Any undetectable anonymity and privacy apps for EOS?

[nicknick]

Hi friends.

I was accidentally off-topicing another thread with @sempterobit and @z580c and decided to open this one to talk about this specific topic.

I’m really curious. How are there websites like reddit, that can detect if you’re using Tor or VPNs and ban you?

Does this mean that nowadays, privacy and anonymity is literally impossible to achieve?

Or maybe it only detects that you’re using Tor or a VPN, but your privacy remains anonymous?

I remember that a year ago I could use Tor on Reddit, after that I logged into Reddit with Tor and they banned all my accounts because they don’t allow using Tor on Reddit.

It’s a topic that I’ve always been interested in knowing but I’ve never paid much attention to it until today.

EDIT:

If any mod deems it necessary, he/she can move the thread to another subforum. I didn’t know in which subforum I should open a discussion/learning thread.

[xircon]

I have a vpn (Azire), I harden my browser with a selection of extensions, I then I spend my whole time on the BBC and here I am in the UK, so until I start building IEDs and become a member of a paramilitary wing of the GNU software alliance, I will be OK

Viva la revolution!

[z580c]

@nicknick

Or maybe it only detects that you’re using Tor or a VPN, but your privacy remains anonymous?

It’s this. You’re conflating privacy and anonymity (both very possible) with being completely invisible (impossible, unless you just don’t visit a given website).

Like I said in the other thread - VPNs/Tor only disguise that the traffic is coming from you personally.

To use Reddit as an example (although it is the same for literally any website or internet service), they can see where literally every single connection is coming from. In the case of someone using a VPN, they see that the connection is coming from whatever server that VPN is routing through rather than the person’s own connection, and if they don’t want people to use those services to access their website they can just block the server/exit node and be done with it.

They still don’t know it was you trying to access their website, just that they have blocked an anonymous connection that was being routed via a known VPN endpoint.

It’s no mystery.

A little diagram, and to keep it as simple as possible we’ll just talk about the thing everyone knows for identifying a given computer anywhere on the internet - IP addresses. The actual process involves way more factors but for the purposes of explanation, this will do -

No VPN/Tor:

You <---------->Reddit

Reddit can see you as you’re connecting directly from your own ISP and can see your IP address, no anonymity here obviously.

VPN/Tor:

You <----->VPN/Tor<---->Reddit

Reddit can only see the VPN/Tor side of the connection, you are hidden and so is your IP address. It could be literally anyone or anything on the ‘You’ end of this diagram as far as Reddit is concerned, all Reddit sees is the VPN/Tor and that particular exit point’s IP address. Since Reddit can see the VPN/Tor and because it can see it, it knows it’s IP address, and they can block that particular address from connecting should they choose to.

It’s not difficult at all for a company to find and block known IP address ranges for VPN providers, so they can cut off entire blocks of addresses very easily to block VPNs should they choose to.

However, even if you do successfully connect over a VPN/Tor, you need to be mindful of doing something like signing in to reddit with an account you’ve previously used without being on a VPN/Tor. They will have recorded your IP at the time of account creation and can simply link the two together, and presto, they still know exactly who you are because you’ve been here before under another IP.

With that in mind, if you’ve created an account on a service then 99% of the time you’ve already lost any given privacy battle as that’s when the bulk of information about you will be collected, unless you did absolutely every step of it whilst also connected to a VPN/Tor, and even then it’s hard to definitively state how well you’ve maintained your privacy depending on the nature of the data they’re collecting at the time.

There are other things that can be done to determine if you’re a repeat visitor as @dalto has outlined below, most of which can be somewhat circumvented if not mitigated completely by using a hardened browser like Librewolf to minimise your fingerprint, which may narrow things down a little if you’ve previously visited Reddit from the same browser on your home connection, but these aren’t as definitively identifying as connecting directly from your own ISP with no VPN/Tor in the middle.

[dalto]

It depends what you mean by “ban” and also how you connect.

The TOR endpoints are made to be able to be blocked. So any site can block/ban TOR traffic.

If you are logged in, then you could theoretically be banned if the site decided that it should ban users that connect via TOR.

If you want to be anonymous, it isn’t enough to be cautious with your network traffic, you also need to be cautious of things like cookies/local data and fingerprinting.

That being said, none of it is magic. The key is figuring out what you actually care about stopping.

If you want a significant level of anonymity, that will be a lot of work and restrict what you can do effectively. On the other hand, if you just want to stop your ISP from spying on you, that is pretty easy to achieve. If you want to google/facebook/amazon and friends from collecting data on your that is somewhere in the middle.

[thefrog]

@dalto

If you want a significant level of anonymity

Disconnect your computer from the power supply and store it in a safe, Throw the safe in the middle of the ocean. Then move out into the wilderness and become like Bigfoot. Something so scarce that if someone acatully does see you one no one would believe them. Then you can be anonymous

[sammiev]

@thefrog

Then move out into the wilderness and become like Bigfoot. Something so scarce that if someone acatully does see you one no one would believe them.

Sounds like where the wife and I live.

[xircon]

But… I know about the issues with Opera browser, but with their vpn turned on, I can browse torrent sites, blocked by the UK government. That way I don’t have to turn on a vpn (which pisses off most BBC sites and directs me to the sub-optimal bbc.com), really need to find a vpn that works inside UK!.

[sammiev]

Have you tried wireguard?

[xircon]

Yes, I use azire wireguard.

[sammiev]

Watching bbc.com here with wireguard but I live in Canada.

[xircon]

bbc.com misses a lot of regional stuff, I like rugby league and missing from the main pages, iPlayer did not work.

Or was! now it seems to work (after years!). Grrrrr

Okay Azire has fixed it! (not that I watch Eastenders, would rather extract my eyeballs with a spoon!!).

[BONK]

[rinwolf1312]

I’ve had a good time with LibreWolf+extensions. You can have almost the same experience with firefox, though it would take some tweaking.

Riseup-VPN is one of the first things I add to a fresh install. It does just as well as the paid services I tried, though its location options are limited. It breaks sometimes, when it does I just switch to the -git version.*

• for some reason the only version of this working (for me) at the moment is on my Debian 12 install. I’ll have to see if anything’s been reported on 0xacab.

Freetube, using Invidious, is a good YouTube frontend.

EDIT: As far as reddit goes, I haven’t used it in a long time. tux.pizza has a libreddit frontend that’s pretty good.

[Bink]

@dalto

If you want to be anonymous, it isn’t enough to be cautious with your network traffic, you also need to be cautious of things like cookies/local data and fingerprinting.

This is a key point I think. One aspect of this, is one’s ability to blend in to the crowd. If your browser is customised to the hilt with security plugins and privacy settings, you may actually be leaving a more unique fingerprint.

For this reason I generally prefer browsers that are privacy tuned out of the box, such as Brave (needs some tweaking to turn off the unnecessary stuff), and the already mentioned LibreWolf (pretty much good to go)

If you are habitually signed into the likes of Google, or Facebook in your browser, then consider it a given that your movements online are being noted. I have the few websites that I use daily, signed in (this does not include Google or Facebook). For everything else, the majority of my browsing, I use a Private / Incognito window, so minimal data is actually stored.