Welcome to General Chat - GAW Community Area
This General Chat area started off as a place for people to talk about things that are off topic, however it has quickly evolved into a community and has become an integral part of the GAW experience for many of us.
Based on its evolving needs and plenty of user feedback, we are trying to bring some order and institute some rules. Please make sure you read these rules and participate in the spirit of this community.
Rules for General Chat
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Be respectful to each other. This is of utmost importance, and comments may be removed if deemed not respectful.
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Avoid long drawn out arguments. This should be a place to relax, not to waste your time needlessly.
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Personal anecdotes, puzzles, cute pics/clips - everything welcome
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Please do not spam at the top level. If you have a lot to post each day, try and post them all together in one top level comment
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Try keep things light. If you are bringing in deep stuff, try not to go overboard.
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Things that are clearly on-topic for this board should be posted as a separate post and not here (except if you are new and still getting the feel of this place)
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If you find people violating these rules, deport them rather than start a argument here.
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Feel free to give feedback as these rules are expected to keep evoloving
In short, imagine this thread to be a local community hall where we all gather and chat daily. Please be respectful to others in the same way
You have to ask yourself what you are trying to protect yourself from.
Service providers knowing who you are?
Protecting from viruses, malware etc?
Clowns watching what you do?
For (1) you are simply replacing the service providers knowing you, to the VPN providers knowing your browsing habits (and possibly selling that data anyway)
For (2) you dont need VPN
For (3) Most probably all VPN providers sell data to the clowns anyway. So no point.
The best option, in my technical opinion, is to buy the cheapest hosted server (does not have to be dedicated) and run your own VPN server on it, and use that. Keep changing the server frequently. Its a pain, but the only way you can protect from both 1 and 3.
Thanks for your tips on VPN. I agree with you about security using a VPN. Now that you mention it I remember reading years ago about a VPN selling information. It's been so long I forget about that incident, don't remember the company. I'll might look into the server idea. Thanks for your great detailed information.
My personal belief is that this is beyond just the one or two VPN providers that were in the news. I believe all VPN services are captured operation. However, there is possibly only one exception to this.
Check out vanwatech. I came across that site because of the DOD IP addresses (at one point, Vanwa's DDoS protection service was going through one of those IP addresses) and I tried it for a bit.
It was an interesting experience. I was able to create a completely anonymous account and I could use bitcoin for payment. For the most part the service was great. But at one point my VPN did not work for a whole month, and I never got satisfactory reply. But I recommend their server option - never had problems.