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kinkdr

Time for ToR/VPN

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-setu...

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I wouldn't recommend PPTP, it is not really secure. If you try to avoid surveillance you better follow best practice.

[1] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/45509/are-there...

PPTP is fine to avoid this madness; it will mask all traffic from a single IP to another single IP.

It is not safe, that is true, but it's better than nothing for this specific purpose.

Which droplet would be best for between one to three people?

From what I gather, the ISP has to record the sites you visit—but not the specific pages. Does VPN stop my ISP from seeing the loaded sites? Or do I need Tor for that? I’m not too concerned about complete privacy, I just don’t want every website I just don’t want my browsing history to be leaked.

With socks5 proxy (e.g. putty supports it), your ISP will only see you are connecting only to 1 IP address.

Also if you are visiting https site your ISP only see domain name, not pages.

If you route traffic and DNS to a DO droplet outside the UK, all the ISP sees is a connection to that droplet and how much data was sent, not anything about what it was that was sent.

It neatly circumvents this bullshit, some suspect doing so will put you on a list for a closer look but if your traffic is innocuous who cares, I'm more worried about my useless ISP leaking/losing such data than I am about state intelligence.

Just the existence of these databases held by ISP's built under lowest cost bids will make them a massive target.

Its likely you could even use DigitalOcean in London because they're likely not subject to this legislation as they don't provide *DSL-style services?

Possibly but I'd quite like to exit in another country sinces another layer of bureaucracy for them to deal with and not all countries have equal policies in terms of privacy.

Just route everything though a 4G router and change the prepaid sim card every month, it's honestly the best way for now.

Not especially viable for 100GB+ consumption per month. There's no cost-effective option for this volume, AFAIK?

With Three it's unlimited for 25 pounds, I use around 100GB/month.

How is your opsec - i.e. do you vary your purchasing pattern, using random numbers to pick intervals between purchases and a variety of vendors?

I only ask, because routing everything over a VPN provides the illusion of privacy while flipping contracts every month provides some element of real privacy. It is easy enough to check on the activity of people pretending to hide their activity (assuming GCHQ has access to the same access that the NSA do), but real resources have to be spent tracking down people who actually hide their activity.

I have no idea how they allocate their budget for tracking potential threats, but somebody flipping prepaid sims would warrant a closer look if I was analysing the logs.

Indeed, that's a good point and I'm aware of that. They can absolutely track me given enough effort; they probably do it anyway since I'm a developer, I just try to make it a bit costlier for them I guess. For now, I don't bother much rotating vendors but it should be something I do indeed!

Until the UK adopts rules regarding SIM card registration which are effective in some other European countries (I know of Germany and Poland): every pre-paid card must be associated with a specific person and vendors won't issue/activate you one until you present them with your ID card.

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