I know it isn’t specific to just Linux but I use Linux anyway so my question is,

Is there a way you could use a VPN without them knowing that? Or if they outlaw them is it really just game over?

If they made VPNs illegal I suppose stuff like TOR would follow except TOR is partly funded by the US state department and the US is one of my countries closest allies (one of the five eyes). So surely they wouldn’t shut down something the US funds directly… Would they?

I’ve read very very little about Gemini and other protocols like Gopher, would this be the way forward if they do this? And is that even remotely close to the security and potential anonymity you would receive from a VPN?

  • Kevin@lemmy.ca
    7·
    8 hours ago

    You could rent a VPS in a neutral country and use ssh to create a SOCKS proxy to it, then use foxyproxy to add the proxy to firefox/librewolf/whatever and either allowlist certain sites you don’t want your country knowing about or denylist websites you don’t care if your country knows about (especially higher bandwidth sites that aren’t controversial like YouTube).

    At that point you’d have plenty of “real” traffic from the unproxied websites and any traffic the rest of your OS is using, and when you access the proxies sites you want to hide it’ll look like you’re using ssh and/or scp.

    You could also create a proxy server with a tor connection on the server and use ssh port forwarding to access it locally. The Mullvad browser + foxyproxy would probably be your best bet for using that since it’s basically tor browser without tor.

    EDIT: Additionally, if you wanted to proxy an application that doesn’t support SOCKS internally, you can configure proxychains with the proxy and then launch proxychains applicationname.

    • trolololol@lemmy.world
      3·
      6 hours ago

      This, but I’d use separate browsers to keep seperate digital fingerprints. Otherwise your ad trackers would know it’s the exact same person going to site a directly and site b indirectly.

      Also worth noting that Facebook has a back door on its mobile app, that keep listening on some port. When you use certain apps with meta code ( could be a newspaper that monetizes with Facebook ads ) or websites with meta code ( same “newspaper”), those apps/websites send your ad tracker id directly to Facebook app through that port. This de-anonimizes the shit out of your “anonymous” ad IDs. Other techniques rely on lots of data points and some degree of guessing, but this ways it’s mercilessly effective and accurate.