You can’t just tell people to ‘get a VPN (Virtual Private Network)’. Buying a VPN is like buying a house. It’s very very important. Having no VPN or having a ‘wrong’ one can seriously damage your life. Especially for Americans because their privacy laws are garbage. I am going to try explain why you should get a VPN but bare with me, I am from Germany and my English is far from perfect.
Let’s start with a simple test. Click this link here: https://whatismyipaddress.com/ It will tell your IP adres, your ISP (internet service provider), and your location. The location might not be very accurate, but then again, it’s just a simple website. Imagine what the government can do!
So basically, everyone can find out where you live. But there is more danger. Your ISP. Your ISP logs your every move online and they are required to keep it in case the government wants access to it (or if a 3rd party wants to buy your data (yikes). They have everything. What websites you visit. How long you stay on a website. What you download. Your search terms. European laws are more subtle on this but if you are from the US you are #@*#&, especially because Trump doesn’t support the open internet. It’s scary but maybe in the future you can’t get a job because the recruiter knows your searched on ‘how to deal with depression’ or anythings else that’s supposed to be private because it’s your f*cking right. Or you get a $100k fine because you pirated a movie 15 years ago. You need a VPN. You’re dumb for not using one. but what does a VPN do?
A VPN encrypts all your data so if it were be intercepted no one can ‘crack the code’ and damage your privacy.
Usually being online goes like this (simplified): Your computer —-> ISP (—–> keeps data —–> sells it)
But with a VPN it goes like: Your computer —–> VPN (encrypts data)—–> ISP (ISP can’t see shit)
Furthermore, a VPN hides your IP address and location by giving you another IP address located in Spain for example (you can often choose from a list and change as many times as you want).
Now that you know why you should get a VPN and what is does it is important to educate yourself because people often choose the wrong VPN. VPN providers are also businesses and have to obey the law. If you choose a VPN provider located in the US then you are throwing your money away because the laws in the US shits on your privacy. If the US gov wants the provider to give all their logs they have to obey. The ISP still can’t see what you are doing online and sell your data but the US gov can interfere with your VPN provider so NEVER CHOOSE A PROVIDER LOCATED IN THE US.
I just wanted to make that very clear so my followers don’t buy false security.
There is still more danger! Who says your VPN provider isn’t selling your data? You need to check their logging policy. Do they keep logs? If yes, what for? For how long do they keep them? Tip: Choose a provider who doesn’t keep logs
More about law The US is part of the Five Eyes program (the worst):
The Five Eyes, often abbreviated as FVEY, is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are bound by the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence (source)
There is also a Nine Eyes (bit better) and Fourteen Eyes Program (better). You don’t want a VPN provider who is located in one the Five Eyes countries. If you had to choose go for a provider located in a country that’s part of the Fourteen Eyes Program or even better, go for a country that isn’t part of any program!
I know this is a shitty explanation and please pardon my english but now it’s time to do your own research. Take your privacy seriously. Maybe WWIII breaks out and you get killed for liking the ‘wrong’ FB-page.
Make sure that your future VPN provider both has green boxes for Privacy Jurisdiction and Privacy Logging.
I recommend ovpn.se and trust.zone. ovpn is located in Sweden so they are part of the 14 Eyes Program and they keep minimal logs. Their business ethics, however, are alright.
Trustzone is located in the Seychelles. No country can interfere and their privacy jurisdiction is the best you can get. The US want your data but needs to get it from Trustzone? The Seychelles will simply give them the finger and wave them goodbye. However, this makes this provider very appealing for people who torrent and criminals because they keep no logs (and that is how it shoud be) Also, there are almost no marketing efforts so this provider is one the cheapest)
Also, often providers such as ExpressVPN are being called ‘The Best’ on websites about VPNs but know that this is just marketing which also makes those provider more expensive (and they too shit on your privacy)
This must be the worst article you have ever read but please, please take your privacy very seriously.
I am also with Trustzone but I think you forgot to explain one of it’s most important features. It protects you when you are using someone else’s Wi-Fi. If you are at Starbucks and you use their Wi-Fi your privacy is at risk. Anyone with ill intentions could steal your information. Especially if you are using an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot. With a VPN your data gets encrypted so no one can steal it.
Wait, what’s going, on? Did trump destroy internet privacy with a bill or something? Where’s the news? Oh wait, why am I getting visions of Alex Jones and selling water purifiers?
He hasn’t yet but he says he wants to. And if he is serious about it it would be really easy to do. Since all our data is already recorded, as the person above explained.
Trump wants more surveillance of Muslim Americans. This in a country where internet privacy is already close to non-existent.
