Thanks for the input. I do a lot of remote work over a VPN for work (Azure one I assume as they’re an MS house, I’ve not checked), which they don’t block, but they also only blocked the always on VPNs myself and the rest of the household had in place for that 12 hour window on a Sunday. It is currently working fine for the personal VPNs. I didn’t think to test the work laptop given I’d tested 3 VPNs by that time, but I’ll try next time
Ahh. That’s bad. What exactly did they do that made it feel like a data collection scheme ?
Yeah, I hope it’s not deep packet inspection, Mullvad has dropped support for OpenVPN (wireguard only), the other two still support it, I’ll have a bit more of a dig, my network skills beyond the basics are getting rusty. Disguising it as https should just be putting it on port 443 and making sure it’s TCP only I would have thought ?
Great questions.
I’m reasonably confident the DNS requests are not going to the ISP but I wouldn’t bet parts of my anatomy on it. The router is set to call Mullvad’s DNS with quad 9 as the fallback (which is obv for unencrypted traffic and the initial call to start a VPN session), the Mullvad client definitely calls to their dns and they have tests on their website for dns and rtc leaks which they pass.
The other two have similar setups, although the minor one I might just carefully check.
There is unfortunately only 1 ISP in my area (Virgin), and I would really love to not be using them - they have an awful reputation for a very good reason. Their support team is truly atrocious, and from previous experience I’ll get an answer like
“I’m sorry, we don’t support VPNs, is there anything else we can help you with ?” “Yes I appreciate that, but are you throttling my VPN ?” “I’m sorry, we don’t support VPNs, is there anything else we can help you with ?”
Continue loop until you hang up.
Hostinger were very dear (double) compared to most of the other options at the lower/middle end (2cpu/4gb-ram/50+gb), but thanks very much for the suggestion, appreciated.
Thank you
Thank you
Thanks very much
Thanks very much, I’m going with OVH and really appreciate so many options.
I’ve not heard that one, but it’s a better acronym to pickup the privacy abusing tech bros
FAANGs = Facebook, Amazon, Apple, NVidia, Google - ie the big tech companies - technically it’s kinda out of date because Nvidia isn’t doing much (any ?) creepy shit whereas Palantir are the worst. However the acronym was actually an investing one as short hand for high capital gain tech stocks
TLAs are “Three Letter Acronyms” - a short hand way of referring to the govt dept’s who tend to use TLAs - CIA, FBI, NSA, MI6, MI5, BND, etc.
Technically a lot of them are FLA (four letter acronyms) CIA equivalents are CSIS for Canada - ASIO for Australia, DGSE for France and GCHQ is the UK equivalent to NSA for example
Yep. It’s real, scores of noobs on the reddit subs sobbing about.
I believe protonvpn install was the usual culprit. I won’t link to reddit but the /r/linuxmint sub has many posts
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=446923
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/yes-getting-gnomed-is-a-thing
Using a VPN may subject you to NSA spying.
NOT using a VPN WILL subject you to NSA spying.
Might as well make their job harder.
Edit to add
Everyone on the internet in any country should assume their local spy squad is spying on them plus the Americans & the Chinese. You’ll rarely be wrong anywhere in the world, and they have a lot of backdoors via network hardware (among other ways).
You can potentially have privacy from the FAANGS if you are careful. TLAs not so much.
OK, in broad terms you want a distro that is reasonably up to date, but doesn’t have to be bleeding edge.
I run Mint Cinnamon and Arch KDE for the limited gaming I do, they both work perfectly fine.
Almost all games that have a Linux port will have the support & requirements specified for Ubuntu, which has a KDE flavour, however most people won’t recommend Ubuntu (for good reasons). An Ubuntu derivative with the issues removed however is a decent choice: Mint or PopOS.
Mint is by a long way the most recommended Linux distro for beginners and for good reason - the install process is easy, the community is supportive, and it does pretty much everything straight out of the box.
