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Comment by fmajid | Hacker News Reader

The UK is almost as bad an enemy of the Internet as Australia and the nanny-state filters are beyond obnoxious. Back when I was with “Vodafone Full Fibre broadband” (in reality shitty VDSL because the truth-in-advertising authority gave ISPs license to lie), they had accidentally blocked StackOverflow for 3 days because it was actually the test site for implementation of the filters and they had been turned on by accident.

A VPN is essential to defend yourself from the jackbooted UK government. I run my own, based on my https://GitHub.com/fazalmajid/edgewalker/

As for Three, their 4G is abysmal but they have the best 5G coverage.

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> A VPN is essential to defend yourself from the jackbooted UK government.

I tend to agree. Unfortunately even VPN doesn't entirely solve it though.

On the one hand wiregaurd makes this feel far more transparent and comfortable technically compared to how it used to with old fashioned crappy TCP over TCP style VPN... instead we now get low overhead, low latency, native, simple configuration etc.

The only problem is the end point: Running your own makes you very uniquely identifiable; using shared gets you on tons of blocklists or excessive captcha-walls of various popular and common services and underlying services like cloudflare or auth services such as google.

Even when running your own server you tend to get blocked due to having an IP from a VPS provider rather than a consumer ISP. It's basically impossible to get normal neutral internet these days... I find myself jumping between different servers, and turning it on and off, there is no single all access method... it's like wtf leave it alone guys, we are not in north Korea.

> The only problem is the end point: Running your own makes you very uniquely identifiable

I think it depends on where you are. In France, my fiber connections have had a fixed IPv4 since I first got one, 10 years ago. Some ISPs have recently switched to CG-NAT, though. But they also started offering fixed ipv6.

My point is that trying to hide behind a non-fixed IP is a losing game. Plus, you can probably be indentified quite reliably but the pattern of websites you visit.

What downsides did you experience from being uniquely identifiable? I suspect browser fingerprinting still goes pretty far in most cases even if you are behind a typical ISP NAT.

OTOH for an extreme case, and non-web-browsing purposes, I can imagine automatically spinning a VM every N hours, setting up a VPN exit node by a script, and switching DNS to point to it, then spinning down your old node. It won't even need any shenanigans with WG keys if you use two (or more) keypairs in a round-robin fashion.

Yes. I use source routing to run my DNS through the VPN, but end devices go direct because too many streaming services or sites like Wikipedia ban VPN IPs.

>it's like wtf leave it alone guys, we are not in north Korea

we will eventually get everything they have in NK/China/Russia/Iran, under a thin veneer of being done for our own good and accompanied by a mass media campaign that will convince a sizeable population of useful idiots to accept it all. the venerable western democracies hate and fear dissent as much as those loathsome dictators do

> the venerable western democracies hate and fear dissent as much as those loathsome dictators do

Who specifically hate and fear dissent in western democracies, and what's the mechanism against that?

>Who specifically hate and fear dissent in western democracies

the people and entities in power

>what's the mechanism against that?

disarming the population

I don't buy that as a general principal. You get the odd fascist leader of democracies that wants to do that in say Hungary, Turkey, even the US got a whiff of it. But most people and most politicians actually like democracy and support the ideas around it, they want to be left along and live in peace and prosperity. Pols want power and to crush the other political side in parliment, but ending public dissent is not the plan of most political parties or politicians.

For a good chunk of sites, rerouting Tor paths a few times will work. Maybe try Tor Browser?

> The only problem is the end point: Running your own makes you very uniquely identifiable

https://www.mullvad.net/

I already use mullvad, and as good as they are no VPN is immune to the issues I mentioned unfortunately.

Their 5G coverage is shite also, I have smarty (three backend) running and if I’m lucky to get 5G, it’s never full strength.

Smarty coverage is terrible, can't depend on it even in a city.

>A VPN is essential to defend yourself from the jackbooted UK government. I run my own

Wouldn't be that illegal?

Nah, it's not. The onus is on the ISPs, and it's just a shite DNS blocking of adult websites if you don't have them unlocked.

Are vodafone still doing their man-in-the-middle business with certificates?

As an Australian, the UK seems worse.

> The UK is almost as bad an enemy of the Internet as Australia

The UK is almost as bad an enemy of the Internet as North Korea.

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