To all my friends in the US, please read this entire post. Making everyone aware of VPNs is going to be my mission. Your privacy matters. Please reblog this post.
Don’t tell me you just wanted to scroll past this. Stop looking at pictures of cats for a moment, okay? Don’t you realize how important this is? This is dangerous! ‘America, the best FREE country in the world’ my ass.
With this new law your ISP can sell your Internet history which could include passwords, usernames, religion, credit card numbers, race and much more to the highest bidder. So here is what I want you to do.
You are going to read the whole thing and before you think ’this is so important. Let me reblog this real quick and go back to admiring cats again-’ NO! Don’t reblog this. Take action first. Then reblog. Sign up for a free trial! Trust.Zone offers one (here). Yes. It might be difficult to set up a VPN for some people. But is that going to stop you from protecting yourself and your family? 30 minutes. 30 minutes is all that it takes. 5 if you know how to install software. The problem with some of you is that you see ‘difficult’ as something negative. I want you to see difficult differently. I need you to push through this stuff. You are going to protect yourself. There is nothing negative about that.
VPNs are fun and costsaving too! A VPN bypasses geographical restrictions so you can access websites you normally can’t or you could start Netflix’s one month free trial over and over again- forever. And it’s legal! (unless you use it to buy weapons etc.,)
Don’t tell yourself that you are too tired and that you will do this tomorrow. Because that isn’t going to happen and you know it. You have to do this right now. You only have to click on it.
Don’t let this/shit/life just happen to you. Take yourself seriously. Get a VPN.
Privacy is not a privilege, it’s a fundamental human right
I had this pointed out to me, and I wanted it to be the last thing I reblogged so it was the first anyone entering my blog would see. It’s not something I usually post, but it definitely is important enough to make an exception.
Goodnight everyone!
Just a note for people who simply can’t afford to pay for a VPN that free VPNS do exist. They’ll likely not be as good quality as ones you pay for (for example, they may have a cap on how much data you can use with them or have bandwith limits or limited support options) but they’ll still get the job done and they’re better than nothing.
You can find a list of different free VPNs and the descriptions + pros/cons of them here:
All this is terrible advice combined with needless panicking.
First of all, your searches are already protected. Any site whose URL says https rather than http is encrypted, so all the ISP can see is that you visited google*. Or thepiratebay. Or suckinghorsecocks. The actual torrent traffic will be visible, I think, but if you’re in the first world and torrenting stuff it might be a simpler idea to just buy a seedbox.
* also, when you did that, and how much data you got from it
Why not use a free VPN for torrents? Well, free, good performance, trustworthy, pick 2 … and in most cases it’s pick 0 or 1. Plus, remember that with a VPN you’re just moving the burden of trust from your ISP to the VPN – they still have just the same access to your data the ISP would have, and a helluva lot of them are dodgier than most ISPs. After all, what better way for whatever authority it is that you’re worried about to get the traffic of whoever is especially worried about their traffic being listened to (and therefore is much more likely to be Up To Something from the authority’s point of view) to go through their free-and-fast-no-logs-whatsoever-pinky-promise VPN.
Now, if you do still want a VPN (I’ve been procrastinating on setting one up on my phone for when I’m travelling, f’rex) and you’re not trying to run the Revolution off it, I’d recommend protonvpn. Personally, I find them trustworthy (they’re a bunch of CERN scientists with privacy grudges hosting this shit in Switzerland, which has excellent data protection laws, not in the least because the proton folk have campaigned for it :D) and you can switch from free and good performance depending on your resources and requirements 🙂 They’re also running a very good email service called protonmail which I recommend you use for all critical purposes – free version only has 500MB of inbox space, but it’s 500MB that are also encrypted on your side, so nobody but you has access to it.
If you *are* trying to run the Revolution, for whatever “running the Revolution” means in your regime, I’m really not competent enough to advise you. You’ll probably want TOR, and have to worry about a lot of niggly details that wouldn’t be a problem for someone just trying to escape mass dragnets but would be one for someone who’d risk actually being targeted. All the rest of y’all who aren’t running the Revolution, feel free to use TOR too (it’s waaaay more secure than any VPN, free or not, and stuff like ProtonVPN will also route your traffic through TOR if you ask them to, plus the more “innocent” ppl run their traffic through TOR, the less credible is the argument that only people with something to hide use it) but please don’t fucking try torrenting or streaming on it, even if you somehow manage to, since you’ll be eating up a whole lot of bandwidth and slowing shit down for everyone, including the people in too deep danger to use anything else.
