@ins0mniak And they will defend it even though the reason behind the VPN block is obvious. Deanonymization and money. If it wasn't about this, they would block that with CloudFed.
At least it's cheap entertainment unlike when you have to work with these IT boomers. Muh LAMP stack is da best. Nothing can beat Apache and MySQL.
@phnt Oh they're all defending it. like "yea another win for gab!"
They're doing that boomer thing where they start going on about forcing people to verify their ids with real names to "stop the trolls"
Torba sends so much info to law enforcement, if he can force them to pay for gab pro on top of it its the icing on the cake.
I've been enjoying reading the threads immensely, tho you're right. Working with them is a nightmare. Anytime anything goes wrong its "uhhh the server is down"
@SoylentGroyper@ins0mniak VPNs are completely misused. Their point never was hiding something, or anonymity. They were made for access to a walled-off LAN from the Internet.
In the context of anonymity they are glorified proxies and if you use them for anything other than hiding your real IP/traffic from your ISP, and/or bypassing geoblocking, you are using them for something they aren't supposed to do.
@ins0mniak he's correct in that VPN detection is the fundamental problem here - it sort of defeats 50% (not all) of the purpose of a VPN, which is that you can use the internet "as if" being a regular user, and NOT use the internet as a "marked" user, that apparently everybody can easily recognize to be a VPN user, and then be discriminated against and sanctioned for being a #VPN user. Gab is just one a**hole that makes use of this detection, unfortunately others use it too, Reddit is one I believe (but you can use with an account) and 4chan is another (you can't post from a VPN unless you pay for their gold account or what it's called). He is wrong with saying Proxies would be any better - no, these will also be flagged as "VPNs" because they treat any IP coming from the cloud as a VPN I believe, so only end user ISPs work and are "not VPNs" in their thinking
@phnt@ins0mniak I would say they are deceptively advertised as "this VPN will make you safe on the internet", which is obviously not true. For people who know what they're doing on the internet, they're one tool of many many tools, a tool that can be useful sometimes.
@ins0mniak definitely Gab is not to be trusted, trusted with personal data such as real ID and real IP, which is why a VPN or similar measure is not a bad idea there and on many other places on the internet. Gab could be hacked or Torba could give the data way voluntarily, so obviously it shouldn't be given to them in the first place. Them insulting VPN users or stigmatizing them as trolls is outrageous, many dissidents use VPNs even without knowing what they do exactly, probably didn't actually help, but I would never insult them for trying it, which Torba and his "experts" apparently are doing. Some VPN providers were actually advertising on Gab!!! 😆 #Cloudflare is a honeypot in my estimation - it is officially known to decrypt all SSL&TLS traffic, before re-encrypting it and sending it on to the original site, encrypted for this site - how can anyone not be disturbed by this is beyond me.
@SoylentGroyper Well in his case, the main issue lies in the fact that he actively advertises people to come on his site and post controversial things, many people have good reason to want some anonymity when doing so.
Gab is a badly built site in a number of ways, they've gotten hacked one time enough to where all their CC transactions, addresses etc were taken and leaked nn DDOs secreets for every journo to go have a field day with.
Second he openly brags about his willingness to share information with law enforcement which he certainly cant be trusted to be scrupulous about.
>you can't post from a VPN unless you pay for their gold account or what it's called
yeah that's just slimey. :torba1:
Of course you're right when you mention sites like Reddit et al for blocking VPN and Tor traffic, personally I refuse to visit any site that blocks tor, for a lot of reason but mainly I'm not doing the humiliation ritual of pointing out the fucking bycycles on a grid for the 1,903477902th time.
A VPN will only do so much, it won't do much to negate browser fingerprinting on it's own. At the end of the day it's just a tunnel really from on server to another. Great for pirating movies or watching tv in a another country. Regardless people should be able to do what they want.
He is using CloudFlare to block tor which given his predilection to sucking up to law enforcement is a bit....interesting.
@ins0mniak@SoylentGroyper >CloudFed Their market share comes from companies that can't use anything else. As a big company, building your CDN from scratch with DDoS protection is a waste of money and you won't do it properly anyway. What CF built over the years is technologically very impressive, but they shouldn't be trusted with data coming from sources not aligning with government opinions. Neither should Akamai or any other big CDN anti-DDoS provider. They all glow.
Especially fedi instance operators should know better. I've never seen a properly implemented CF proxy on fedi anyway. Maybe NCD has done it properly, but I wasn't motivated to check yet.
>Them insulting VPN users or stigmatizing them as trills is outrageous, many dissidents use VPNs even without knowing what they do exactly
They have no respect for their users. They know that they're gullible older people for the most part and easy to bilk.
