Firefox Private Network Is Now Official As Mozilla VPN

[Jabberwocky]

But why this over any other vpn?
https://compare.fandom.com/wiki/Vpn_Provider

Or why a payed VPN at all?
VPN to your home if you are out, and get a better ISP if you don't trust yours, and Tribler or tor if you want

Disclaimer: I live in Africa.

Free services like tor or tribler doesn't for most streaming nor gaming, cloudflare's free VPN service works in some cases. Paid VPN also helps for increased government spying and allows you to stream and game without lag or bandwidth limitations. I use a couple of terabytes per month and have not had any problems over the years. I mostly use VPN to prevent users on my localnet from binding IP to GPS coordinates. I don't know when this changed but today this is default behavior for many mobile devices.

I'm paying ~$3 USD at the moment. I'm considering to stop using VPN altogether (no more colleagues or clients on my network due to lockdown) or changing to something like mullvad which is €5 to support companies that do open source.

[Giovanni Fabbro]

Only sith reason in absolutes. There is a whole world of shades of gray between running ass-naked and maximum security.
Here we are talking about normal people protecting their privacy from commercial and government entities acting in a mostly legal manner, a VPN is enough.

If your goal is stopping black hat CIA/FBI espionage shit that drops from black helicopters to steal your data through EMI exfiltration, you really are in a different ballpark alltogether.

I'm saying if you value your privacy, you'd be smart to realize that centralizing your data behind a VPN is no better than leaving it with your ISP. The difference is, is that VPN in another country where you're not a citizen? Would you trust a foreign country with your browsing data more than your own?

[Giovanni Fabbro]

Don't pay with credit card, duh.

"Cash is king" except when the Fed prints more money, then it's not even worth the paper it's printed on.

[Giovanni Fabbro]

Ok boomer.

It's actually harder to manipulate than bank accounts, and it has nothing to do with the technology involved.

You MIGHT get away with manipulating a bank account if you have enough control and understanding of the internal system of a bank as that's basically a crappy database. There are usually checks and redundancies with paperwork and signatures and stuff so it's not as easy as a one-liner SQL, but it's doable if you have an insider.

With a decent cryptovalue EVERYONE has the "database" (the "block chain") so you would need to change their database too for your transaction to be valid. Good luck with that if the cryptovalue is not Dogecoin or some toy shit with 10 miners total, you would need billions of dollars of mining equipment to overpower them and take over the lead so you can actually record the transaction in a legit way.

You need electricity to drive Bitcoin and you need stable storage. It's far easier to erase billions of "dollars worth" of Bitcoin with a faulty drive than it is to erase the value of a finite physical asset like gold. I'd probably take the value of the precious metals in the failing hard drive over the worthless bits on it.

[danmcgrew]

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Why, everybody else, of course.
The biggest threat to any supposedly open undertaking--which, ostensibly, is created for your benefit--most often comes not from the people who created it...does NOT come from the people who created it--but comes from second or third-generation sly actors who 'hijack' the original organization and its good intentions: the 'people who would keep it pure'. Not for their sakes, but ours, mind you. Of course.

You need look no further than Jim Zemlin and his band of cronies (insert your own word; I was shooting for political correctness)--including Microsoft--at The Linux Foundation.

Y'all keep up that 'custodiet'ing; you hear?

[zxy_thf]

But why this over any other vpn?
https://compare.fandom.com/wiki/Vpn_Provider

Or why a payed VPN at all?
VPN to your home if you are out, and get a better ISP if you don't trust yours, and Tribler or tor if you want

The problem is, forwarding all your Internet traffic to some VPN/proxy only hides your IP address, but IP is not the only Internet identity.
Furthermore, since nowadays almost everyone is behind one or more NATs of the ISP, the IP address is less useful than 10 years ago to trace an individual.

On the other hand, a per-window browser specific VPN would be a better isolating method for online privacy.

[zxy_thf]

This video was brought to you by Mozilla VPN.

More information about the inherent problems of VPNs can be found here: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29

I read this a while ago, and I agree his point, VPN only gives your unverified safe feelings.
But most of its recommendations, well lemme be frank, is BS.
There is also no way you can verify the VPS provider does not steal your generated private key inside your VPS, and you can neither verify the chain of your tor nodes are not pile of traps (it happened before).

Let's not talk about differential privacy and DPI+machine learning. These tracking methods are easier to implement and harder to counter.

[starshipeleven]

I'm saying if you value your privacy, you'd be smart to realize that centralizing your data behind a VPN is no better than leaving it with your ISP. The difference is, is that VPN in another country where you're not a citizen? Would you trust a foreign country with your browsing data more than your own?

See my answer here https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...48#post1187448

[Almindor]

No. Cryptocurrency never looks good. I'd say cryptocurrency is like buying fool's gold, but fool's gold is an actual thing. Cryptocurrency is no different than money deposited into a bank account - it's just electrons aligned on a hard drive that can be manipulated on a whim. The real commodity in cryptocurrency is electricity to run the machines to store it. I had this discussion elsewhere....

I'm guessing you don't really know much about how transactions work in say Bitcoin right? The whole idea behind cryptocurrencies is to provide the agency to have the ability of making transactions without centralized intermediaries that you're forced to trust using essentially math. Oh and the set-in-stone rules for making new digital notes, that's about it.

The electricity bit more or less an unwanted, but still unsurpassed, side effect... (proof of stake didn't prove itself properly yet)

It's all about you being the bank yourself and having the ability to send to anyone else. Fiat money btw. is the same digital 1s and 0s in the end today. No difference but for the ability of some to "print" more on a whim and as you said manipulated on a whim. Proper cryptocurrencies actually enforce the fact that nobody but the private key holder can do the manipulation.

[starshipeleven]

You need electricity to drive Bitcoin and you need stable storage.

Without either the current civilization would collapse anyway.

It's far easier to erase billions of "dollars worth" of Bitcoin with a faulty drive than it is to erase the value of a finite physical asset like gold.

You have no fucking clue of what you are talking about.

In all cryptovalues EVERY SINGLE MINER has a copy of the full transaction log (the "block chain"), there is no way in hell that you can erase hundreds of thousands of drives all over the world like that.

I'd probably take the value of the precious metals in the failing hard drive over the worthless bits on it..

Yeah because you are a boomer and don't comprehend basic economics.
Apart from the fact that you (the user) don't store bitcoins on a hard drive, and all miners have a copy of the same transaction log of all transactions in the world, gold's "intrinsic value" is another completely BS concept. Gold's true intrinsic value as a resource isn't that much as it really does not serve a whole lot of purposes where you need a ton of it, most of its value is dictated by people's belief in it, just like diamonds or dollars.

Which is why it can swing in value by 200-300% up or down as economical or political situations change, and can also go down to zero in case "electricity and stable storage" disappear (and the current civilization collapses).