And while we’re doing advice…remember your social media accounts are far easier to associate with you than your internet searches. Does it have your phone number? It knows you. Does it have your main email address instead of a different one you made just to sign up on that platform? It knows you. Do you access it from your phone, and have location enabled*? It knows you, and knows where you live. Do you have RL friends on it, or same friends you also have on a different social media platform? It’ll know you if you’re directly targeted, and corellating-this-as-a-dragnet-rather-than-spearfish isn’t technically difficult either. Do you post about stuff you like, or like stuff you like, or generally interact with stuff you like? Boy does your friendly data mining person have some bad news for you.
*srsly ppl, the only time you should have location enabled is when you are fucking lost or trying not to become such, and if you’re on android 6+ you can stop it from sharing location info with apps on a case-by-case basis. Probably iOS too.
However, note that the friendly data mining person has a tumblr account,
and posts crap, and likes crap, and such. Reason being, there’s no such
thing as perfect security, just a tradeoff between security and
convenience, and the vast majority of people reading this (esp first
world) have more to lose from not living their life, or from panicking uselessly, than from not having better security than most everyone else. There’s a lot of stuff you can do for better security that won’t be more than a minor inconvenience * , but beyond that? Stay informed about internet privacy issues, especially on how they relate to your own country, and don’t let the politicians representing you not stay informed of either the issues or your opinion on them either 😉
*beyond the stuff I’ve mentioned above, also adblock, either in-browser or by hosts file, use the PrivacyBadger extension or Brave browser (or Noscript if you’re really serious about stuff – it’s great and does stuff PrivacyBadger and Brave don’t do, but it’s not the sort of thing you install once and then never notice), HTTPS everywhere, have a restrictive cookie policy and I could go on, but seriously, for most of y’all, anxiety is a bigger problem than internet security.
IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW OTHER PEOPLE ARE DOING OR WHETHER THEIR ILLNESS IS “WORSE” THAN YOURS!!! FOR YOU THIS IS A FACTOR IN YOUR LIFE AND THAT DOES FUCKING MATTER!!!
Some commentary well worth a read, which I found earlier via @robohontas on Twitter.
It also must be noted that in areas that are not near Native communities, we are often mistaken as something other than being Native, but still perceived as an “other”.
That bit jumped out particularly, for some fairly obvious reasons. Talk about “the minority of the minority”.
It can feel even weirder in some ways, living somewhere that you know it’s never occurred to at least 99.9% of the population that they might ever encounter someone like you, if people like you exist now. Much less in their own (colonizing) country. With some different weird dynamics than back home.
But yeah, especially given some of the differences in how things work here, and the current political climate amplifying that? (See also: that last reblog.) You can bet some people are going to make sure you know that you’re still perceived as an “other”.
As I mentioned before, specifically in connection to medical settings but extending well beyond? Even if they’re not sure what stereotype(s) to apply, too often people will choose whatever feels best to them and just run with that. While you can never really predict what that might be. Or, often, figure out what version they’ve chosen while you’re trying to deal with it.
As I know I’ve also commented on before, I am still impressed (and kind of surprised) that so far nobody here has felt entitled to get up in my face with the breathtakingly rude “What are you?!” type questions. Much less tried to argue me down whenever it has come up for some reason. Glad not to be dealing with that these days, at least. Different styles.
But, this is another of those areas where I do get the idea that not being readily able to pigeonhole someone immediately can make too many people very, very uncomfortable. Also liable to react badly and take that discomfort out on whoever prompted it by being disturbingly ambiguous in their vicinity.
That can be pretty disconcerting to deal with, and I haven’t noticed it getting talked about much.
Brexit laid bare a deeply illiberal seam of british attitudes. The tone of debate after the UK cast its vote to detach from the rest of EU has not been pretty or comforting for those whom it affects deeply. Oddly belligerent victors have met peacocking triumphalism in a tide of ‘just suck it in, losers’. Those who do not get behind the programme are ‘remoaners’; told to get over it as ‘the people have spoken’.
Six months on Alexa is still experiencing period of intense anxiety where her heart pounds and the world is overwhelming. She is now exploring plans to move to another european country. Alexa feels she can’t talk to the people she works with about her worries. “I was having a conversation with a colleague and my boss turned around and said: “you’re giving me indigestion”. When your boss says something like that you shut up. I feel now I can’t really talk about it at work because because the English people I work with don’t really see why I feel this way.”…
Alexa has been shocked at the way anti-immigrant sentiment has seeped into everyday use; “A colleague was talking about how eastern European immigrants bring in diseases. I think she’s read it on Facebook. I never heard her say anything like that before but it’s become normal.”…
Most people will just ignore the unfolding Brexit story and get on with everyday life. They have the privilege of knowing their place is secure. Those who do not have that luxury will experience the situation differently. If attitudes to people identified as foreign continue to harden, it’s unlikely the anxieties expressed by the children identified as different will reduce. Being trapped in a situation that causes you harm and which you cannot leave causes trauma. And if you belong to a minority, the one thing you can’t do is leave your own skin.
