Hacker News Reader

Comment by __sha3d2 | Hacker News Reader

If you're here, you can likely set up a VPN on a VPS provider. Do yourself a favor and spend the $5 / month for an instance. Get your hands on your parent's, spouse's, friend's, sibling's phones and get it set up for them too. Nobody needs to put up with this bullshit from ISPs or the Government.

There is a great and easy to follow tutorial from DigitalOcean here: digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-an-openvpn-server-on-ubuntu-16-04.

Edit: It seems as though this post is rubbing people the wrong way. I'm sorry to anyone offended by this post, that was not my intent. In my mind, one can simultaneously watch out for their own safety online and advocate for sensible internet policy.

View on HN

> Get your hands on your parent's, spouse's, friend's, sibling's phones and get it set up for them too. Nobody needs to put up with this bullshit from ISPs or the Government.

I... I don't do this anymore. I've found myself overburdened with support calls when the tech I've configured invariable breaks. Whether it's weeks or months later. Even if what I've configured isn't the culprit, I'm still on the hook. This is actually one of the reasons why I recommend Apple products to the least tech-saavy in my circles. Just so I can direct them to Apple Support later on...

When I retired, I moved to a new, very rural, area.

This led to what was probably one of the dumbest things I've ever done.

Wanting to be nice, I fixed a new neighbor's computer. I then fixed another, and another, and it kept going. For an area with so little population, I was shocked by the numbers.

The good news is that this drove me back to Linux. Now, I can truthfully tell them that I don't use their OS and am not qualified to fix their problem.

Still, don't fix someone's computer. Certainly don't do it for free.

This won't help you if your ISP decides to penalize all VPN traffic or all traffic that doesn't pay protection money. Also, you're throwing normal people under the bus; the point of net neutrality is to fix the Internet for everyone, not just geeks.

Secure your own face-mask before securing the face-mask of those sitting around you.

A couple situations where it will help you: The justice department issues a subpoena for your IP address because you visited a website about a protest, your ISP wants to sell your internet history to the highest bidder.

I am fully cognizant that we need to be working on NN at a collective level but individual protection is incredibly important in 2017.

Edit: To answer the comment below that I cannot reply to -- I am the VPN provider and I wouldn't do me like that.

You could do that. However you then paint a target on your back saying "FBI please hack me" under the rule 41 change.

Not at all. Rule 41 just says that if the FBI already has a warrant to hack your shit, they can hack your out-of-jurisdiction servers. This seems like good policy to me. Am I missing something about it that 'paints a target on my back'?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com