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VPN and Plusnet fibre broadband

crypto_sloth
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Registered: ‎02-12-2016

VPN and Plusnet fibre broadband

Once again hello🤗,

im currently using a friends plusnet wifi and am able to use my VPN (Freedome F-Secure) without any issues across the board on 2 Apple devices I own. I basically just wondered if being a new customer with MY OWN contract starting soon, if there's likely to be any issues raised by using a VPN. It's a VPN that I'll be renewing again before the end of my PlusNet contract so the assigned IP and the VPN server IP address won't change, i.e. my external and internal IP addresses will remain the same other than the fact I'm using a different router.....ideas?

22 REPLIES 22
gleneagles
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Re: VPN and Plusnet fibre broadband

You ask a very interesting question, as you know the government has passed a bill which requires all ISP to record what customers access on the web and much discussion has taken place on the chat forum regarding concerns about the bill.

From what I have read about vpn's the content is scrambled so if a ISP cannot see what a customer is accessing there is a good chance they may block all vpn's

As you know vpn's are not illegal and many people use then when sending or getting private information.

Hopefully someone at PN can answer your question but what one ISP does the others are likely to follow

We are born into history and history is born into us.
crypto_sloth
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Re: VPN and Plusnet fibre broadband

ISP's CAN be ordered to handover individuals details , obviously specifically targeted individuals, and in some cases the VPN vendor will handover and done absolutely will not. Generally speaking the FREE VPNs which are essentially a trade off of a new IP address in exchange for information on all the sites you visit, what you look at on those sites etc etc, and as I said , GENERALLY speaking the paid for VPNs make it 100% clear in their information presale that they won't give over any details such as the users internal IP address or the end site the user visited but they may handover the encrypted data that the VPN might in some cases store. This of course is like giving them a ton of shredded and reshredded paperwork and saying " there u go, that's the info u wanted" , as most decent VPNs don't have the ability to read or decrypt the users traffic themselves.

The VPN I use doesn't keep anything on their servers, they're based out of Switzerland (the country w the best online privacy laws in Europe definitely and quite probably the world seeing as a lot of the Swiss privacy software such as unseen.is , ProtonMail.ch etc have specific deals for journalists , (unseen.is has free VPN service for Falan Gong members), and obviously lists dissidents, people from countries where social media is blocked i.e. China, N.Korea etc. But I see Rocky times ahead with the Digital Privacy Act 2016-17 being pushed through parliament by people that know nothing of the subject they're voting through. Online privacy is being argued against because certain people think it's used/abused by criminals , thus all proponents of online privacy laws are up to no good.Admittedly there are criminals that take advantage of VPNs, TOR , TAILS, LINUX, blah blah. But a simple and non argument winning point is this: I have curtains in my home.Does that mean I have something nefarious going on, or more likely does it mean I don't want my private life exposed to every single person passing my house? That's an extremely simple analogy for online privacy advocacy, imho. But, money talks and as we know the uk generally follows the USAs lead on most things, and with Trump now legally forcing Apple to install a backdoor to idevices to allow FBI agents to bypass Touch ID and pass codes so they can read everything on said devices , as well as lobbying fiercely for the dismantling of Online Privacy for all, I think we ought , rightly, to be concerned in which direction our privacy online is headed. It'll either remain as is, or the govt will obtain the right to search any specific targets device remotely. Having nothing to hide I've no problem w that, but as a staunch privacy advocate I am utterly against in principle.

~ CS

LukeAger
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Re: VPN and Plusnet fibre broadband

I can add with certainty than all of the western VPN providers which claim they do not log and that they will not provide logs to third parties are talking non-sense. As soon as they get a court order they all hand over the logs they claim not to have. Don't believe they hype Cheesy 

30FTTC06
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Re: VPN and Plusnet fibre broadband

Well thats very disappointing then seeing as I was looking at setting up a VPN.

 

"Strict No Logs Policy + Tor Over VPN

NordVPN never logs where you go on the Internet. If anyone asks, the best we can do is shrug our shoulders. And we like it that way.Read about it in more details."

 

@LukeAger  What proof do you have to substantiate your claim ?

LukeAger
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Re: VPN and Plusnet fibre broadband

@30FTTC06 I've handled 1000's of Intrusions and been responsible for many of these requests. 

30FTTC06
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Re: VPN and Plusnet fibre broadband

@LukeAger Thats not proof, but merely your word.

LukeAger
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Re: VPN and Plusnet fibre broadband

@30FTTC06 ok then. 

caravanj
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Re: VPN and Plusnet fibre broadband

I'll just stick to what the legal position is.

There is no requirement whatsoever for a VPN provider based outside of the UK's jurisdiction to abide by any of the UK's laws & regulations which means that  these VPNs do not have to keep any records demanded by the UK so they can't hand over what they haven't got.

A good example of the same legal position can be shown by the way that a foreign newspaper can print a story that the UK's Supreme Court bans from being printed in the UK.

 

 

LukeAger
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Re: VPN and Plusnet fibre broadband

You are correct for the most part. The UK clearly has allies in some nations where the judicial arms can be stretched to overcome this but it really does depend on the geography of the situation and the severity of the event being investigated.

There are certainly a number of safe heavens where nothing can be done at all by any western authority. 

crypto_sloth
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Re: VPN and Plusnet fibre broadband

@30FTTC06 I think given the name NordVPN indicates it originates out of Scandinavia which, along with the Swiss have some of the best online privacy rules. They're also in the top 5 VPN list in a poll gathered by many industry experts, not people with interests in pushing their product to the fore. 

