I want to try bitmagnet on the dev server at work (yes, we have permission to use it for personal reasons as long it’s legal) but for obvious reasons it must be tunneled through a VPN.

Bitmagnet it’s a local search engine that discovers content via DHT. It just asks peers for content, then when you come back the following month it should have found many interesting stuff

Problem is that from a network point of view it looks I want to download every single torrent ever made so I wouldn’t want to have my workplace ip address associated with that.

Because the network traffic is minimal and for this content I don’t care if the provider does data mining, I would like to use a free VPN with gluetun.

But I can’t find a free one that works. From the officially supported only windscribe and proton have a free offer, but windscribe free doesn’t have OpenVPN or wireguard, while proton VPN free blocks me immediately as soon as the program talks with other peers, even if I don’t actually download anything.

So back to the question, which free VPNs are working with gluetun, someone has experience with that?

  • stoy@lemmy.zip
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    10 months ago

    Don’t do this.

    It is a terrible idea.

    1. Free services have negative interest in protecting user’s privacy, they would mine the shit out of that data.

    2. Since you are doing this from a company network and split tunneling is not 100% secure, this means that your company computer will send internal communications through the VPN, where it will be mined the shit out of.

    3. Since you are talking about torrenting, even if you are just consuming small ammounts of data, don’t be surprised if the VPN provider eill either block you immediately, or hand over suspicious logs to the police/media companies.

    4. You claim to have permission to do this, I am pressing X to doubt, if you had proper permission to do this you would not need to use a free VPN, the company would either have the technical and legal infrastructure to deal with this, or they would provide you with a good paid VPN like Mullvad.

    5. This sounds extremely sketchy to me, and unless I have a written and signed order to do this in this manner I would refuse to do this work, and even then I would want a written and signed order for the specific time I had to do it.

    • Osa-Eris-Xero512@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      split tunneling is not 100% secure

      This keeps being said and I don’t understand why people keep saying it. Split tunneling should be exactly as secure as your route table makes it, shouldn’t it?

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
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        10 months ago

        Sure, if you can guarantee that the specific program uses the tunnel for the specific connections required.

        It is not uncommon for programs to to either not use the tunnel correctly or not use it at all.

        • Osa-Eris-Xero512@kbin.social
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          10 months ago

          While its nice when a program let’s you pick the egress interface for its network traffic, split tunneling is still on the host os for handling its route table and making sure that’s set up correctly. Like, were people setting up split tunnel networks where they were treating the vpn interface as a proxy, pointing the software at it, and just hoping for the best?

  • ryannathans@aussie.zone
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    10 months ago

    Free VPNs are generally a bad idea. They are frequently malicious, harvesting data or credentials to fund their operation

  • FuckyWucky [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    If you have a rooted phone you can extract Windscribe wireguard config file even on free plan. Data directory.

    wd.vp is the wireguard config file.

    Don’t listen to soy nerds being akshually this is a bad idea. Do what you want.

    That said,

    Be careful with DHT scrapers though. Those things will find much more illegal stuff than pirated stuff, I’m talking about CSAM, even if you don’t download it even having the magnet could be illegal.

  • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
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    10 months ago

    What about https://protonvpn.com/en/free-vpn/

    Do they do shady stuff, too? They say:

    “[…] the Proton VPN Free plan has the same level of security as our paid plans, including the same strong VPN protocols and strict no-logs policy.”

    They don’t allow BitTorrent on the free plan… But I don’t know how that translates to you using BitMagnet, since you’re not downloading the torrents.

    • Moonrise2473OP
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      10 months ago

      as soon as i turn on bitmagnet, i can’t even ping 8.8.8.8 , they detect&block torrent traffic immediately

      • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
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        10 months ago

        Haha, thx for the info. That answers one of the questions I had. I use protonvpn-free for testing and debugging, check if my firewall works and the webservices ban me if I try brute forcing my webservices. But I’ve nener tried torrenting on that connection.

      • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
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        10 months ago

        Sign up for an account, choose a location, then configure your Wireguard client with the provided values.

        But as we pointed out in the discussion, it won’t get you Bittorrent. They’ll immediately block you if you download torrents over that.

        • Revisane@ani.social
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          9 months ago

          Sign up for an account, choose a location, then configure your Wireguard client with the provided values.

          Thanks . How do i open wd.vp ?

  • Brayd@discuss.tchncs.de
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    10 months ago

    Don’t use a free one. Use ProtonVPN or Mullvad VPN. In general even for normal browsing. Free VPNs are trash.

  • squid_slime@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    As much as I believe we should take as much advantage of our employers as they do they’re employees. Its important to remember that you’d be handing them a legally sound reason to fire you.

    Proton VPN, mullvad VPN while they’re not free they’re reasonable and your in employment, think of it as an investment as you can have 5 systems on one account (mullvad no sure of proton)

  • viking@infosec.pub
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    10 months ago

    Windscribe gives you 10GB in the free tier, for testing purpose, that should be plenty.

    • Moonrise2473OP
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      10 months ago

      problem is that the in the free tier the web panel doesn’t give you the credentials for clients other than the official one, which can’t be used on this operating system. But i read that with a rooted phone it’s possible to extract that - gonna try it