[–] Empire_of_the_mind 0 points 3 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago
why not just ignore faggotry and do something more useful with your life, like shitpost on Voat?
[–] Planetoftheclown 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago (edited ago)
So, VPN's are not magic. The only thing they do is disassociate your IP with your location and identity.
The problem that a lot of people seem to ignore is that while the VPN does obfuscate their identity, they still use the same computer to access both their ISP's network and their VPN's network. Why is that important? Well your computer with all it's little applications that phone home identify you. Most applications these days create some form of unique identifier and in most cases have your personal identity recorded to some extent. When they phone home those companies know exactly who you are. And now they know that you're using a VPN.
An analogy would be like driving your car to work. Every day you take the same route. Then one day you decide to obfuscate your route to work by taking another route you've never been down. But you're still driving the same car with the same license plate. That's not exactly anonymous, is it?
You've also got to worry about DNS leaks and the times your VPN disconnects reconnecting you to your ISP's network while you're in the middle of doing all those things you want to hide. In those cases even if you used another computer with no identifying applications installed your cover is blown and you have to start over with a new computer because any software you install is capable and very likely using your CPU's unique identifier to create its own identifier. If it's an OS like IOS, MacOS, Windows and Ubuntu, they're phoning home and identifying you all the time.
I always found it odd that most VPN's out of the box don't make the capabilities to prevent DNS leaks and prevent reconnects to your ISP's network during disconnects easy to implement when it is easy to implement but somewhat obfuscated and technical. You generally have to have admin level knowledge of your systems to implement these measures.
There's even more to being anonymous than this because if you don't think the systems out there aren't trying to identify every account on every system like Voat then I've got bad news for you. They're likely doing grammar & literary analysis because these analysis techniques are very repetitive. Maybe you have difficulty spelling the same words or regularly use certain phrases. The longer you associate all this with a specific account the greater confidence such analysis can identify you.
If the NSA is really capturing everything, then you'd be a fool not to believe they're not analyzing all that data. You'd also be a fool if you don't think corporations aren't doing the same damn thing.
But even if you're careful with all of the above you're still paying for your VPN with your credit card. Even if you think you've obfuscated that with maybe paying with gift cards you paid cash to purchase your VPN provider still knows your originating IP and therefore who you are. You have to consider that every ISP is captured by the same entities that are doing everything in their power to identify you. So, is it really anonymous? Not likely IMO. It will at least obfuscate you from corporations and individuals who want to try to dox you, but not likely government. And that's assuming your VPN provider isn't selling you out to begin with.
[–] Celtic_Cross 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
The Internet is not anonymous. When Big Tech admins say "fuck it" and start handing over data to each other to "fight the right wing Nazis" it's over.
You can be anonymous to a Reddit faggot trying to doxx you with information you stupidly said about yourself.
You can be anonymous to your local LEOs who aren't going to mobilize a Federal task force to figure out who bought some LSD on the darknet.
But your ISP knows who you are. Most sites and applications track you. Correlating all that is trivial if the admins decide "we can't go to jail, we are punching nazis!!"
Also yes with the grammar and word fingerprinting. They can find you based on how you talk....it's how humans recognize each other's speech. AI can do it too.
[–] ThisIsMyRealName 0 points 7 points 7 points (+7|-0) ago
I don't bother with VPNs. They're just a layer of obfuscation, not a silver bullet by any means, and I don't want to pay for a service to use Dissenter. It's easier to just not make a Gab account and not use that bit of the internet, because there's plenty more internet out there.