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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • OK, so what is a VPN?

    A Virtual Private Network is a virtual network that lives on top of a physical network. In the case of the Internet, basically what happens is that your network traffic goes into the VPN on one side and comes out of the VPN provider’s network somewhere else, rather than out of your ISP’s network. All this really does is move any privacy concerns from your ISP to your VPN, which may or may not protect you from any legal inquiries.

    For a more thorough explanation look here: https://www.howtogeek.com/133680/htg-explains-what-is-a-vpn/

    Is it possible to use torrent without a VPN?

    Certainly, however your torrent traffic will be visible to and inspectable by your ISP. If a copyright holder chooses to, they may sue your ISP for the personal information of the person whose IP address matches the illegal traffic that they found. After they have your personal information they can prosecute you directly. A VPN might shield against this by changing the apparent IP address associated with your torrent traffic, but then you are at the mercy of the VPN provider and the government of whichever country they operate in.

    It should be noted that if you are not paying the bill for the Internet, and you use it for illegal activity, then the person you are putting at risk is the person who pays the bill. It’s their name attached to the ISP records.

    If you are caught, or if they just don’t like torrent traffic on their network, the ISP may decide that you are simply too much trouble and it’s not worth keeping you as a customer, and just cut off your service (for your whole house).








  • Encrypting the connection is good, it means that no one should be able capture the data and read it - but my concern is more about the holes in the network boundary you have to create to establish the connection.

    My point of view is, that’s not something you want happening automatically, unless you manually configured it to do that yourself and you know exactly how it works, what it connects to and how it authenticates (and preferably have some kind of inbound/outbound traffic monitoring for that connection).


  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldSyncthing alternatives
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    2 months ago

    Ah, just one question - is your current Syncthing use internal to your home network, or does it sync remotely?

    Because if you’re just having your mobile devices sync files when they get on your home wifi, it’s reasonably safe for that to be fire-and-forget, but if you’re syncing from public networks into private that really should require some more specific configuration and active control.


  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldWhat do I actually need?
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    3 months ago

    My main reasons are sailing the high seas

    If this is the goal, then you need to concern yourself with your network first and the computer/server second. You need as much operational control over your home network as you can manage, you need to put this traffic in a separate tunnel from all of your normal network traffic and have it pop up on the public network from a different location. You need to own the modem that links you to your provider’s network, and the router that is the entry/exit point for your network. You need to segregate the thing doing the sailing on its own network segment that doesn’t have direct access to any of your other devices. You can not use the combo modem/router gateway device provided by your ISP. You need to plan your internal network intentionally and understand how, when, and why each device transmits on the network. You should understand your firewall configuration (on your network boundary, not on your PC). You should also get PiHole up and running and start dropping unwanted inbound and outbound traffic.

    OpSec first.