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Comment by m-j-fox | Hacker News Reader

I don't know much about Tor. But I hope I can route all of my home network traffic through it. That or route everything through VPN. I'll bet you can guess why I'm suddenly interested.

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Couple of things. With Tor, you cannot control your exit in a sense. Since some websites are really shoddy (a lot of application portals are) and don't have / support SSL, you would be transmitting your entire application profile through TOR unencrypted. Somehow, I trust my ISP more than some random TOR exit when it comes to this.

Second, many websites (sadly) do not work if you are using a VPN (like Netflix).

Netflix's VPN detection seems to work by blacklisting a known list of IPs (e.g. AWS datacenters, etc.). Proxying through a machine that's not on the list works.

Founder of https://easyvpnrouter.com/ ask me anything or how to build one yourself if you want a project

I guess the main question about this product (which is the sort of thing I'd buy -- an hour of saved effort pays for it) is how can I trust you to be less evil than Comcast?

I guess if you're open-source and a lot of people are paying attention, that would do it.

It is much more difficult than 1 hour to setup yourself, because of FCC regulations flashing new routers is much more difficult, you need a TFTP server, it's pretty annoying. In addition the edge cases of the internet going out, then when it comes back bringing the VPN back up automatically, being able to switch PIA accounts / countries easily, it's not a simple thing. I got into this because I wanted to build one myself, and I have a friggin master's degree in CS and it took me several weekends. So I figured a business could be formed :)

We use OpenDNS for safer kid surfing and logging. Can I get similar functionality? Your FAQ says you use "Private Internet Access’ custom DNS servers".

Also, what about the Netflix issue?

You cannot use Netflix with any non-self-hosted VPN service, they have put a lot of effort into getting around it. We use PIA's DNS for anonymity.

I'd be cool with whitelisting a couple of URLs, such as netflix.com. Or google, hacker news, whatever. Who cares if comcast sells the fact that I use a service everyone uses?

I really just want things that I access in Private Browsing, or using a service other than http/https, not to be recorded.

I understand that people in various countries want to use the Netflix from another country. But I'm representing the 99%.

As I said in the other comment, right now we recommend running 2 routers, and connecting to the normal router when you want to access VPN blocked services or want low-latency connections for online gaming. But we will investigate white-listing IP addresses, that would be very useful.

So do you have a workaround? Can you bypass VPN routing for Netflix and other specific domains?

Interesting idea - adding whitelisted domains to bypass the VPN. We will investigate this. Currently we recommend running 2 routers simultaneously (which do not interfere because of automatic channel switching) with the VPN chained after the normal one. This allows you to choose when to use VPN. Basically the Easy VPN Router is designed to be super easy so that non-technical people don't mess anything up. Building one yourself is tricky, especially to cover edge cases like the VPN dropping, the internet going in and out, etc.

Nice! There's definitely a need for this. It would be good to include the actual router specs on your site, like cpu frequency + cores and RAM.

We can include that, sure. The router's are well-known brands which can be looked up in tons of places, but yeah we should add it.

You really don't want to do that. Any exit node could be recording or tampering with your network traffic, e.g. using sslstrip or worse.

you can, but it's not really nice, because TOR is relatively slow, it only makes sense for heavily text based sites and not images/video etc.

*This and almost every CDN starts popping up 'Captchas' atleast the last time I tried.. I find it easier to setup a VPN server and use one.

*This and some sites block completely if they use cloudflare for example https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/

Please forward to me any Cloudflare site on which you still see a CAPTCHA.

Curious why this is one of my most hated comments in at-least a couple days ...

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