Posts by JR555

Re: VPN

Yes it would.

Your connection gets encrypted all the way to the VPN providers server.

E.g. citizenvpn.com which is located outside EU/UK/USA so don't have to log anything (which they mention on their site). I use this and it is fast and always work. Basically you can't trust any VPN that is hq'ed inside the US or UK or EU. The US has f.ex secret courts (FEMA) that can secretly demand VPN providers to log information and ban them from disclosing that they are even doing it(!) Seriously. There was also a scandal some years ago with hma who are hq'ed in the UK and they turned over one of their users to the government, so much for the name then...

CitizenVPN can connect with openvpn on port 53 to most countries so it appears as DNS traffic and gets around even blockages on port 80/443...

Re: How insecure is HTTPS over a public Wi-Fi hot spot?

HTTPS is secure enough to guard against your average snoop, but not really if the snoops are the government.

However, you have to be carefull, because a lot of HTTPS pages have content embedded that is NOT secured with HTTPS. You can spot this by looking at the padlock in the address bar.

Also relying on HTTPS alone is dangerous because while surfing you might forget to check it and find yourself logged in someeher without https (and then it's too late).

So your best bet is to ALWAYS use a VPN (especially when on a wifi hotspot).

Re: Hotlinking - not 'linking'

"no, Google is not hotlinking..."

You're splitting hairs. The point is that they take content from some site and display that content on their own site. The way they do it technically hardly matters.

"And seriously, pirated content?"

Yes seriously. It's beyond 'fair-use' because it's possible to browse google news without ever leaving it and get a meaningfull idea of what's going on in the world. They copy images, headline and exerpt. They server ads. They make money on others content.

It is only because google is so big that the news sites don't dare go against them because then google will just de-index them from their search engine. It's basically blackmail.

"find such an uninformed comment as yours on a tech site like ElReg,"

Do you write this epitaph to every comment you make? If everybody had the same opinion as yourself there would hardly be a discussion, now would there? Oh I forgot, your entire comment is just a typical hive-mind mentality. I bet you carry the latest iPhone as well.

Not all in EU are bad..

You can still use CitizenVPN.com a Danish service that delivers the service out of The Bahamas and therefore do not have to comply with the EU logging. Even if they got subpoenaed by a Bahamas court there wouldn't be any logs to deliver...

But you're otherwise right. Be careful when using a EU or American VPN provider and read the TOS. Generally if a specific VPN provider in the EU don't write on their site if they log, then they do log. All American VPN services are not to be trusted.