Use of VPNs to Change Borders?

 Considering the use of a VPN to border the web?

ACM NEWS

How Millions of Russians are Tearing Holes in the Digital Iron Curtain   By The Washington Post, May 6, 2022

When Russian authorities blocked hundreds of Internet sites in March, Konstantin decided to act. The 52-year-old company manager in Moscow tore a hole in the Digital Iron Curtain, which had been erected to control the narrative of the Ukraine war, with a tool that lets him surf blocked sites and eyeball taboo news.

Konstantin turned to a virtual private network, an encrypted digital tunnel more commonly known as a VPN. Since the war began in February, VPNs have been downloaded in Russia by the hundreds of thousands a day — a massive surge in demand that represents a direct challenge to President Vladimir Putin's attempt to seal Russians off from the wider world. By protecting the locations and identities of users, VPNs are now granting millions of Russians access to blocked material.

Downloading one in his Moscow apartment, Konstantin said, brought back memories of the 1980s in the Soviet Union — when he used a shortwave radio to hear forbidden news of dissident arrests on U.S.-funded Radio Liberty.

From The Washington Post

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Microsoft Edge to include VPN

Wondered about this recently why not?  How secure can it be? MS has big storage assets.  Why not leverage further data for better security?

Microsoft Edge to include built-in VPN

The catch is it only covers 1GB of data usage per month.

By Igor Bonifacic  in Engadget

Microsoft has consistently tried to get more people to use Edge. Some of the ways it has pursued that goal have been less well-received than others, but its latest effort to do so could make for a useful addition to the software. In a support page spotted by The Verge, the company revealed it’s adding a free built-in VPN service dubbed Edge Secure Network to its web browser. 

The company says the tool will encrypt your internet connection. You can use that functionality to protect your data from your internet service provider. As with most VPNs, you can also use Edge Secure Network to mask your location, making it possible to access services that might otherwise be blocked in the country where you live or are visiting. ...'

Hardening your VPN

 Just posted, as usual these often get interesting comments.

Via Schneier:     Hardening Your VPN    

The NSA and CISA have released a document on how to harden your VPN .... 

Which VPN are Secure?

Useful look provided.  Who do we trust?

Which VPN Providers Really Take Privacy Seriously in 2021?

June 14, 2021 by Ernesto Van der Sar  in Torrentfreak

HOME > TECHNOLOGY > VPN PROVIDERS >

Choosing the right VPN can be a tricky endeavor. There are hundreds of VPN services out there, all promising to keep you private but some are more private than others. To help you pick the best one for your needs, we asked dozens of VPNs to detail their logging practices, how they handle torrent users, and what else they do to keep you as anonymous as possible.

private lockThe VPN industry is booming and prospective users have hundreds of options to pick from. All claim to be the best, but some are more privacy-conscious than others.

The VPN review business is also flourishing as well. Just do a random search for “best VPN service” or “VPN review” and you’ll see dozens of sites filled with recommendations and preferred picks.

We don’t want to make any recommendations. When it comes to privacy and anonymity, an outsider can’t offer any guarantees. Vulnerabilities are always lurking around the corner and even with the most secure VPN, you still have to trust the VPN company with your data.

Instead, we aim to provide an unranked overview of VPN providers, asking them questions we believe are important. Many of these questions relate to privacy and security, and the various companies answer them in their own words.

We hope that this helps users to make an informed choice. However, we stress that users themselves should always make sure that their VPN setup is secure, working correctly, and not leaking.

This year’s questions and answers are listed below. We have included all VPNs we contacted that don’t keep extensive logs or block torrent traffic on all of their servers. The order of the providers is arbitrary and doesn’t carry any value.

—

1. Do you keep (or share with third parties) ANY data that would allow you to match an IP-address and a timestamp to a current or former user of your service? If so, exactly what information do you hold/share and for how long?

2. What is the name under which your company is incorporated (+ parent companies, if applicable) and under which jurisdiction does your company operate?

3. What tools are used to monitor and mitigate abuse of your service, including limits on concurrent connections if these are enforced?

4. Do you use any external email providers (e.g. Google Apps), analytics, or support tools ( e.g Live support, Zendesk) that hold information provided by users?

5. In the event you receive a DMCA takedown notice or a non-US equivalent, how are these handled?

6. What steps would be taken in the event a court orders your company to identify an active or former user of your service? How would your company respond to a court order that requires you to log activity for a user going forward? Have these scenarios ever played out in the past?

7. Is BitTorrent and other file-sharing traffic allowed on all servers? If not, why? Do you provide port forwarding services? Are any ports blocked?

8. Which payment systems/providers do you use? Do you take any measures to ensure that payment details can’t be linked to account usage or IP-assignments?

9. What is the most secure VPN connection and encryption algorithm you would recommend to your users?

10. Do you provide tools such as “kill switches” if a connection drops and DNS/IPv6 leak protection? Do you support Dual Stack IPv4/IPv6 functionality?

11. Are any of your VPN servers hosted by third parties? If so, what measures do you take to prevent those partners from snooping on any inbound and/or outbound traffic? Do you use your own DNS servers?

12. In which countries are your servers physically located? Do you offer virtual locations?

Important note: services that offer dedicated or fixed IP-addresses are often able to link the IP-address to the user account, irrespective of the answer to question 1.

Tip: Here’s a list of all VPN providers covered here, with direct links to the answers. Some links in this article are affiliate links. This won’t cost you a penny more but it helps us to keep the lights on. ... '

History of the VPN

Intriguing history, now finally becoming universal.  Saw it first in the enterprise. 

Everything VPN is New Again in ACM Queue

The 24-year-old security model has found a second wind.

David Crawshaw  in 

The VPN (virtual private network) is 24 years old. The concept—cryptographically secure tunnels used as virtual wires for networking—was created for a radically different Internet from the one we know today. As the Internet grew and changed, so did VPN users and applications. The VPN had an awkward adolescence in the Internet of the 2000s, interacting poorly with other widely popular abstractions such as multiuser operating systems. In the past decade the Internet has changed again, and this new Internet offers new uses for VPNs. The development of a radically new protocol, WireGuard, provides a technology on which to build these new VPNs.

This article is a narrative history of the VPN. All narratives necessarily generalize and cannot capture every nuance, but it is a good-faith effort to (critically) celebrate some of the recent technical history of networking and to capture the mood and attitudes of software engineers and network administrators toward the VPN.  ... "