In my Homelab I’m currently running a docker container for Sabnzbd and I have another container with Gluten which sab is binded to. Unfortunately this is reducing the download speed since my VPN provider isn’t steady with their speeds. It’s not too bad but it would be definitely faster without going through Gluten at all.
Your ISP can generally tell what website you connect to over HTTPS, and can tell how much data you transfer. The data transferred is encrypted and they can’t see what it is.
Sometimes just the length of the data alone is a privacy leak (eg: if you download one of 1000 files on a website and they each have different sizes).
VPNs help hide what website you’re connecting to from your ISP, though it’s just shifting to your VPN provider and their ISP - which may be an advantage in some situations.
It’s not the downloads that nail you, it’s the upload. You’re almost never going to have an issue with your ISP and Usenet downloads. Torrent uploads are where they get you
You don’t need a VPN if you trust the newsserver. The fact that you are connecting and downloading/uploading from/to a newsserver shouldn’t be a problem cause your ISP can’t see what you are downloading/uploading.
If the server gets compromised by hackers or feds or the server owner decides to share info with law enforcement however, you could get into trouble when downloading copyright protected content.
Depending on the server you choose, your risk might be very low but to be sure I’d still use a VPN and give as little identifying information as possible to the server owner and don’t post any identifying information with the same account or IP that you use to download copyrighted content.
It’s better to explain it using OSI layers. Websites info and it’s contents are on layer 7, while encryption/decryption is performed on layer 6. Everything bellow it is visible to your ISP including IP adressing from layer 3. VPNs encapsulate and encrypt layer 3 packets with new header, so then even original IP is not visible to ISP.
The “but it’s ssl!” claim is bogus as in many jurisdictions it’s not the ISP that rats you out. If an agency gets ahold of the servers your IP with timestamp will be there. Using a VPN and using a private payment service is paramount.
It’s never 100% anonymous, but you can approach this number with tor.
The only reason your ISP “can generally tell” is because of your DNS traffic, which is unencrypted even if the connection to a website is encrypted. You could have a look at DNSSEC, which is encrypted DNS and should make it quite hard for a simple ISP employee to look at your browsing. It’s another matter to hide from the tracking algorithms they’re probably using to sell your data.
Consider switching to Proton VPN.
- their speeds are pretty stable
- they don’t keep logs
The last part is important. It really comes down to who do you trust more? Your ISP or your VPN provider? Sure there are VPN providers who claim to not keep any logs but one still needs to trust them on that. A little better is a situation where your VPN account can not be tracked back to you. But that requires among other things the usage of a completely anonym payment method.
It is actually if encrypted SNI has been enabled.
Even if it were, the ISP still sees the IP addresses (without a VPN), no?
Never been got uploading anything .
But I’ve gotten got twice just downloading. I know your case is usually what is told. Just wasn’t my experience for some reason or another.
Um actually……
A) OSI does not describe in any useful measure how the internet works. See for example Layering considered harmful
B) SSL/TLS inhabit all layers from 4-7, crosscutting half the OSI stack prior to the protocol (SMTPS,SFTP,HTTPS) even being considered
Better approach is to ignore the existence of the OSI since no one uses it and focus on TCP/IP
Thank you, this makes it very easy for me to understand now!
i don’t know a single instance where this happened. it’s at least exceedingly rare.
in most jurisdictions they don’t even go after people who bought drugs when they take down drug markets.
What you’re thinking about is DNS over HTTPS. Very easy (and free) to set up using Pihole and Cloudflare servers.
Yeah there have been far too many vpn providers who claim to keep no logs and then it comes out that they do in fact keep some logs.
That’s where Mullvad comes in