Yes, that has been my experience too. At first you think, “maybe they are down for maintenance?”, but then you realize the website can’t be broken for that long, so then you try switching to a different country VPN.
//i\\
I have a VPN and I have found many sites (usually big websites and media websites) somehow know you are on a VPN and block you.
Not sure how they do it but I find it happens a lot (I use Nord VPN if that matters).
I would guess that they are familiar with the IP addresses used by some VPNs.
That was my guess too.
Thanks for all the info. I’m going to look into this a bit more, sounds like a pretty good idea. Not much money for a little peace of mind.
My credit card info was stolen on a recent trip where I was booking hotels online. Because I was using VPN, I knew that my other data was secure* and could help the CC company narrow down the potential area of the breach.
I’m often in airports and hotels that have open wifi. VPN gives me some assurance of privacy.
*but I changed passwords anyway because it seemed stupid not to.
Here are the reasons to have a VPN:
- You live in a dictatorship and want access to outside news, want to be able to post things to message boards that might be frowned upon, etc.
- You use the internet a lot on insecure WiFi networks (coffee shops, airports, etc.).
- You want to be able to change the seeming geographical location that you’re at (e.g. in order to get American Netflix while living in Algeria).
- To match with your tin foil hat and ensure that THEY aren’t watching you.
And reasons to not have VPN:
- Costs more
- Slower internet
Generally, if none of the reasons applies to you then skip it.
One of the suggestions for that sort of use is that sometimes airlines show different fares depending on whether you’re in the US or elsewhere, or so I’ve heard.
A caution with using VPNs: if they do make it look like you’re elsewhere, it can mess some things up, I learned that when I was doing phone support for a state unemployment system. People would get flagged as trying to file for a week’s benefits when they were outside the country - a BIG no-no, and they’d have to prove, somehow, that they were NOT outside the country. One thing that caused a false positive on that was if they were using a computer with a VPN designed to make it look like they were elsewhere.
And a friend was planning to set up some kind of VPN on her phone, before a trip to China, so she could post on Facebook. I need to ask her how that worked out.
I won’t discuss the specifics, but there are at least a couple more reasons that one might choose a VPN. They boil down to less tinfoil-hat reasons to care about being trackable.
What I will mention is that some adblocking software works by using a VPN. Though often the VPN is hosted on your own server. Personally, though, I find private DNS is sufficient.
This is one I still don’t agree with. Virtually every site on the internet now uses TLS 1.2 and many support TLS 1.3. Yes, there is traffic (mostly DNS) than can be sniffed between my computer and the access point because they are not using WPA or WEP. Other than seeing the URL, nothing else is visible to the sniffer. Even DNS is gradually moving to DNS over TLS.
Seeing the URL isn’t nothing - depending on what you’re doing and how smart the developer was who wrote the site you’re dealing with.
And maybe I’m wrong but I feel like the OS might be less inclined to do things like connecting to local printers, network devices, etc. when you jump on the VPN. A lot of security issues come from user friendliness features that automatically do things for you when something happens - an email arrives, you preview a file, you join a new network, etc.
Now, granted, you’re only secure after you join the VPN and anything that triggers on joining the WiFi might happen in milliseconds but, in general, you’re more secure by being on VPN more often than not being. But, I would agree that it probably doesn’t help all that much.
A couple of jobs ago, I had to make a lot of trips to China, and I found the Great Chinese Firewall extremely annoying. China does a good job of cracking down on VPNs, but there were ways around it.
I set up an Amazon cloud account, and I run a VM there with a public facing IP address, an SSH server (I also have a registered domain that sounds like a generic business), and an OpenVPN link from my home network to the server. When I am in China, I could set up an SSH tunnel from my laptop to my server (An Amazon EC2 instance) and have a direct link to my home network, as well as access to the general internet that bypassed the Chinese firewall.
As far as it looked like to China, I was an American businessman connecting over SSH to a business account in the Amazon cloud. They didn’t know I was using it to surf the Dope.
I have also found that the same technique is good for bypassing a corporate firewall. But don’t tell the IT department.
DDG got nailed. They use MS Bing search and share your details with MS.
A VPN is useful if you don’t trust your transport layer. That can mean untrustworthy WIFI, or any of the US mobile carriers. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile all treat customer network data as a valuable resource they can snoop on and sell. In the past they’ve even gone as far as inserting ads into third party webpages that their customers access.
As mentioned before, using a VPN changes the privacy exposure. The owner of your near transport layer can’t see what you’re doing (other than connecting to a VPN), but the VPN provider will be able to see. Many of the VPN providers have had scandals where they’ve been found to be using or selling that data.
The question to weigh is who do you trust more, a single VPN provider that you’ve hand picked, or whatever random (or monopoly) network you happen to be connecting with?
Another option for those a bit more tech savvy, is to get a free tier VPS node from Oracle, AWS, IBM, or whoever, and run your own VPN through that. Setting up a basic cloud Linux server running wireguard is pretty easy. There are downsides that might matter if you’re protecting from a state level threat, but don’t matter if you just want your phone’s traffic hidden from your employer’s wifi.
The free VPS VPN also won’t get you the other main use of VPNs, which is to watch Canadian Netflix, or BBC shows for free.
But solost is talking about using Opera. It was the DDG browser, not the duckduckgo.com website, that allowed Microsoft’s scripts from Bing to get through. IIRC, Microsoft didn’t associate any search data with advertising profiles, so it wasn’t going to learn too much about the user personally.
Pretty much this. Your ISP knows everywhere you go on the internet. And they sell that information.
That information is then, most often, used to target advertisements and content towards your interests.
If you’re a compulsive shopper or are the sort of person who will try to lock themselves in an impervious echo chamber on the Internet, given the option to do so, then, maybe, it’s better to have less targeting. If you’re able to see advertisements for things that you want and restrain yourself, have healthy browsing habits, or would be logging in to websites like Facebook and Google News, anyways, then you don’t really gain anything by turning off the tracking.
However, it could in theory also be used by scammers to try and fool you into a con. That is always worth blocking but, so far, most scammers seem to rely on spam attacks, targeting idiots. They’re not customizing the scam on an individual basis, based on your personal info.
That said, if you’re a person who works in national security or can wire money from bank to bank, indiscriminately, then you might be the sort of person who should try to make yourself harder to con, by ensuring that your interests and habits are not available to be purchased.