I sometimes wonder if NordVPN has done more for the privacy cause than anything else, purely for the sheer amount of advertising.
this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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Privacy
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But most of their claims are false. And how does it do anything for privacy. And if you say obscures your ip address.
It certainly make me feel safer against big tech snooping. Is obscuring your IP address not useful? I genuinely want to hear the arguments for and against VPNs. And if they're not effective what are better ways we can protect ourselves?
VPNs hide your IP from your ISP and anyone they share that information with. Here in the UK ISPs keep a record of every internet connection you make and pass it on to the government and perhaps others. Using a VPN here means that instead of them knowing every single website you visit they just know you are using a VPN (or Tor, or a proxy etc if that's what you're using). All they can tell from that data is what time you're active online and how much data you upload/download, not which websites you're visiting.
The websites that you connect to at the other end can still determine who you are by means other than your IP address, like information that your machine presents to them which is unique. VPNs don't protect against this.
A VPN is like a private courier. What the recipient does with the delivered message (and what you've put in it) is out of the courier's hands.
Just the fact that NordVPN claims to protect your privacy means that the average person hears about privacy a lot
Another wall of text no one will ever read does nothing. Here's what works:
https://lemmy.world/post/21620691 https://lemmy.world/post/20950542
You're basically studying viral pathology and immunology at that point. Remember how restaurant little can be for making and for vaccinations in American culture?
On top of it taking the slightest effort ... We basically have to settle the solutions and then invite or incentivize them into it, which is hard when you're against disinformation networks with better fundling.
Not to say it's hopeless. Just that the incentives in a highly individualized society captured under surveillance capitalism are misaligned.
Interesting you say viral pathology and immunology. Can you expand on what you mean on that a bit? I find it a useful analog for what's going on.
I'm sorry, first of all, for the egregious typos in my last remark. I won't be fixing them or future typos, lol.
Second, vaccines work by every person in a network being a less-weak node with less attack surface than if the whole network is without. Every person that armors up is protecting the whole system, just a little bit, until the network is complete with less attack surface.
Privacy restrictions, antivirus, healthy infosec, follow similar principals as masks and shots in arms, and you have to start studying how the threats respond to shifting attack surface.
At the point the effort to execute on the securing behavior is lowered, adoption improves, but at the point it conflicts with competing values you have to start marketing to people to do the right thing. Selling them on collective interest and on self interest. It's ironic.
How you do ANY of this, well, I can only speculate. I come from a backwards country where 1/3 of our population successfully installed a national health director that admits to not believing in germ theory, and I half expect civilian encryption to be outlawed in the next 18 months.
Anyone want to join my privacy team? I'm trying out for the 2026 Olympics.
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I can use an sdr to read your water meter and determine how often you go to the bathroom, shower, wash your clothes, and when you're home and it's not illegal. I'm allowed to follow you around and take your picture as much as I want to. I can print off as many pictures of you as I want in public and wallpaper my whole house with your face and body, there's nothing you can do about it. I can do an 8 hour video essay about you and share this with everyone. As long as the info is publicly available (or not in most U.S. states), it's legal.
You could get charged with stalking.
In my state it's not stalking if you don't make any threats. You don't have an expectation of privacy in public. That's the argument they use with license plate cameras and other warrantless survelance, tracking, facial recognition, etc.
Damn. that is creepy. Similar to the comment someone else left about stalking....
Maybe I'll so a series of case studies via the blog - thank you for sharing this!
for the site see if you can reissue the cert or try certbot if u already used certbot try manyally downloading the cert an pointibng to it
The site is hosting by a hosting company - and they assure me that the cert is fine.
If I was self hosting I'd expect these problems, but not with a hosting company.
The only difference with this company is that they do not use any big tech infrastructure - they have their own servers. I wonder if big tech has something they don't.....?
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