Why I no longer use a VPN (most of the time) and nor should you

hey stun here I'm a private Santa security researcher and you're watching the Privacy guides in today's episode I'm going to talk about why I am no longer use a VPN most of the time and nor should you uh that's a really interesting topic because there's a lot of YouTubers on the internet that are promoting vpns and kind of scaring people into subscribing for one um and unfortunately even some pretty well-known YouTubers such as I want to thank more VPN for their support on this video are actually pushing nordvpn and that kind of makes me sad and I'm going to use one of Mark's episodes uh to kind of go through The Narrative of this episode but before I talk more about this please watch the episode till the end because it is a nuanced topic there are some legitimate reasons why you should be using a VPN I myself am still paying for malvad and do use vpns I just don't use them the way I used to I think that way I used to was maybe a little naive and I want to share this with you um Dan also please do use the comments to share share your opinion on if one should use a VPN or one should not and why I think that conversation is going to be really precious and I'm really looking forward to jumping in and being part of it so um without further Ado Let's watch One of Mark's adverts for nordvpn I want to thank nordvpn for their support on this video I've been using their service myself for over three years now because they really are the best at this alright so first part of that narrative is Nord is the best at this um well I would argue that malvad is significantly better and without expanding too much on this I mean uh Nord is owned by tessonet it's a large technology conglomerate that also owns surf shark by the way um I haven't seen them doing anything really relevant Pro privacy and you can totally compare this to uh malvad that's actually very vocal and is actually paying for big Billboards in Sweden because they're fighting for privacy um one could also argue that malvad does not require credentials when creating an account in it generates a random account ID and it really encourages users to pay using crypto and recently they started selling kind of cards prepaid cards on Amazon and they don't really want us to use credit cards anymore because obviously that's not great for privacy um all right playing on with Nord you can surf the web anonymously your location stays private and your data is encrypted because even though I'm not a bad guy with something to hide I generate a ton of information online every day and I prefer that information wasn't sold or used against me in some way Nord collection store is absolutely nothing and makes us so others can't either Nord stores nothing on me whoo um all vpns including malvad are potential honeypots why because the internet is beautiful decentralized distributed uh when you take your laptop and you go in an internet cafe you're browsing the web from there if you're traveling to Germany and you're I don't know in Berlin well you're browsing the internet from Berlin that is amazing if you clear your cookies and by the way the Firefox episode I published recently will do this when you exit the app um there's no way for a website to know it's you it's pretty pretty amazing um and and when you're using a VPN that knows who you are because you're paying for it so they need to have some kind of an account identifier well you're essentially routing all of your traffic wherever you are as a specific identity and you're routing all that traffic through their exit nodes what that means is if ever that uh VPN provider is a bad actor they can totally know uh or correlate that all of this traffic is originating from you and if you dox yourself even once they can correlate that to a real identity uh now a lot of those VPN providers say they don't store nothing about us which is not always true because obviously nordvpn stores our credit card for instance but they say they don't log anything and they have external audits if the Snowden Revelations uh proved one thing it's that nation state surveillance programs can pressure companies to backdoor its users or its own Tech so that nation states you know can have access to the data using a VPN makes that potentially much easier for surveillance programs but this is really conspiracy uh one could argue that you know VPN providers are probably fine but I just don't really like that idea of you know centralizing all my traffic through a specific provider uh yeah playing the advert plus if you're traveling and you want your exact same internet experience at home like to watch all the shows you're used to it can virtually transport you to nearly 60 different countries yeah Whit Nord watch shows from other countries this is actually legitimate you can totally use a VPN to browse the internet as if you were in different countries uh to some extent it's not always um it doesn't always work because all VPN providers have exit servers or exit nodes that have public domain IP addresses what that means is Netflix or Hulu or whatever can totally know that you're using a VPN so it's just a question of will they enforce it or not um I'm guessing a lot of them don't uh and yeah so to some extent you can totally use VPN for this a much more meaningful reason for using VPN is if you're in China or a country that has a lot of censorship and for some reason the the great firewall of China uh is not restricting a specific VPN uh