cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/49033194
Sorry if this is not the high brow discussion this com is for.
I travel a lot between different countries in the Middle East which have restrictive laws, and I live in one that is slowly becoming more competent technologically. I have to stay for an extended time in different places, so I’ve been connecting through always-on VPN out of the same place and it’s been working fine for now. But Digital ID laws are quickly going to close things off from me.
My risks that I’m trying to avoid are as follows:
Collapsed this part, it's not as important
Locally, I want to make sure my IPs aren’t connected to public accounts. I don’t say anything online that can put me in jail for the most part, but I don’t trust that this will always be the case. I also would appreciate being a bit separated from the local internet. Elsewhere, I also don’t want my traffic to be monitored or my accounts to be tied back to my personal identity. For example, I don’t want to land in Dubai and to have my Steam account permanently affected by having “Spec Ops the Line” (banned game there) in my account (silly thing to worry about, but this is one tiny example out of many small issues that pile up). Plus, a lot of the internet is not accessible from these places, and I don’t like that, regardless of whether or not I want to peruse inaccessible internet stuff from there.
This has come with some serious downsides (online services are more expensive in Europe, where I have historically exited from), but it was/is worth the cost for me. Ironic that many VPN users seem to be trying to connect in the opposite direction than me (out of rich countries rather than in).
I’ve just been permanently using a single reputable VPN and single exit city for all of my traffic for the past while. Digital ID laws in the UK and EU will make this increasingly infeasible and I will probably have to exit out of somewhere new like Switzerland. I don’t know if those servers might be more trouble due to increased abuse for example.
Just want to know how others are dealing with this. Is just stomaching the wave of verifications after logging into all my emails from a new country the only price to pay? Is the world going to shit and should I rethink “just” using a VPN? Is it VPS time now that more and more things are being blocked from VPN access? Do I give up on the internet a decade ahead of schedule and chop wood in the woods until Israel’s AI mistakes my shack for a children’s hospital and drops heavy munitions on me?
I’m really hesitant to start using two sets of devices, some for insecure local traffic and some for encrypted traffic. I don’t think carrying like four laptops through airport security would keep eyes off of me.
While most of the technical solutions suggested by the replies in my original thread are probably good for different use cases, I'm just chasing the original high of the anonymous internet of my childhood, I just want to blanket route all my traffic through one place and not have to think much about it. Too naive? I'm sure. But I have no big threat to worry about in my scenario, at least now. This is just basic I-want-to-network-out-of-view-of-ISPs.
My main exit nodes have been in the UK, since that was a good compromise between the US's wild west privacy/surveillance and not being blocked by US stuff that wasn't GDPR compliant. I know the UK was never the bastion of internet freedom, but it was a practical option. Especially getting English-as-default for everything, which is something I missed. When the internet went hyper-mainstream in the 2010s, I was no longer getting a standardized English internet like everyone else, I got a localized badly-Arabic-translated version that assumed I want the strictest filtering on everything. Moving over to always-on VPN has made me feel like I got something back. Especially now that ISPs around me are no longer as careless as they once were.
Now the UK is introducing digital ID, and services have started to comply. I'm not a regular Reddit user, but I still would like to access the site without sending them a selfie (or my ID, of course). Nexus mods is enforcing this now as well, and while I haven't used it in ages, it's still a big public repository of stuff I'd want to go through at some point. Digital ID really goes against everything I believe about the internet, this concept of me being on the same anonymous playing field is directly under attack from laws like this, and it is fueling a lot of tech doomerism thinking inside of me. The last thing I want is for an any account of mine, regardless of how infrequently I use it, to be permanently blocked for lack of ID. I know we love our piracy here, but I am a Steam user as well, and with the amount of money I've put into their service (and how much I use it), I would have no choice there. But that's the only one, I think.
Someone in the thread suggested Singapore, I was thinking Ireland or Switzerland, as good exit node countries. Ireland has only two Mullvad servers (which is a problem). Switzerland I'd think would be very popular with scammers. And Singapore would, if nothing else, make my terrible ping even worse.
There's also the fact that a lot of things are now getting blocked more often from VPN servers and it is pretty annoying. Random Imgur links and so on.
I know this is more of a meandering rant than a pointed question, but I just want to hear some of your thoughts on this.
You could rent one or two cheap vps-servers in various locations, and then WireGuard or OpenVPN into them on port 443. Looks like standard web traffic, and your exit point is not flagged as a VPN.
That uniquely identifies you and only is useful to unblock things.
Yeah. Since I would want to log into personally identifying accounts, I want something that’s “known” as a VPN, but in a jurisdiction that doesn’t block off half the internet from me, if that makes sense.