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Comment by adam12 | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for reminding me about this. I'm seriously thinking about getting a VPN subscription again.

Be very weary- seems many (most? all?) are not the most trustworthy. Look into rolling your own setup.

Behind an untrustworthy ISP to boot? Might want to consider a hosting company that has servers around the world at that point... One in the USA for initial contact and one in the other side of the world for browsing maybe? Or what everyone else will see as your IP.

Why use paid privacy-by-policy systems (VPN) when you can use free privacy-by-design systems like Tor and i2p? In fact, even if you use a VPN browser fingerprinting is still an issue unless you use something like the Tor Browser.

two reasons: speed and security. Speed is self explanatory, security may not be obvious. I don’t believe Firefox to be on par with Chrome. It was years behind getting a sandbox, and doesn’t appear to have the engineering or QA focus on security that Edge/Chrome do.

> I don’t believe Firefox to be on par with Chrome.

You need to know that the Tor Browser disables a lot of stuff that Firefox has to lower the attack surface, and you can lock it down further using the Security Settings in the Torbutton.

Also you should look into a Whonix+Qubes OS setup, just because there's a sandbox doesn't mean you can't get hacked.

For speed: It's not really that bad for general browsing.

If we’re talking about privacy of tor vs VPN, I want my entire network protected at the gateway, so not sure how the tor network keeps up with streaming video etc?

I wasn’t aware of the attack surface reduction, I’ll take a look at that, thanks for the recommendation.

My ground truth for this is usually to ask full-time exploit dev friends which is a harder target, although that’s probably flawed in that if you’re targeted by someone determined it probably doesn’t matter the cost.

> I want my entire network protected at the gateway, so not sure how the tor network keeps up with streaming video etc?

With Qubes you can have a Whonix-ws VM have all its traffic go through Tor, and have another VM with all its traffic through some VPN to use with streaming.

What about my TV, my phone, my iPad? The way I see it the only workable solution to privacy against my ISP is to do it all at the gateway. And in that instance, I need ~50mbit which tor can’t provide.

> What about my TV, my phone, my iPad?

For iOS there's Onion Browser by Mike Tigas, but it's definitely NOT as privacy resistant as a Tor Browser. For Android there's Orfox and official Tor Browser builds for Android are coming this year.

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