You are right, I didn’t mention to simply use TOR, the onion router and its browser based on Firefox. The other solution is to change ISP’s. If you can’t get one in your area, consider relocating. Outside of the options we have, vpns, proxy, browser config and ext, firewalls, there is no way to 100% leave no trace of your digital self and your Internet behavior. Considering the laws Congress are enabeling, privacy is a much needed commodity and they plan to use this to profit from greatly.
That might be because of me lol. I tried signing up for another $100 free credit promo and tried multiple names, emails, etc but I guess they might be checking for people abusing it
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I haven’t seen anything like that (I rely on Linode for the gateway node for my server because I don’t trust my ISP with that). Reach out to Linode support I’m sure they’ll be happy to help.
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Because it’s a good service, and is a mutually beneficial situation.
Did you sign up through the VPN that you signed up to this forum with? Linode has a responsibility to protect against malicious activities. Almost all malicious activities happen from behind VPNs.
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Using a VPN isn’t illegal though, and to assume becuase someone is conducting illegal activities when using a vpn, simply by signing up for services, isn’t that paranoid and prejiduce? I mean, I use a vpn everywhere I go, and the only services that give me trouble are like google based services. I have to temperarily shut down my vpn if I don’t want to go thru extra verification and or sms. Is this what you are meaning?
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I would consider asking support, checking your email address, perhaps there is a typo, and or, that verification email went to spam, or another email account even, if you mistakenly used a different email address. If you check all the possible areas you could have made a mistake, I would maybe contact support and/or simply make a new account and try again with a different email. Maybe use a different computer on a different network, ie Lilbrary, to create the account on?
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Yep.
Clearly something about his fingerprint set off their protections.
Sometimes what we do on this forum when we suspect someone is a spammer is ask them to re-verify their email. It’s as simple as opening their email and clicking a button, but for 95% of spammers, that’s too much work and they go elsewhere.
I’m not sure what Linode suspected, but they obviously have a protection in place to prevent either illegal activity or terms of use violations, and somehow xasLok ran afoul of the anomaly detection systems.
Also, from a forum administration perspective, it only indicates to us that you don’t want us to know who you are, and that makes us suspicious. For example, it’s fairly easy to find out who I am if you look into my profile. I’m sure that’s horrifying to some, but frankly, there’s good reasons for that.
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That is exactly it. They couldn’t get his fingerprint. That is how I know my vpn and broswer settings, extensions, are working. I always assumed this without actually knowing, giving them more credit possibly, than they deserve. But I was wrong. It would be intetional fingerprinting they are after to associate the account with the actual hardware of the device. Of course this would be in the form of a huge database and would likely be updated daily. This centralization of personal private data is what is concerning to me. But this is childs play, though we are not talking about the capability of an intel community who has a target in sight. We are talking about companies, that which operate under protocol and authority to mass dragnet meta data, as well as content. And being we are talking about ISP and your traffic, our traffic, everyones everything traffic, its a bit concerning. Maybe even unbelievable at times. With the scale and magnitude of the net cast, it would only be logical to have this technology and reach in literally every digital corner.
You may know who I am. I am good with that, because I know you personally and decently well. Otherwise, though, I think you already know I don’t agree.
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Nah, I don’t want to use Protonmail. I decided a long time ago that I didn’t trust the service; and something recently happened that justified my decision. Instead, I’ve been using https://runbox.com. I am a firm believer of privacy-by-compartmentalization; so I do not use any one provider for two or more services at the same time (i.e. putting all my eggs in one basket).
I am a Linode customer already. I have two servers with them, both at the $10/month tier with backups enabled so I pay like $25/month for them. And as a matter of fact, one of those servers, my host for various game servers (namely Factorio and Vintage Story), would be perfect for a wireguard instance.
That’s cool. Could I do that same thing except with my Linode server? Also you got any documentation or tutorial links I could utilize as I am still very new to PFSense? Thanks.
Comcast is a greedy-ass corporation. I was looking at the stock market the other day as I was planning on doing a little bit of trading, and did you know that Comcast has the highest stock price of any cable company? Additionally, from one of the articles I read about it, a Wells Fargo financial expert seems to think that Comcast’s high-margin ad business will allow it to better weather new infrastructure rollouts that he predicts cable companies are having to do as “competition increases among them” (Boy I hope he’s right).
Also, @KenPC and @regulareel, currently I use MozillaVPN. I realized long ago that trusting Mozilla with my data really isn’t much different than that of Linode or Mullvad (since MozillaVPN uses the Mullvad infrastructure after all). I don’t think I would ever use AWS for this simply because I am not already a customer.
