Which VPN should I be using?

[matt23]

As some of you know, I'm off to a stupid college next year that is a bitch when it comes to torrenting (see: http://www.zoklet.net/bbs/showthread.php?t=244907)

I decided I'll just suck it up and buy a VPN, probably pay for 12 months up front. Anyways, which VPN should I be using? I've been doing some research and found some charging as little as ~$55 a year and others charging over $250 a year. What's the difference, besides $200, and which VPN should I use?

I'll mostly use it for torrent downloads (maybe 15-20gb a month) and maybe some light web browsing, like on Zoklet and stuff.

[Lanny]

Well I'd proposed this to several people but no one has yet to actually do it as far as I know. Rather than bother with a VPN, get your moneys worth and get a VPS account and use SSH tunneling rather than a VPN. Places like intovps are ~$10 a month, and are more than you would need in bandwidth. SSH tunneling works very similarly to using a VPN and is entirely as secure (I maintain more secure in most cases because it doesn't require some shitty untested, closed, third party shitware). What you also get is a seedbox (leave a torrent seeding on your VPS and you can knock up ~50 gigs up in a day, big help if you're aiming to maintain a ratio), a low-power web server which is great in all kinds of situations, and traffic that doesn't look shady (VPN traffic always sticks out in a university, VPS traffic looks like all other SSH traffic which is abundant in academic institutions, no one things twice about it).

I've been SSH tunneling for a few years at my school, only C&D notice I got was when my friend downloaded some dumb game without asking and didn't tunnel.

[NSFW]

Originally Posted by Lanny

Well I'd proposed this to several people but no one has yet to actually do it as far as I know. Rather than bother with a VPN, get your moneys worth and get a VPS account and use SSH tunneling rather than a VPN. Places like intovps are ~$10 a month, and are more than you would need in bandwidth. SSH tunneling works very similarly to using a VPN and is entirely as secure (I maintain more secure in most cases because it doesn't require some shitty untested, closed, third party shitware). What you also get is a seedbox (leave a torrent seeding on your VPS and you can knock up ~50 gigs up in a day, big help if you're aiming to maintain a ratio), a low-power web server which is great in all kinds of situations, and traffic that doesn't look shady (VPN traffic always sticks out in a university, VPS traffic looks like all other SSH traffic which is abundant in academic institutions, no one things twice about it).

I've been SSH tunneling for a few years at my school, only C&D notice I got was when my friend downloaded some dumb game without asking and didn't tunnel.

I've seen you mentioned SSH method before and have researched on google but haven't found any real info on this. Could you make a tutorial of what you do or point me in the direction of one?

[xCon]

For tunneling with Azureus: http://www.freebsdcluster.dk/~lasse/sshazureustunnel/

[Lanny]

Forget everything I just said, PortalVPN is actually the best most secure service anywhere with the best pricing available anywhere on the web. The only thing is that their service is so effective that the feds are now watching their site. To avoid detection you have to use the special back door which can be found by using the link in the top right of any page on this site. We cleverly disguised it as an ad. They'll keep you totally anonymous or my name isn't ZokLanny!

[dopeman420]

You're being paranoid. You can download shit loads of movies on campus and not get caught. As long as you're not seeding them for days at 1mb/s.

[Lanny]

Originally Posted by dopeman420

You're being paranoid. You can download shit loads of movies on campus and not get caught. As long as you're not seeding them for days at 1mb/s.

Depends on the campus I guess, but where I'm at, rights holders send dozens of reports a day about people downloading copyrighted material. Anyone who is visibly downloading illegally is informed. We work on a two strike system.

[Malcolm Equis]

Originally Posted by Lanny

Forget everything I just said, PortalVPN is actually the best most secure service anywhere with the best pricing available anywhere on the web. The only thing is that their service is so effective that the feds are now watching their site. To avoid detection you have to use the special back door which can be found by using the link in the top right of any page on this site. We cleverly disguised it as an ad. They'll keep you totally anonymous or my name isn't ZokLanny!

conflict of interests?

[Lanny]

That's the Joke - YouTube

That's the Joke - YouTube
Video: click to display

[sevenTwo]

Does your school have a huge internal DC++ hub? You might want to look into that as an alternative. Speeds are hella fast too since it's all on the residence local area network. (I got ~9mb/s download speeds on resnet in 2008.)

[Malcolm Equis]

Originally Posted by sevenTwo

Does your school have a huge internal DC++ hub? You might want to look into that as an alternative. Speeds are hella fast too since it's all on the residence local area network. (I got ~9mb/s download speeds on resnet in 2008.)

i get 9mBps on the internet

[xCon]

Originally Posted by Malcolm Equis

i get 9mBps on the internet

You're both wrong. It's MB/s. Unless you guys both have really slow connections ;-).

m = milli
b = bit
M = mega
B = byte

[Jack]

Nuh-uh, I get 100 milligigs per second. It says so when I mouse over the LAN connection in the system tray.

http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-pr...iously-111007/

[matt23]

Originally Posted by dopeman420

You're being paranoid. You can download shit loads of movies on campus and not get caught. As long as you're not seeding them for days at 1mb/s.

Maybe but I'd rather be paranoid than end up screwed. A couple people last year ended up settling out of court with music labels (mommy and daddy's money of course) because of torrenting.


I'd love to see an SSH tutorial. And a discount on portalvpn? I'll check it out though.

