So tell me about VPNs and phones

Cap'n Jack

Cap'n Jack

Final Approach
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Cap'n Jack
There is some internet traffic that may be blocked in the USA soon. Can I use VPN to access that traffic? My understanding is that they connect to servers in other places to get around the blockage.

Any recommendations? I want to use an Android-based phone.

Thanks in advance.
 
Airvpn and protonvpn are both excellent. A major streaming service or two, well known to NOT work behind most vpns, work(s) with Proton. Their email service is excellent, too,and worth paying for.
 
Another recommendation for Proton, both for mail and VPN.
 
We have ProtonVPN. Clients for Win, Linux, ios, and android. If your router will do it, you can run it on your router and protect everything on your LAN. They have options to keep your traffic inside the USA or route it outside/ through a specific country. Paid plan is $5 a month for 5 simultaneous devices, or a free plan for a single device. No slowdown in traffic noted.

Anybody running this on a DSR250 router? I can't get it to connect up. Thanks!

Jim
 
In my experience, running a vpn on a router requires a pretty beefy router. I did it for a while with my middle of the road equipment,but experienced significant slowdowns. I don't remember exactly what the minimum specs to look for were, but when I looked into it a year or two ago the router processor (and ram?) was recommended to be of pretty significant capability. Maybe current equipment is up to the challenge... My router is a couple years old. I've had great luck with vpns on my single devices.. phones, tablets, laptops, Kodi on Pi boxes, and I think I had a vpn on a Roku successfully. Now primarily just use them on phones and tablets when off my home network.
 
What he ^^^^ said.... The DSR250 has OpenVPN options to run as a client, server, or client-server. Most home routers won't have the options.

Jim
 
Thanks- looking at Proton per your suggestions.
 
I just signed up for a two-contract with Private Internet Access. Servers are fast; costs about $2.60 a month, and good for up to 10 simultaneous connections.
 
Cap'n Jack said:
There is some internet traffic that may be blocked in the USA soon. Can I use VPN to access that traffic? My understanding is that they connect to servers in other places to get around the blockage.

Any recommendations? I want to use an Android-based phone.

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

I am curious, what internet traffic is being blocked, being the land of the free and all... ?
 
Last edited:
MuseChaser said:
In my experience, running a vpn on a router requires a pretty beefy router. I did it for a while with my middle of the road equipment,but experienced significant slowdowns. I don't remember exactly what the minimum specs to look for were, but when I looked into it a year or two ago the router processor (and ram?) was recommended to be of pretty significant capability. Maybe current equipment is up to the challenge... My router is a couple years old. I've had great luck with vpns on my single devices.. phones, tablets, laptops, Kodi on Pi boxes, and I think I had a vpn on a Roku successfully. Now primarily just use them on phones and tablets when off my home network.
Click to expand...

I second the point about the router needing to be beefy to prevent slowdowns. By beefy, I mean having a powerful CPU and high CPU clock rate. I just tested enabling a VPN client on my router, an Asus RT.68AC with two CPU cores running at 1GHz, and my download speed went from 300ish MB/s to around 20. I use Surfshark as my VPN service. Running a VPN app on my windows 10 computer with lots of processing power got me back up to 300 or so. This means that the slowdown was due to the router and not to my internet connection or the VPN service.

I’m considering getting a hardware VPN accelerator to put between my router and my cable modem. These things have multi-core processors running at high clock rates to handle the encryption tasks. Reports are that they are blazingly fast.

I really like the idea of ALL of my traffic going thru a VPN. IOT, cloud backups, browsing, everything. I’m uncomfortable knowing that my ISP can log my traffic if they want to.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
 
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jimhorner said:
I second the point about the router needing to be beefy to prevent slowdowns. By beefy, I mean having a powerful CPU and high CPU clock rate. I just tested enabling a VPN client on my router, an Asus RT.68AC with two CPU cores running at 1GHz, and my download speed went from 300ish MB/s to around 20. I use Surfshark as my VPN service. Running a VPN app on my windows 10 computer with lots of processing power got me back up to 300 or so. This means that the slowdown was due to the router and not to my internet connection or the VPN service.

I’m considering getting a hardware VPN accelerrator to put between my router and my cable modem. These things have multu-core processors running at high clock rates to handle the encryption tasks. Reports are that they are blazingly fast.

I really like the idea of ALL of my traffic going thru a VPN. IOT, cloud backups, browsing, everything. I’m uncomfortable knowing that my ISP can log my traffic if they want to.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
Click to expand...

some ISP and wireless will throttle some content, but the bothersome part is the where the state has full access to anything anytime

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A


public wifi like Starbucks or hotel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_analyzer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack
 
jimhorner said:
I really like the idea of ALL of my traffic going thru a VPN. IOT, cloud backups, browsing, everything. I’m uncomfortable knowing that my ISP can log my traffic if they want to.
Click to expand...

So the ISP at the VPN exfiltration point will do it, then. Probably sell it back to yours too. LOL.

Haha. Even pretty easy for them to correlate it back to you just by stream start/stop times. As long as they work together.

It’s all being moved down into the OS level for that sort of tracking anyway. Both MSFT and Apple are now doing it. They want that data badly.

Example:


That covers Apple. Just the first one I grabbed. MSFT doing similar.

Was cute to see Macs all keel over nearly dead this week, when the Apple Big Sur release blew most of their services out of the water including their OCSP servers.

Notice those servers aren’t listed anywhere as something having an outage or that the OS needs them to be up and functional and non-degraded... for you to open an App.

c4d83a7f46ac8a1e04d6452cbcb29a23.jpg


da02d2dc384c93b180255b4b6a1893e1.jpg


Impossible to strip it out of OSX or iOS. Stripping it out of Win10 is barely possible but leaves the OS significantly crippled, disabling multiple unrelated features. Blocking it at firewalls tends to have “odd behavior” in both company’s products.

(As an aside, Amazon devices as well as Samsung also constantly jabber to multiple servers unnecessary for them to operate properly. Researchers know about half of what they appear to do / log. This includes things like adding Amazon branded apps to any mobile OS.)

They’re all logging. Many are sharing. Even more are sharing with governments. A VPN just isn’t really accomplishing much anymore. It’s barely an obfuscation. Even those using them to “get around” location based blocks like Netflix? Nah. They know. They just ask location services on the device to tell them directly from the device. They’re just ignoring it. Heck, even time of day usage patterns give it away for those continent hopping with VPNs.
 
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