Honestly, the thing that I think I will do is use my Linode that I use to host my game servers. This will hopefully help alleviate the speed issues and vpn-blacklist problems of some websites and services. Remember, my goal isn’t total anonymity. My goal is self-preservation from abusive ISP practices. Linode isn’t an abusive data-brokering ISP.
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Thanks @ThatGuyB for being the only one to answer the technical question. And My ISP is a humongous dick - the biggest dick of them all. I’d literally rather have Google as my ISP. But as with so many other areas in the United States, my only two viable options are Comcast and AT&T, but AT&T only offers 25/2 VDSL in my neighborhood which brings the viable count down to 1. Though to AT&T’s credit, they are aggressively rolling out fiber in my local area.
I use Tor very rarely, and have a basic understanding of how the network works from my research on the Tor Project’s official website. I don’t really have much use of it outside of surfing onion websites out of curiosity, and I haven’t found anything useful to me on there yet sadly. I’ve considered putting my personal website on the dark web for funsies though. 
Also, I am aware of the path of trust one goes through when considering privacy, and I have decided that I’d even trust Google Fiber more than Comcast. That being said, I currently use MozillaVPN and I have been. They use Mullvad’s servers, and although they are slightly less trustworthy than Mullvad themselves, I figured that this would be a good way to support them since I only wanted a VPN to get around the firewall at work xD and connect to insecure public networks - which I do a fair bit. Now the scope of why I need a VPN has slightly changed, so I am finding that Mullvad/MozillaVPN no longer work for me anymore. I run into too many blocks from services I try to use, and I get 1/4 the speeds that I am paying for. Considering that my service costs me (and the FCC xD) a total of $60/month for 400/20mbps I really want all the speed I can get for that highway-robbery of a price.
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Piggy-backing on what @SgtAwesomesauce said:
I’ve noticed a lot of abuse of Linode’s services; and simply because they don’t have the reputation of Amazon’s AWS, they are sadly fairly powerless to counteract the negative reviews they get from it. I’ve seen someone complain that an IP address that originated from this company “hacked” his YouTube TV account or something. Someone from Linode explained that they were a VPS provider and that someone was probably abusing the service. His unfair complaint is still active - though I wonder what that guy’s true intentions were because evidently he’s smart enough to trace an IP address back to its originating source, but not smart enough to perform basic research on the business and draw logical conclusions about why an IP address from them “hacked” their account…
I don’t remember the sign-up process for Linode since I have been a customer since 2019, before I found Level1Techs; but I imagine that the Sergeant is right in saying that Linode is trying to protect its service from abusive “customers”.
As another example, someone filed a formal complaint that Linode deleted their account without warning; and Linode’s Terms of Service explain why an account could be deemed fraudulent. Among those, nonpayment for services rendered is one reason.
Another complaint was generated by a person who is receiving unsolicited Spam from an IP address owned by Linode. And the email sending the spam is a gmail account… but Linode gets the flack.
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Yes, you could set up an OpenVPN client on pfSense to connect to a VPN server running on your Linode instance. Then, assign the OVPN client to an interface, configure manual outbound NAT for LAN to OVPN, and change the ‘Default allow LAN to any’ rule to use the OVPN interface as its gateway.
That’s a really brief summary. Lawrence Systems is probably one of the best tutorial resources for pfSense.
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You know what the funny thing is. People think i’m crazy for doing this stuff. But I think its crazy i have to.
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I’ve seen that video, and tbh the product wasn’t all that interesting to me. I don’t really watch any geo-blocked content.
Well, then again, the only option to protect your data from your ISP and trick them to not throttle you, is to do a TCP VPN (OpenVPN in this case) in a VPS and set it to listen on port 443. That way, your ISP will think you are visiting a website (because all they will see is TLS encrypted traffic to port 443, which is usually https and most ISPs, I believe, don’t throttle or restrict this) – unleeesss they also have some automation to try a curl or wget to the “site” you are connecting to (doubt it), in which case they might throttle you. I guess it’s worth a try if you have a Linode instance (if not, you probably know the deal, $100 free trial on sign-up with the level1techs referral code). Why I believe the latter to not be the case is because you can’t know if some http(s) websites are restricted by a firewall, so blocking or throttling it is a gamble. But ISPs in the US are shitty, so it’s not out of the question for them to try that.
Again, UDP traffic might suffer a little if you have too many packet loses between your home and your VPS, but it shouldn’t be that big of a deal. Try it, see how it goes and maybe report back.
Is there any reason I couldn’t use WireGuard?
Wireguard is UDP only, it might get throttled. It’s worth a shot if you put it on UDP port 443, but that’s unusual and QUIC isn’t really “out there” yet, so you might see some traffic throttling. Try it out and see if it works.
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for sure worth a shot.
And a VPS only cost a few dollars to play around with and find out
I’d say give this a go