Thanks!

[Malcolm Equis]

Originally Posted by xCon

You're both wrong. It's MB/s. Unless you guys both have really slow connections ;-).

m = milli
b = bit
M = mega
B = byte

[sevenTwo]

Originally Posted by xCon

You're both wrong. It's MB/s. Unless you guys both have really slow connections ;-).

m = milli
b = bit
M = mega
B = byte

Overly meticulous...

[Lanny]

Originally Posted by sevenTwo

Overly meticulous...

Gotta agree. If you're talking about transfer rates it's pretty clear you're talking bits. Also a millibit/byte isn't even unit since a bit is, by definition, the smallest possible unit of information.

[UNDFTD]

So what is the difference between a VPN and VPS? Could you use a VPN and SSH at the same time and maybe TOR on top for another layer of security. It will be snail slow tho lol.

[Jack]

VPN is a virtual private network. You join a remote network to which your connection is encrypted by SSL, SSH, maybe some other thing, depending. Now your connections originate from that network instead of your network.

VPS is a virtual private server. Put basically, it's just a VM on a server and you have root on the VM, so you have a virtual, dedicated server (as opposed to a shared server where resources aren't allocated specifically to you). A VPS isn't there for the express purpose of anonymizing and hiding from local-area snoops your online activities, but you can tunnel your traffic through it: http://xn--phnix-ibb.net/tut_unix_ssh.php

You just define a local port and you point applications to the SOCKS proxy at localhost : port.

This is distinct from using a VPN in that you have to put each application through the proxy, and any incidental connection that hasn't been proxified will be out in the open. Using a VPN, any connection you make on the network adapter that is joined to the VPN will go through the VPN.

You can use VPN -> SSH tunneling (local -> VPN -> VPS -> Inet). I think this should work as it would without the VPN, but I've never tried it. You can also stack SSH tunneling and Tor, so you should be able to do that with VPN. Info on all of that is easily found.

I'm not sure about local -> VPS -> VPN. If the VPS is on the VPN, would you need to be on the VPN in order to connect to it? I have never tried. Someone else will know, I'm sure.

If you have a good VPN that doesn't keep logs and allowed you to pay anonymously, there's no point in then going through the VPS, especially if the VPS provider won't protect you like the VPN provider would. And people use VPNs instead of Tor, not with it, if you just want to anonymize your traffic. If you need to get to some .onion sites, stacking a VPN and Tor would be great, because then you would avoid security issues that Tor has that may compromise your anonymity.

[sevenTwo]

Originally Posted by Jack

VPN is a virtual private network. You join a remote network to which your connection is encrypted by SSL, SSH, maybe some other thing, depending. Now your connections originate from that network instead of your network.

VPS is a virtual private server. Put basically, it's just a VM on a server and you have root on the VM, so you have a virtual, dedicated server (as opposed to a shared server where resources aren't allocated specifically to you). A VPS isn't there for the express purpose of anonymizing and hiding from local-area snoops your online activities, but you can tunnel your traffic through it: http://xn--phnix-ibb.net/tut_unix_ssh.php

You just define a local port and you point applications to the SOCKS proxy at localhost : port.

This is distinct from using a VPN in that you have to put each application through the proxy, and any incidental connection that hasn't been proxified will be out in the open. Using a VPN, any connection you make on the network adapter that is joined to the VPN will go through the VPN.

You can use VPN -> SSH tunneling (local -> VPN -> VPS -> Inet). I think this should work as it would without the VPN, but I've never tried it. You can also stack SSH tunneling and Tor, so you should be able to do that with VPN. Info on all of that is easily found.

I'm not sure about local -> VPS -> VPN. If the VPS is on the VPN, would you need to be on the VPN in order to connect to it? I have never tried. Someone else will know, I'm sure.

If you have a good VPN that doesn't keep logs and allowed you to pay anonymously, there's no point in then going through the VPS, especially if the VPS provider won't protect you like the VPN provider would. And people use VPNs instead of Tor, not with it, if you just want to anonymize your traffic. If you need to get to some .onion sites, stacking a VPN and Tor would be great, because then you would avoid security issues that Tor has that may compromise your anonymity.

The pros of having a VPS is that you can continue downloading your files even while you're offline. I realize you'll have to download off of a server afterward on top of it, but if your torrent was poorly seeded, then downloading off of a single low latency TCP connection ends up being way faster. If it's seeded pretty well, you can still SSH-tunnel with no performance penalties compared to VPNs.

VPNs prioritize anonymity over conveniences like that and are easier to configure properly to the end-user, so if you need that much anonymity, it's great. I think that much anonymity isn't necessary on a school campus though.

[matt23]

Originally Posted by sevenTwo

The pros of having a VPS is that you can continue downloading your files even while you're offline. I realize you'll have to download off of a server afterward on top of it, but if your torrent was poorly seeded, then downloading off of a single low latency TCP connection ends up being way faster. If it's seeded pretty well, you can still SSH-tunnel with no performance penalties compared to VPNs.

VPNs prioritize anonymity over conveniences like that and are easier to configure properly to the end-user, so if you need that much anonymity, it's great. I think that much anonymity isn't necessary on a school campus though.

I don't care sooo much about being anonymous to the school (I have to log into wifi w/ my student ID number and password) I just don't want them to know I'm downloading torrents. Even better would be if they couldn't see how much data I downloaded, but I don't think that's possible.