Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwertox | Hacker News Reader

> First, I just upgraded to 2.5 Gbps internet and I don’t want to route all my traffic through a VPN and take the speed hit. I have this bandwidth for a reason

You don't have to. You create a container which runs openvpn to connect to your vpn provider, and also hosts an ssh daemon. The ssh daemon receives incoming SOCKS5 connections from a firefox portable browser, which has been configured to use the proxy (your Docker openvpn-container) for browsing and DNS resolution, and pipes it through the VPN tunnel.

So you have that one browser just to surf imgur. if that's your thing. And you could also use Firefox on Android (maybe also iOS) with those proxy settings (a secondary Firefox browser, like the beta version).

So you get very high control about what you are using the VPN for, you don't just pipe your entire OS's network traffic through the VPN.

View on HN

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-pro...

You can default route domains through a VPN using a Firefox tab container, you don’t need a separate browser instance running!

You can use the official add-on for that https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... On the surface the proxy option looks like it is only their own VPN service, but you can set up your own too.

Wow thanks for this, was using the above linked addon myself until I read your comment.

This would have the exact problem mentioned immediately after the paragraph you quoted. Every computer, phone, etc. would need specific setup. The author is clear about their goal:

> I wanted something cleaner: a solution that works for every device on my network, automatically, without any client-side configuration.

This is a great idea except for me (and for the author I suspect) I regularly come across attachment of Imgur hosted images on sites (like a post on a DIY forum but not all of them) so it wouldn't solve my issue unless I were to use your browser in the container all the time (I suspect the author also doesn't just 'surf imgur' but randomly comes across images hosted on imgur linked to from other locations).

In that case FoxyProxy's proxy by URL pattern would be what you'd want to use.

That doesn't seem very practical. The issue is that imgur links are everywhere and you wouldn't want to switch browsers whenever you encounter one. Not to mention it requires per device setup. Author's solution is much better than what you describe.

Nope, security/privacy is always a trade off. It's much much safer just to route all your traffic through a VPN. I get ~200-500 Mbps with Mullvad, that seems good enough. Sucks if you upgraded to 2.5 Gbps before checking, but oh well

> So you have that one browser just to surf imgur.

Doesn't solve the real problem, being fails of imgur embedded it many others you surf.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com