Re:Personal VPN Services are Snake-Oil
by jsheard on Sunday April 14, 2024 @03:59PM
(#40033938)
You may not even need a VPN to get around censorship, ISPs implementing legally mandated site blocks often only bother to enforce them at the DNS level so you can trivially bypass them by using an encrypted DNS resolver.
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Encrypted DNS resolvers aren't trivial[0] for the ~99% of people who don't even know what they are, though.
Doesn't Firefox default to eDNS these days? I don't think it can get much more trivial than that
Re:Personal VPN Services are Snake-Oil
by LaLaLand122 on Sunday April 14, 2024 @04:24PM
(#40034145)
In the UK, at least, it isn't the default (because of "the children"/"terrorism"). But it's still just a setting in Firefox/Chrome to change (and I guess in Edge too).
Changing the "secure dns" option on their phone/computer is probably easier than installing a VPN app, tbh.
Even just using a different DNS can be enough. A certain popular movie uploader is/was blocked by my ISP at the DNS level but worked fine once I changed to OpenDNS.
Re:Personal VPN Services are Snake-Oil
by gravescale on Sunday April 14, 2024 @07:13PM
(#40035356)
If only the Great Firewall were so easy. ExpressVPN seems to be "OK" once/if it connects but it's not very fast when websites load megabytes of crap via a bazillion tiny requests (which is a problem in any bandwidth-limited and/or high-latency environment: use your browser tools to simulate a slow connection, website devs!).