Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by roddux | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

roddux·

I haven't been able to access the .com/.se/etc in years, since it was blocked in ~2012 by most ISPs here in the UK.

That said, proxies are but two clicks away and faster than connecting to a VPN.

View on HN

Some of the proxies are pretty scary though.

As are some VPNs. It's concerning that so many people route all their traffic (when connected) over some unknown third parties network. Default gateway and server pushed DNS. Only HSTS and certificate pinning would prevent their traffic being sniffed or tampered with.

In Brazil we saw a brief explosion of VPN use to get around Whatsapp ban.

Now we are getting reports of people intimate videos being uploaded to porn sites... (considering whatsapp is not much safe in first place, it is no surprise... I even tried to warn people and convince them to use Telegram instead but "network effect" is a strong thing...)

Huh? Unless your endpoint peers directly with your ISP, you always route over unknown third party networks.

True but it's much easier for a malicious player to set up a VPN service selling cheap a anonymity as a way to gather MITM targets than it is to set up an ISP or transit provider.

Yeah I really wonders who runs them, seems like it has been a golden opportunity for scammers and other malware crowds.

Given the amount of malware I downloaded from warez BBSes back in the day, I wouldn't be surprised.

You just need to change your dns server to access those domains, or just access the server ip directly.

Doesn't work for Sky Broadband in the UK. I use Google DNS but TPB is still blocked.

I'm not sure if you can easily find the server IP for TPB - they appear to behind CloudFlare?

That doesn't work for all ISPs, for example Virgin Media.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com