Cinnamon desktop environment is customisable, not as much as KDE. If you’re really keen on sticking with KDE then either EndeavourOS (which is basically a bundling of Arch so it’s easy to install) or KDE Plasma - which is Debian based but more up to date than Sid I believe.
I don’t recommend Arch for beginners unless you’re highly technical and willing to RTFM.
Most windows games will work in linux via proton/wine etc. You’re Your only really blocked ones are the couple of companies that insist on kernel anti-cheat and are anti-Linux (EA I think ?) it’s a handful of AAA games that are locked out.
Generally you don’t need any hardware changes nowadays, in fact it’s often the other way around - stuff that W10 & 11 no longer support can often be made to work on linux. AMD & Intel GPUs are less troublesome than Nvidia, but it’s generally not a big deal anymore.
Reddit’s /r/linuxgaming has fairly reasonable people (for reddit) and a fairly deep archive that will allow you to search for the specific games you most play, and ways to get them running.
KDE is not a Mint supported DE and the KDE files are not in the Mint repos.
This can be made to work if you’re experienced but is definitely not a good idea for beginners. It will eventually break, and dependency hell is a thing.
For a KDE option suitable fir beginners, Fedora offers KDE as does Ubuntu, or there’s KDE Neon
Ubuntu touch project runs linux on a tablet while retaining the phone/android functionality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch
https://docs.ubports.com/en/latest/userguide/install.html
https://liliputing.com/ubuntu-touch-mobile-linux-distro-is-now-based-on-ubuntu-24-04-lts/
There’s a list of supported devices there. Lenovo was one
Caveat - I don’t use skylight or bluesky
A cursory search indicates the US should work. It also came up with a reddit thread suggesting it’s basically just bluesky - dunno how true that is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/1jquvhe/creators_to_follow_on_skylight_social/
"Your followers and follows on Bluesky and Skylight are the same unless you make separate accounts; something to keep in mind. "
Which implies they’re different front ends for the same thing.
Good find although not the article I was thinking OP was referring to. It was more recent, within the last 12 months I think.
My best recollection was that the person had a hotmail or outlook account which was suddenly terminated following criticism of microsoft (possibly their failure to address a security issue). That account was their login/access path to a high profile foss tool. I don’t think the tool itself got taken down in this case.
Not sure how accurate the above is, it’s my vague recollection.
Remember the Github dev who got blocked by Microsoft
It’s funny, I do remember the story, but I can’t find it across multiple search engines (obviously Bing are going to block it so DDG can’t find it, but I also tried startpage, searx, ecosia as well)
Can you point me to any links or give me a few more search terms to help finding it ?
Nah we don’t know that either way on the available facts.
I had one outage which started on a Sunday and ran about 10-12hrs, 3 commercial VPNs were throttled down to 250Kb, but if you turned off the VPN or split tunneled full expected speed was reached (100Mb +). It wasn’t the VPN servers as disconnecting from wifi and going over 4G/5G worked normally.
The “outage” ended and hasn’t happened again. On the monday at least 2 of the commerical VPNs plus my work VPN were all working fine at the expected speeds and have been since. So we don’t know either way whether my work VPN was or was not affected as I didn’t think to test it.
Hypothesis 1 - I was sinbinned for too much torrent d/loading on sat night with a lock down against the VPN addresses that would have come up as the top couple of sources of large data requests (because obviously the tunnel IP address is what the ISP sees)
Hypothesis 2 - they trialled blocking popular 3rd party VPN services as you suggest (but 1 of the 3 is very obscure and def not main stream) and I was just one of those caught in it
Hypothesis 3 - Packet inspection captured torrenting activity and throttling was done because of that.
Clearly 3 is the worst scenario, 1 & 2 are quite probable - the govt is currently trying to create legislation to control VPN usage and as the largest(?) ISP Virgin would be an obvious candidate to do some tests on, and their service is so shite their customers are used to it getting shitty for random reasons.