Bit of an uphill fight with captchas everywhere. Do people here conduct all online activity over VPN whenever possible? Only for the sensitive stuff? Or perhaps the inverse because the bank already knows you? Maybe when travelling or getting around region blocking? Something else?
The one provided by my work aside, I realized that I don’t have any consistent rules around using VPN. Except sometimes, you know, when downloading ISO’s for my favorite distos.
100% of the time.
My VPN turns on automatically when I leave my home lan. I don’t use split-tunneling, so all my traffic goes back to home before going to internet.
UK porn ban, always-on VPN
On at all times at the router level. Because it’d be annoying to selectively disable it. My VPN isn’t really an anonymity feature anyway; I have a dedicated browser profile for things like banking where I intend the fingerprint to be associated with my government identity.
Always on although my Phone VPN recently has failed to start up automatically or has shut down randomly lately and I got to get that fixed.
My reasons are just privacy. I’m not using it to get around regional restrictions. Additionally, it helps when I want to use a public Wi-Fi, especially if it doesn’t have any passports on it.
I will not connect to public wifi without VPN.
Alll the time with kill switch ON.
Always, unless by mistake it is off.
maybe like 75 percent of the time. the Invidious APIs for Freetube.
My job requires secure outlook and access to our database. I do occasionally have to interface with banking sites.
My VPN is on about 95% of the time, except when I need to pay a local utility bill (or check my bank account) where they need to know my location.
If you’re paying them, why do they need to know your location to accept it? We’re in a capitalist system. Money is money.
Do you know of a guide for a setup like this?
I have a router with opnsense which has q plugin for wireguard making things quite easy for me.
A router is usually also always online and sits at the center of a network so it is the best place for it but there is nothing stopping someone from setting it up with commandline on a home device.
https://www.wireguard.com/quickstart/
There are many online video guides that cover different ways to do it (like docker)
In all casss you first setup a main server on the device that stays home and from it you generate a peer per device you want to connect. (A bunch of settings/codes) Sometimes a peer is a qr code that your device can scan (wireguard app for some devices) otherwise you have to manualy type.
Once set you can just leave it on. The only exception i found is some apps for local payments, presumably because they require both devices to report the same location to perform a transaction.
going around government censorship, being safer from being tracked
I get the idea but all of it depends on placing your trust in some company who’s entire business model is to sell you privacy.
If you live in an area with such heavy censorship then can you trust the business that is legally allowed to advertise and sell to you?
I personally think such company is way more likely to sell my data on the dark web then the government has resources to investigate what web domains i have visited.
They aren’t legally allowed to advertised and sell. Having them installed and selling them is a crime. (China, Iran, many other countries)
It is a valid use case. But thats not my usecase by far, which is what was asked.
My comment is slightly directed at people i know irl that are not very technological and believe that surfing the web is inherently not safe, but completely safe one you pay to connect to name_tm.
My apologies if it felt condescending for people who have good reason to tunnel outside there local jurisdiction.
I use tor for everything.
Everything??? Sounds slow
Sounds like you’ve got a shit VPN if it’s slow for you
AfricanExpansionist is saying that using Tor for everything sounds slow, not that a VPN sounds slow.
Ah I fully misread then
Phone > WireGuard Tunnel to my House = Reap the benefits of my PiHole and other hosted services > WireGuard Tunnel to ProtonVPN endpoint = Reap the benefits of appearing outside my country
Essentially created my own multi-hop VPN, which I use 24/7 outside of my home-network.
May I ask how you have that setup? I’ve been trying to do exactly that using my Ubiquiti gear in the middle, but I don’t think I Ubiquiti’s UnifFi is capable.
I should probably try what the O.P. did as I also have an ASUS router with Merlin. However, in my case, I have a Synology NAS and I set up VPN on that and use that server as my VPN. I have a certificate-based sign-in through a single port on the router.
I use a Public VPN service when I’m out and about and then connect to my VPN when I need to do stuff on my network, Like syncing my Joplin notes.
Picked myself up an Asus WRT router (AX86U) flashed it with Merlin firmware - the custom firmware includes a feature called “VPN Director” which lets me connect up to 5 different WireGuard clients and route my devices through whichever one I choose, given that the Asus WRT router is also capable of hosting its own WireGuard server I created a VPN director rule that routes that server through one of these clients.
The VPN director has a priority ruleset, so if for example WireGuard client 5 dies it will either kill all outbound connections and wait until it’s back online or fallback to WireGuard client 4, WireGuard client 1 being the highest priority right before WAN.
I like this setup because it’s my router doing the routing, not a secondary server hosting WireGuard like Tailscale.
Edit; It also works with oVPN if you prefer that protocol over WireGuard.
Must look into Merlin, I want to stay away from closed source or US companies so Unifi was out.
Could you have a residential static VPN as one of the wireguard profiles and have it be somewhat local to you so you could use banking apps etc on specific devices? Trying to get this to pass the wife test but if streaming or banking is affected I will have to roll back to no vpn.
Could you have a residential static VPN as one of the wireguard profiles and have it be somewhat local to you so you could use banking apps etc on specific devices? Trying to get this to pass the wife test but if streaming or banking is affected I will have to roll back to no vpn.
Absolutely, my setup I have a catchall rule that captures the entire 10.6.0.0/24 range however I can specify the IP’s individually so if I want to put a remote device behind my WAN and not through another WireGuard tunnel I can do that.
You can kind of see that in my second screenshot in my previous comment, I have a couple devices individually behind WGC4 and my catchall rule sitting on WCG5, the router will prioritize WCG4 over WGC5.
Edit: the Asus router also comes with a built in DDNS feature, you can either use Asus’s free domains and associate your dynamic IP with them or setup your own domain, it’ll keep your A records up to date whenever your IP changes.
For example I use this script to update my Cloudflare record for my domain - https://github.com/clayauld/asus-merlin-cloudflare-ddns
Basically all the time.
All the time basically
Pretty much always. If someone blocks my VPN, I just don’t go there or don’t use that. Sucks but it is what it is. I’m just not willing to enter your site bareback.
