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[INGORE] Safe Pirating and VPN
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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This has been discussed before in more depth other places. I'm going to give just a brief overview primer.
You can use a variety of techniques to prevent your VPN from leaking. But nothing is guaranteed. You have to weigh the inconvenience of setting up fail safes, versus the bad things that could happen if it fails.
You could use a container that requires access to the internet through your VPN. So if your VPN fails the container has no network access.
You could use a socks proxy which goes over the VPN, and configure your software to only use that socks proxy. Mullvad makes this easy, not sure about proton.
You could use a operating system like Qubes which would run your software inside of a VM that could only talk to another VM which is set up with the VPN. This is probably the most secure, but also the most inconvenient.
Whatever method you use, you could always run a tattletale program inside of that environment, and if it sees it has a public IP address suddenly, it kills the device.
So everything's a trade-off.
To expand on the container/vm idea, for someone that's never done such a thing before, installing whatever OS u want (windows or other) in virtual box then setting the network get internet only from the vpn would be a very secure but not all that hard to do.
The easiest way for a beginner would however be to use a VPN that have its own software with built in kill switch, then you select whatever program you want killed if the vpn goes down, and it just exits that program. (If your paranoid research DNS leaks first)
I like the idea. It's really well explained. I would caution against trusting VPN internet kill switches with your Liberty and freedom. They're well designed, and well intentioned, but many things can cause them to malfunction.
Operating system updates, network driver updates, even adding a weird Wi-Fi device, can all do messy things with the network stack and rules. And may even briefly subvert the always on VPN setting.
For good day to day hygiene it's perfectly adequate. But if your activities put you at risk, and that risk is high, don't trust always on kill switch by itself.