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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 23rd, 2023

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  • Router-level VPN is going to be more difficult to configure and cause more problems than just having it on all your devices. There are some games where online play just refuses to work if connecting through a VPN. Some mobile apps are the same. When a website blocks your currently selected server, and the usual solution is switching to another server, that’s going to be more difficult and more tedious when it’s configured at the router level. In addition, if you do something like using a self-hosted VPN in order to connect remotely to a media server on your home network, that becomes more difficult if your home router is on a different VPN.

    If you’re trying to keep local devices in the building from phoning home and being tracked, a PiHole or router-level firewall might be a better solution. I think if you’re running a pfsense or opnsense router and are a dab hand with VLANs then maybe you could get what you’re looking for with router-level VPN, but it’s a huge hassle otherwise. Just put Mullvad on your computers and phones and call it a day.











  • This is the one of the few real things that make VPNs a security tool - security from thugs using a MITM attack on your phone. This is also a reason to avoid SMS messaging and port your number to a VoIP service instead of a direct cellular number, as VoIP traffic would be routed over the encrypted VPN tunnel with everything else instead of through the traditional cell network which is vulnerable to these attacks.

    If government agents want to know what you’re saying and doing without your consent, you should leave them no choice but to get a warrant and do some actual work.





  • A few months ago, Proton’s CEO Andy Yen was interviewed on The Linux Experiment and reiterated in the segment starting at 49:27 that he does want to have an F-Droid version, but because Proton encrypts notifications sent through Play Services such that Google can’t get at the metadata, and because third-party notification frameworks are typically much worse for battery life than Play Services, they consider F-Droid a lower priority than some of the other things they’re trying to get done, such as feature parity between their mobile and desktop apps. It’ll come eventually, especially as Yen himself seems to want it, but since they’re completely private and have no investors, they don’t have infinite money for developers, so they have to prioritize sustainable growth.

    Highly recommend watching the full interview, Yen seems to have a good mindset about the whole thing, doing what he feels is best for privacy and ownership of identity in the long run, even if he has to temporarily compromise in some places in order to get there.