I saw Torba one time telling a lady who was on social security she needed to get a pro account to help save America. Just Gross.
Cloudlfare is really bad, I'm amazed how many people who should know better don't. They have a massive amount of control over the internet that they shouldn't have what so ever. Lord knows what they're doing behind the scenes you know?
@ins0mniak Torba / #Gab is delusional in thinking his site doen't need it's own users and communities. It's exactly the opposite, we couldn't care less what server it is, we just use these social media sites to chat and talk to people, anyone can operate something like Gab, and him constantly complaining about costs and so on is ludicrous for anyone familiar with the costs nowadays - they're basically giving away these servers, and bandwidth is unlimited and free of charge usually. Cloudflare is advertised as protecting against hackers and DDOS and such things, but is this worth letting your entire traffic be decrypted by this dubious site? It's extremely suspicious - how can #Cloudflare offer all this for free? (or low cost idk), definitely smells like a honeypot
@SoylentGroyper He's just squeezing people for money, I doubt he believes in anything he says, he changes personas so often. Before gab he was giving interviews where he was blabbing about how important feminism was in tech.
idk, big picture: Twenty years of social media/big tech has infantalized people. So yeah many people can't do much on their own because all the tools that empowered them to do so have been pulled out of view in favor of things like Facebooks etc.
Ive seen people struggle to even use Fedi. I mean one would think it's as easy as anything to sign up to post on a server but some people really struggle, not just with the onboarding but with the entire experience.
@ins0mniak@SoylentGroyper >fedi >some people struggle with onboarding I went through this twice and what always sucks is finding people to follow and threads to reply to. Big instances are the worst as local timeline is fast and TWKN unusable. And requiring reasons for registration also don't help. I personally never knew what to write there, hence why I host my own.
@phnt@ins0mniak 💯 agree, and I for one would gladly accept some outages due to DDoS attacks every now and then (which are not a safety breach) than having Cloudflare as a man-in-the-middle
@SoylentGroyper@ins0mniak >dubious Google protection That reminds me that my ISP's DNS servers redirect ReVanced to their "This site is dangerous page". Patching APKs is dangerous, kids.
@ins0mniak it's like there are two "opposites" continuously expanding: on the one hand, the complexity of sites&apps is expanding, just take this VPN thing as one example, it used to be your IP was just a number, then they started geolocating it, then Cloudflare started blocking some IPs and now this VPN detection thing it's insane. Then these "algorithms" that started being used just for advertisements, but now they have insane things behind these obnoxious AI chat bots, stuff that cost them billions in licenses and development, but they hide that and make it seem easy. On the other hand, the users of the internet are becoming dumber, they used to know things like typing a URL into a browser, and HTML and so on, but now you have smartphone users who literally just use speech to use their phone, and everything pops up automatically, and some dubious Google "protection" then tells them they are "safe" right now. It's these two opposites that keep growing. and no sign of any "competency crisis" anytime soon on the side of Big Tech, how they do it idk (probably jeets doing it all)
@phnt@SoylentGroyper Yeah true, I guess I understant the reason for its existence but it doesn't annoy me any less. No question that shits glowing man, you can probably see it from the moon lol.
@SoylentGroyper Younger people are worse than boomers a lot of the time now. Growing up on an iphone isn't going to be mind expanding in terms of learning about and understand your computer, which is horrifying to me. Something that personal, a device you essential live in and use to communicate with the world locked down to the point where the average person has no clue how it works.
@ins0mniak@SoylentGroyper XFinity is Comcast, right? Cox has the audacity to block ports near the default Wireguard one, if they suspect you use it to host shit and call that a security feature.
@ins0mniak@phnt that's actually one thing where a VPN can be useful - some VPN providers offer a real IP on the internet, that can be used to receive incoming connections on any port
@SoylentGroyper@ins0mniak Mullvad offered that, but they've turned that off because it was getting abused (I think probably too much torrenting and they didn't want to deal with it).
It's somewhat normal in Europoor land for more knowledgeable people to buy a VPS and use that as a proxy to your network for hosting at home since it's usually cheaper than buying a VPN subscription and certainly cheaper than renting a publicly routable IP from your ISP. My current ISP wants $12 for a public IP which is more than twice than a trash tier VPS from basically any reputable provider.
Oh port forwarding is a massive pain in the ass. You cant even access the routers control panel directly, you have to download their app to do anything with it.
You can get your own router but only some are supported and they make it a royal pain.
it looks like some schitzo set it up but it works for me and keeps a lot of my stuff isolated from other stuff and my normie stuff: ps5 work laptop etc isolated from my home desktop with pi hole and such.