that means that the great firewall of China will not be able to decipher the traffic uh including DNS queries and will somehow allow you to browse the internet from another country and I'm guessing China might have to allow this for business you know use cases so that's actually a really powerful use case for a VPN uh but a lot of the ones that are being pushed by famous YouTubers uh are really nonsense unfortunately um okay playing the ad they also have a news service called threat protection which is sort of like an umbrella that protects you from malicious sites downloads of trackers even when you're not connected to a VPN Nord threat protection that one's really fun um I'm guessing that Nord had an narrative that using a VPN is Mission critical so that your traffic is not intercepted so that your credentials are not stolen so that you use military-grade encryption well guess what all of the web pretty much now is https and that means that most of the traffic that is you know going from your computer to servers is end-to-end encrypted and it's extremely hard to interfere with this without having SSL Error messages pop up so uh yeah your traffic is probably already using military grade encryption known as AES now DNS is a problem if you have an internet service provider that is not privacy conscious pretty much all isps I guess they can totally recommend you use their DNS server and what that means is when your computer says hey you know what's the IP address for sunnewson.com well their server will be like oh yeah yeah the IP address for sunnewson.com is blah blah blah what that means is they can totally collect uh at the DNS level you know which websites are you visiting they cannot intercept your credentials because https is there for that but they can start knowing a little bit about you know what you're doing online hey sign of the future here I got a little distracted so what I was trying to say is the old Narrative of Nord was you need nordvpn to encrypt your traffic and make sure your passwords are not leaked or something and that's total BS https does this already and a lot of other privacy and security researchers have been kind of hitting at Nord for this so I think they changed their narrative to becoming some kind of an antivirus kind of reminds you of like the Windows XP days uh in the context of what protection appears to do Firefox does this it has blacklists that will let the user know that some websites are kind of naughty and if you need some more sophisticated protection you block origin and open source project uh is probably all you need so nah nah you don't you don't need Nord for this the reason why I'm no longer using a VPN is that a uh I'm using malvad DNS over https and what that means is I am asking malvad to resolve the IP of sendudson.com my ISP cannot see this the only thing the ISP can see is what IP addresses I'm connecting to and to some extent that can reveal quite a bit uh in the form of metadata but I'm not worried about this because I'm not going on really weird websites and if I have to I'm doing it using Tor and that's what you should really be doing here if you need more privacy use Tor if you want to contribute to this possible deniability of people who really need to use Tor uh you know add diffusion use chore every day just a few times a day just to add some traffic so that people using Torah are not identified as Bad actors that can really help whistleblowers it can really help journalists uh yeah and he had a reason why I'm no longer using a VPN uh is that I have fiber to home I have a really fast internet connection here as I do a lot of stuff online at 500 megabits symmetrical and using a VPN just add a lot of it adds a lot of latency it makes it really slow even if malvat has a data center here in Montreal um I mean I don't find the upside is really worth it now that I'm using DNS over https I mean my DNS queries are going through malvad and if I had to choose a VPN it would be malvad and I mean everything is pretty much https so I'm just not worried about this and I really favor having internet speeds that are much faster and having way less latency as I mentioned in previous episodes I'm working on more and more projects and I I need to uh like I need things to be performant I I don't want to be slowed down by technology and and probably nor should you um so yeah why why use a VPN I did cover this but one thing that I do want to mention uh before I let you guys go is um depending on law where you are uh for instance using torrents could be considered illegal there's a lot of legal torrents out there and there's a lot of legitimate use cases for using torrents to distribute you know load bandwidth I actually did it did that myself in the context of a Bitcoin project that I had but essentially if you are using torrents uh and you're worried about it being illegal well you might want to do this through a VPN that is like torrent compatible just so that your ISP doesn't send you a big fat bill at the end of the month that happened to a friend when we were in Berlin uh and yeah it's it's definitely something that you guys should be mindful of uh that's all I have for you today I hope that was insightful please do use the comments to let me know what you think about all this and I'll see you in the next one bye

Channel: Sun Knudsen

Views: 1,055,565

Keywords: Mullvad, NordVPN, Privacy, Security, VPN

Id: pp-INfssWBo

Length: 11min 25sec (685 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2023