I recently had to travel overseas for a few weeks so I got a VPN for a limited time. I hadn’t really looked into VPN’s for a while. Last time I did was probably a decade or more since at the time I was using bit torrent regularly.
I was surprised by how cheap and reliable VPN has gotten. So here is the question, do I need a VPN?
Our household internet usage is pretty vanilla, not torrenting, just work, Netflix, bill pay type use. Most uses seem to be to work arounds for either repressive governments or torrenting.
Are there benefits to VPN usage that I may be not seeing?
How necessary is it for what? What are you protecting and from whom? Almost everything uses TLS 1.2 or TLS 1.3 these days, which makes intercepting encrypted communications already nearly impossible. They have gotten cheap because most of them are a scam selling snake oil, or worse, harvesting your browsing habits for marketing or even spying purposes.
for a corporation which still has the outdated “hard on the outside, soft on the inside” model, yes it’s still necessary. for personal, with the rise of DoH so that providers can’t snoop on your DNS queries and that TLS encrypts everything directly and is the overwhelming bulk of traffic (with maybe SRTP for real time media accounting for a lot of the rest), i’d say it’s pretty redundant. for all of the traffic analysis you are just trading one provider (say your ISP) for another (the VPN provider) on who can do it. if you need to hide from snooping like, say, for geo location reasons to get around blackout restrictions, or the gubbermint’s prying eyes sure they are handy to have. but you don’t want to use them if you don’t have to because you are forcing your traffic to dogleg through the VPN terminator which leads to suboptimal routing.
While VPNs were initially designed to provide secure and private connections for remote workers, they have become increasingly popular among individuals looking for privacy and security online. Here are a few reasons why you may want to consider using a VPN:
Security: VPNs encrypt your internet traffic, making it more difficult for hackers, government agencies, or other third parties to intercept your data. This can be particularly important if you are using public Wi-Fi, which is often unsecured and can be easily compromised.
Privacy: VPNs hide your IP address and online activities from your internet service provider (ISP) and other third parties. This can prevent your ISP from tracking your browsing history or selling your data to advertisers.
Access to geo-restricted content: Many streaming services, such as Netflix, have regional restrictions on their content. With a VPN, you can change your IP address and appear to be browsing from a different country, giving you access to content that may be otherwise unavailable in your region.
Bypassing censorship: If you live in a country with strict internet censorship laws, a VPN can help you bypass these restrictions and access the open internet.
In short, while VPNs may not be necessary for everyone, they can provide important privacy and security benefits for those who want to protect their online activities from prying eyes. If you are concerned about privacy or security online, a VPN may be worth considering.
VPNs encrypt your internet traffic
Almost all internet traffic is already encrypted, so there’s no real point in this.
Privacy: VPNs hide your IP address and online activities from your internet service provider (ISP)
And instead they become your ISP just as capable of monitoring your online activity.
Access to geo-restricted content
This is the only logical reason to still use VPNs, and even then, you’re better off hosting a light cloud instance and tunneling over SSH.
they can provide important privacy and security benefits for those who want to protect their online activities from prying eyes.
What makes you so sure VPN providers don’t spy themselves? Because they said “trust us”?
Isn’t DNS over HTTP mega slow? I know that for data exfiltration ive used some beacons that exfil over DNS and it takes substantially more time to receive the message than a regular HTTP/S beacon. Is it the same principle?
under normal circumstance the tcp connection is nailed up so it’s just the difference between the http cruft and regular dns. http 3.0 also has header compression so that makes it quic(k). using it also deals with the problem of bloat which would require answers to switch over to TCP instead. given net speeds these days it’s not a big deal.