> I mean, you can go get a VPS from an onion site with crypto....set up a VPN for yourself that way.
then your device and origin ip now has attribution and correlation to the vps purchased with the cryptocurrency. vps/paas providers log or can on demand. might as well just pull out the credit card at that point or only use the vps at the local diner 100mi away from homebased.
@ins0mniak@jae@SoylentGroyper If I wanted my anonymity and still host things at home, I would probably use Tor Hidden Services. They work fine behind a NAT.
while true, the vps/paas provider still sees the tcp or udp connection originating from your device and network. so if the operational model includes anonymity or pseudo-anonymity it's a no-go, since there's attribution.
> You could also torpedo it if necessary.
i'm not sure what torpedo is.
> Crypto is far from secure in that regard sure but id feel better about a set up like that over say...surfboard or something
sure, but really you might as well pay a few bucks with a credit card or virtual card if that's more convenient and buy the vps and route traffic through it.
unless you're trying to hide from governments and their law enforcement it's pretty solid. and if you are trying to hide from those it's going to take a giant cashpile to try to do so.
@phnt@ins0mniak@SoylentGroyper i'm also a fan of multi-homing via tor+i2p+yggdrasil. currently writing a multi-network traffic router thingy that makes this brainless because i'm brainless.
@ins0mniak@jae@SoylentGroyper >Bad use of a vpn tbh, I'm just talking about pirating shit. >phnt mentioned that it was cheaper in some plplaces to just set up a VPS than it is to pay for a vpn. >That's where I'm going with that. I'll probably build a sneedbox like that in the future since I wanted a couple things for some time now and I can't sneed from my home IP thanks to being behind a NAT. And honestly VPNs that allow that allow port forwarding kinda glow.
@ins0mniak@jae@SoylentGroyper I finally migrated everything I had on Epik to somewhere else. It felt like finally dropping a heavy backpack on the floor. In the last year or so, when they got bought, they've broken like half of the panel. Log out didn't work unless you reloaded the page, there were two separate systems for 2FA and other stuff barely worked.
Requiring a written email for account deletion also wasn't great, but I sort of get it for a registrar.
@SoylentGroyper@ins0mniak Thankfully the only service that requires me to use a phone app is my bank. They forced their stupid app on everyone, but at least I'm not forced to use biometrics.
A week ago, I wanted to setup GPay to try it out and immediately noped out when it asked me to register a fingerprint. Fuck that.
On the topic of Google being involved in authentication. I know way to many people that save password in Google and don't remember their Google password. When their phone dies, they wouldn't be able to log in to 99% of their accounts. And I can tell them: Use a password manager, I can host one for you if you want. I've been using it for years and it never failed me. But they still won't budge. They are too far gone. Same with their contacts. Everything in Google.
@ins0mniak when you look at the history, smartphones have pretty much abandoned the "open source" idea. Yea Linux is still there, and still dominating servers, but clients are smartphones more often than not, and these are controlled by Google and Apple (yes I know there may be ways around that but not for the common user). There are governments who want to make these the foundation of everything, your passport, your driver's license, your logins, your money even (CBDC), all of these will be an app run on a smartphone with a non-opensource operating system, that requires you to accept the TOS of Google or Apple to use. I made this meme recently to illustrate the insanity of these changes:
@SoylentGroyper > you need a long and randomized and dynamic password which we will make you change every 3 months > then afterwards we will send a push notification to your phone for you to authenticate > this authentication will then send a code to your email address > you have to then enter that code within 5 minutes or it will expire (it will take 12 minutes for the email to arrive to your inbox) @ins0mniak
@phnt@ins0mniak or use a piece of paper (and a copy of that paper in a safe place) - let's face it, they are so heavily invested in digital surveillance, the moment you "go full analog" (like Robert DeNiro said in Zero Day, something I found really cool) Google et al are powerless. Once you communicate over an analog two-way radio for example, there won't be someone listening, unless you're really important and they spend money on you. These smartphone authentications are going to become a pain in the a**, this so called "digital transformation" is increasing, and at some point you will need a phone in a faraday bag, just in case you can't pay without one, or enter a parking garage and such things. I'm definitely going to fight it and not going to give in easily.
@SoylentGroyper@phnt in 15 years people are gonna be forced to transmit encrypted data posts over fucking ham radio or something just to use gamer words. lol
@phnt@ins0mniak@SoylentGroyper .. and not giving Torba your real-IP address. Of course, your VPN provider can rat you out - but, unlikely unless you are committing a crime.
I am not talking about whether some govt-agency can "figure out" your real IP - because that doesn't get used in a dox. For non-criminals, this is about not losing all access to "being employed for money," for talking about what The Ruling Jews are doing.