An authority CAN get a court order ordering an ISP to hand over the details of all VPN data from a specific client if test client is targeted in a covert surveillance op (The Silk Road 'DPR' farce, springs to mind) 

https://www.wired.com/2013/11/silk-road/

But tbh I'd do my own research rather than takin one persons pov, unless they're a creator of highly successful VPNs. The lack of backed up claims made regarding VPNs being unsafe leads me to believe you're as good going with NordVPN , after some research , as many other reputable VPNs. They have to adhere to trading standards to and can't lie about what they will ,do won't and do hand over. 

The ISP may very well comply with the demand for ur data but the fact it's encrypted means it's near useless to them. Yes, no code is unbreakable, but a lot of VPN encryption now is sophisticated enough to ensure that unless you're a top tier criminal / terrorist, you'll be lightly looked into at best. I'd go w NordVPN.

ive used F-SECURE Freedome VPN now for 15mnths without a single problem, I find one of the most persistent adtrackers to be google or a google related URL and incredibly I have TV PLAYER app which , after an hours usage can rack up over 1200-1400 adtrack attempts.

The attachment is my VPNs work since early September this year. The number of phishing sites ppl fall into without knowing is scary tbh but this tells me in real time and stops me completely from proceeding into the site.

Final words; RESEARCH, RESEARCH, DECIDE, BUY, ENJOY. 

crypto_sloth
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Re: VPN and Plusnet fibre broadband

@caravanj But if ones using the product inside the UKs jurisdiction would that not change the legal argument in court , for example. I know the point you're making and have seen the same information elsewhere but I just wondered what the implications of using a foreign product inside of the UK to effectively circumvent UK law, in some cases? Just asking , I'm interested in all I can garner on online privacy. 

caravanj
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Re: VPN and Plusnet fibre broadband

@crypto_sloth

The present law can only force a UK ISP to hand over the last 12 months of a user's internet activity record held by that ISP.

If asked, a UK ISP will comply by handing over their records but the records for anyone using a VPN will show traffic from the user, via the ISP, to the VPN server after which there aren't any records & the browsing history is anonymised.

When I do the Lottery online I have to cancel my VPN connection otherwise Camelot think I'm outside the UK & won't let me into the site.

The UK has no legal power to make any VPN located outside of the UK keep records so even if a foreign jurisdiction ordered a VPN to disclose what records it held then legally, to comply with the disclosure order, all the VPN has to do is to state that no records are held.

 Going back to the example of  court injunction banning the publication of a news story.

The ban only applies to publishing it in the UK, if someone sends the details to a foriegn newspaper who publish the story then there's no offence because it hasn't been published in the UK.

While it's an offence for anyone in the UK to post details of a banned story on social media etc, it isn't an offence to post a link to an internet site which holds the story & which can be accessed by using a search engine.

 

 

 

crypto_sloth
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Re: VPN and Plusnet fibre broadband

Hi @caravanj,

thats pretty much what I thought was the case until some would be VPN expert threw a spanner in the works by claiming he'd answered 1000s of such questions. I knew that the ISP hands over the information and the info from the VPN onwards in anonymised making it a darn site harder for the actual information to be discovered. I guess the next step in the law l almost obviously, is to force VPNs to hand over their encryption keys which would then reduce a VPN to nothing more than a wifi hotspot safety app and no more.

have a look at cyph.com and their security claims , ill copy n paste it in here as it takes a bit of messing around to find it :- "Cyph is end-to-end encrypted using our patent-pending Castle messaging protocol. Castle is an encryption protocol inspired by the classic Off-the-Record (OTR), with a number of architectural details influenced by Open Whisper Systems' Signal Protocol — such as the use of elliptic curves (ECDH/Curve25519).

The major departure that Castle takes from these other solutions is that it's been designed to theoretically withstand an attack from a quantum computer running Shor's algorithm (50 - 100 years from now). This is thanks to our incorporation of the post-quantum cipher NTRU, along with lower-level details such as a unique public key authentication technique that mitigates the theoretical strengths of a quantum computer. This helps ensure that your now-private conversations won't one day suddenly become public after an accident of science.

Fun fact: to crack a single Castle message would require 1038 Tianhe-2 supercomputers running for the lifetime of the universe."

Its an incredibly easy , no sign up, no held data , text message , voice message and video message application available for iOS and Android. It's extremely easy to use and it's the only way I communicate w my online friends. I remember the days of TextSecure where u had to mess about with Keys and exchange them in order to encrypt then decrypt each message , which just took too much time and is probably the reason people no longer use it to the extent they did , but back in 2012 that was the best they had. 

But cyph is on a different level of security , that along w a good VPN, Strong, Express, Freedome, etc and a TOR configured browser (I use Red Onion, I find it's just that little bit quicker than TOR , possibly cuz ppl think TOR is the only onion router out there....smh) 

LukeAger
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Re: VPN and Plusnet fibre broadband

I think you misunderstood the meaning of my previous comments. When requesting logs from Vpn providers, provided the authorities have jurisdiction they generally do not look for decryption keys, they would be all but useless unless you happened to have a full packet capture.
Generally the request is simply to determine who leased the offending IP/range during the dates in question.
Those logs are easy to come by provided you have jurisdiction. Lots of providers advertise that they don't log what you do while using the vpn and that's usually true. But they do log who is using given IP's and that is what we typically are interested in.(from my perspective)

Actually looking inside the tunnel is a different issue altogether.