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Comment by terrywang | Hacker News Reader

People should NOT trust free VPN services at all, as you don't pay level of service is not guaranteed. What's worse, who knows what the service provide is doing with the data flowing through the tunnels (to)? cover the operational cost (and goal for profits)

Install and configure your own VPN services (IPsec or OpenVPN), use strongSwan (Android native client which works great with RSA authentication with x509 certs, now supports importing VPN profiles in json format, cool) and OpenVPN.

Several past discussions on hacker news to start with:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13351211

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425728

View on HN

> People should NOT trust free VPN services at all, as you don't pay level of service is not guaranteed.

The corollary is that ones you pay for should not be trusted either: a service can both take your money and insert ads.

huh.... reminds me of pay/cable tv....

Actually, I missed this point. Thank you for pointing out ;-)

I think that's why more and more open source tools (scripts or automation {cook,play}books, etc.} have been made available to enable people to self serve and build their own VPN service ;-)

The problem with personal VPN services is that it can be pretty trivial to reverse who the traffic is coming from (eg by requesting the billing address from the VM hosting provider).

This may not be an issue for some people and for those who it is an issue, there are ways around it (I'll leave that part of the post for someone more experienced than I as I don't want to risk giving out bad advice). But it's worth baring in mind when signing up for a VPS in view of running a VPN.

And your VM hosting provider can still MITM you.

I think that's pretty unlikely to be honest - or at least easily avoided. There's enough reputable hosting providers out there (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OVH, Digital Ocean, etc etc) that there isn't really any excuse for signing up with a provider who does MITM your VMs traffic.

That all said, I'm not excluding the possibility of providers logging network connections passively. The way around that is to run more than one VPN; that way any particular provider only has visibility of either the destinations but not the source, or the source but not the destinations. I'm not recommending that people need or should run two VPNs though - just adding it as a workaround against passive snooping by hosting providers.

There's not much to trust anyway. If you're using it for geoblocking, you probably don't care that some company knows you're watching some movie. HTTPS websites are still safe if the app isn't somehow hacking the browser. Non encrypted traffic was never hidden from much anyway. My ISP even injects ads into HTTP websites.

What about the new VPN feature built into Opera Browser?

It's not a VPN, it's a proxy. [0]

[0] https://gist.github.com/spaze/558b7c4cd81afa7c857381254ae7bd...

Marketed as a "VPN".

One side effect of schools blocking websites is students downloading and using free VPN software. They have no money, and it works well enough for "unblocking" websites as far as they're concerned. Rip privacy.

Can you elaborate where you are seeing this? Is this as the post-secondary level or lower? I worked in higher-ed in the US and almost uniformly our institution and those we talked to in mailing lists were adamantly anti-blocking. Remembering back to when I was in HS and our library was outfitted with a few donated computers that shared a 56k connection, I know they had a net-nanny installed, but that was quite some time ago.

Schools blocking stuff is very active still- it's extremely prevalent up to and including high school, and only a handful of colleges do any sort of filtering.

Furthermore, kids find increasingly shady free vpns as IT blocks more and more free vpns.

Lots of kids will use free vpns to get their SAT/ACT/AP scores a day or so early.

> Lots of kids will use free vpns to get their SAT/ACT/AP scores a day or so early.

I don't understand - how does a VPN help there? Are schools actually blocking the websites that publish the test results?

Some standardized test scores are released on different dates depending on the location of your IP (divided into zones like Eastern, Central, Western US, and International).

wow, thats a good use-case you dont think of often.

>People should NOT trust free VPN services at all

People should NOT trust free services at all

FTFU.

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