Fun fact: pine cones used to be called “pineapples”, and that’s where the fruit’s name comes from. They look like pine cones and English-speaking explorers named them for that resemblance.
1. People like me get thrown off flights, especially if they’re too full, and asked to pay double for the privilege of waiting for the next one.
2. People like me can’t shop in most malls. We get strange looks and downright condescension if we go into certain stores.
3. I can’t turn on the TV and expect to see someone like me, in general. If I do, then that person is almost always being portrayed as something broken to be fixed, or otherwise in a negative light.
4. When I see people like me talked about in the news, it’s about how horrible people like me are, and what is the best way to get rid of people like me.
5. If I go to an adoption agency I will be told that people like me shouldn’t be parents.
6. If I go to an infertility clinic I will be told that people like me shouldn’t be parents.
7. If my child is someone like me (which they have a good chance of being) I will be told I shouldn’t be a parent. My child might even get taken away from me.
8. I can’t open a magazine and expect to see people like me. However I can expect to see ad after ad for products on how to prevent becoming like me, or how to ‘fix’ someone like me.
9. If I ride the subway/bus, I get dirty looks. People don’t think someone like me deserves to sit. If I stand, they tell me that I’m in the way of everyone else.
10. If I take a walk down the street in a populated area I can expect to be told how horrible I am from passing cars, pedestrians, people in shops — anyone I meet. I might even get things thrown at me, like garbage.
11. If I go to the gym I can expect to get talked down to, and treated like the reason I’m there is to ‘fix’ myself from being so broken and horrible.
12. If I drive my car instead of walk it’s taken as proof of why people like me are horrible. If I don’t go to a public gym it’s taken as proof of why people like me are so horrible.
13. There is big money for people who are trying to eliminate people like me. They especially want to eliminate children who are like me. Most other people, even some people like me, think this is a wonderful thing. They hail an ‘enlightened’ future world that no longer has people like me in it.
14. People like me are blamed for the broken healthcare system.
15. People like me are blamed for global warming.
16. People like me are told that we can’t do certain things, and when we do, we’re told that we’re the exception that proves the rule.
17. I pay three times as much as what other people do for clothes, and it’s often much worse quality, style, fit, and selection. Clothes for people like me are segregated in stores and online, if they are available at all.
18. With some regularity the media debates on morning and news shows if people like me should exist, and how best to get rid of us if not.
19. People like me aren’t in trendy establishments. We are either barred from going, or the place can’t accommodate us, or we get condescended to and pressured to leave as soon as we walk through the door.
20. I can wear the same style and cut of clothing as someone who is not like me, and told that while it is perfectly decent on her, it is indecent on me.
21. People like me are told that we shouldn’t leave the house because of how awful we are, but that we are so awful because we never leave the house.
22. People like me are denied life-saving surgeries and the opportunity to donate organs unless we change.
23. My friends and family think it’s their duty to tell me how horrible I am, and how I should change.
24. People like me are told that we are stupid, lazy, immoral, and broken with regularity. I can expect to hear this several times a day.
25. People like me are never the heroes of books or movies. We are usually cast as the villain.
26. People like me have a harder time getting hired. Employers believe that people like me aren’t good representatives of their company, regardless of our skills, work ethic, experience, or talent. People like me are much less likely to appear in employee circulars and marketing materials. There are even workplace groups and contests where people like me are rewarded for altering themselves, and people who aren’t like me are rewarded for not being like me.
27. People like me are told that we aren’t as intelligent as other people. We are told that it is impossible for us to be economists, health care workers, or honest debaters.
28. People like me are told that we are the worst witnesses to our own experience. We are called liars if we relay experiences that do not hold true to what mainstream culture says about people like me. People who call us liars aren’t just our enemies – they are doctors, nurses, teachers, and our own family.
29. For people like me, social events like family gatherings and class reunions are often battlefields.
30. There is a whole month of the year dedicated to eliminating or preventing people like me. It’s called “Resolution Season” and is widely viewed as a positive and constructive, rather than negative and destructive, phenomenon. During this time of the year it’s nearly impossible to watch television, open a newspaper/magazine, read online media, or walk down a city street without being reminded that people like me are undesirable.
31. Many Western countries have publicly funded campaigns which claim people like me are a problem to be rid of.
32. The very existence of people like me is called one of the top problems of our modern age.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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