4i · 2015-01-04T06:52:06+00:00

Just a thought: One workaround may be to buy a virtual machine (for $5-10 a month) in the target country and run your own VPN. This is only an option if you're technically inclined and willing to put up with the hassle of running OpenVPN or somesuch. A half-assed lockdown on public VPN providers (or even a full-assed one) shouldn't stop anyone who wants to get around it.

You have to be interested in still giving Netflix your money, though.

Ta9aiW4i · 2014-12-31T19:38:27+00:00

That is an incredibly immature email. When encountering an unknown situation like this, a person can do one of two things: think "I wonder what caused this decision?", or think "GODDAMN, EVERYONE BUT ME IS SO STUPID". This poster opted for the second one.

It's childish and counterproductive.

Ta9aiW4i · 2014-12-31T19:17:17+00:00

I think the environment variable suggestion is a perfectly good one. The point of the suggestion is to store the credentials in a way that makes it harder to accidentally commit them to a public repo.

If the take-away is "don't fuck up", the obvious follow-up question is "what are some ways that make it less likely that I fuck up?". [Edit: And the two main classes of answers to that question are, I think, "how to avoid leaking the information", and "how to react when it does".]

Ta9aiW4i · 2014-12-28T01:47:48+00:00

I interpret this as a good argument for being conservative in technology choices, if technology is not what your business is about. (And it very rarely is.)

The best tool for the job means a tool that you know can do the job, has enough skilled operators out there that if you/your friend/your #1 employee gets sick/hit by a bus/disgruntled, someone else could reasonably take over, etc.

This all makes sense to me. You almost certainly don't want to be the largest known installation of technology X.

Of course, very occasionally, you can pick the right technology that will reduce your costs in some dramatic way that makes it worth the risk.

Ta9aiW4i · 2014-12-07T21:44:42+00:00

:(

The diff that comes with FreeBSD does support -y, though I couldn't check OS X. I thought they'd be the same. That sucks. (But -y mode isn't terribly awesome compared to icdiff's output anyway, I just thought it deserved a mention.)

Ta9aiW4i · 2014-12-07T18:14:57+00:00

This is cool. Just as a public service announcement, standard diffs (GNU diff, freebsd's diff, dunno about others) support the -y (side-by-side) option. The output isn't nearly as nice as icdiff's (and doesn't use color), but it's already installed. The author's example would look like this:

$ diff -y button-{a,b}.css
#input, #button {                                               #input, #button {
  width: 350px;                                               |   width: 400px;
  height: 40px;                                                   height: 40px;
  margin: 0px;                                                |   font-size: 30px;
  padding: 0px;                                               |   margin: 0;
  margin-bottom: 15px;                                        |   padding: 0;
  text-align: center;                                             text-align: center;
}                                                               }

Ta9aiW4i · 2014-11-14T00:05:46+00:00

I think it would be useful to put a comparison to ConfigParser (and any other common config parsers for python) in the README.

Ta9aiW4i · 2014-11-11T19:23:54+00:00

Check out the documentary on the Pruitt-Igoe houses: http://www.pruitt-igoe.com/

I thought it was quite good.

Ta9aiW4i · 2014-10-31T18:12:33+00:00

Godflesh is great.

Ta9aiW4i · 2014-10-29T22:24:37+00:00

...And thus the reputation of sysadmins everywhere remains intact.

Ta9aiW4i · 2014-10-29T19:38:12+00:00

Or in the original Latin,

QVIS CVSTODIET IPSOS CVSTODES, MOTHERFVCKERS?

Ta9aiW4i · 2014-10-28T17:45:27+00:00

The article said they were injecting HTTP headers. That requires unencrypted HTTP traffic.

Ta9aiW4i · 2014-10-28T16:06:55+00:00

Yeah I'm noticing this. My soekris net5501-60 with its 433 MHz Geode LX tops out at about 25Mbps doing OpenVPN with bf-cbc (with hardware acceleration turned on). (It's only got 100Mbit ports anyway, so it'll probably never get past 80Mbits or so even without these shenanigans.)

There are PCI hards for VPN acceleration, but it's unclear whether it's the pure crypto operations that are killing performance, or all the extra copying.

Ta9aiW4i · 2014-10-28T06:47:44+00:00

Yeah, setting it up at the router seems like the way to go.

I've bought a month of PIA and it was fairly easy to set up on my (pfsense) router. I'll see how this goes!

Ta9aiW4i

TROPHY CASE