Technology

59331 readers

5177 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

498

Novel attack against virtually all VPN apps neuters their entire purpose (arstechnica.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

133 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (5 children)

(…) the entire purpose and selling point of VPNs, which is to encapsulate incoming and outgoing Internet traffic in an encrypted tunnel and to cloak the user’s IP address.

No. That is not the entire point of a VPN. That’s just what a few shady companies are claiming to scam uninformed users into paying for a useless service. The entire point of a VPN is to join a private network (i.e. a network that is not part of the Internet) over the public internet, such as connecting to your company network from home. Hence the name ‘virtual private network’.

There are very little, if any, benefits to using a VPN service to browse the public internet.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Come to think of it, why do they even call this use case a VPN? I'd call that a proxy.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago

There are very little, if any, benefits to using a VPN service to browse the public internet.

This is why it's often best to just avoid the comments completely

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (1 children)

There are very little, if any, benefits to using a VPN service to browse the public internet.

accessing services that are blocked in your region.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 6 months ago

that works, but a regular SOCKS proxy should do. for HTTP even a HTTP proxy. many VPN providers offer them too, btw.. may help with mitigating this attack vector.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago

There are very little, if any, benefits to using a VPN service to browse the public internet.

I've run into issues multiple times where a site doesn't load until I turn on my VPN with an endpoint in the EU