• Emerald@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Many students in my IT class think that a VPN is just “that thing that encrypts your Internet”.

    • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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      16 hours ago

      You got to teach your kids how to pirate. A VPN isn’t the thing that encrypts your internet, it’s the thing that keeps your ISP from knowing that the 200 GiB you’ve uploaded this month was all copyrighted material

      Not that I speak from experience

    • GameGod@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      As someone who works in tech, I feel like the sales pitch for VPNs is snakeoil for the average person. All you’re doing is trading out your own ISP spying on you for another ISP who can spy on you. I know I have rights if my ISP spies on me in my own country, but if my traffic is all egressing via a foreign country, I may have zero privacy rights in that country.

      If you need to hide your torrenting activity, just use a seedbox. If you need to hide from the NSA, none of this is going to help you. And TLS basically does the rest.

      Same with DNS-over-HTTPS - the DNS server is where they’re going to be spying on you!

      • Emerald@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        If you need to hide your torrenting activity, just use a seedbox

        I never understood seedboxes. A VPN on my own hardware works nicely. I hate cloud stuff. With a seedbox I’d have limited storage and would need to constantly pay monthly fees for it. Instead, I can just use my own hard drives on my own hardware.