What do I need to do in order to use my residential IP as a proxy (because it's high quality vs the ones you can purchase) when travelling?
Realistically, itu2019s generally fine to go without a VPN or proxy, unless you go to a country that censors and closely monitors, or you are a super-secret-agent who really does have secrets all the time. back around the year 2,000, mostly just financial sites would use https (then SSL, now much safer using TLS) to keep snoopers from snooping. A few non-financial websites started to encrypt traffic. Other sites were encouraged to encrypt traffic, were begged to encrypt traffic, but not much happened.. Then Firesheep arrived in 2024 to show how easy it was to steal your password, read your emails in transit, and perform all kinds of interesting things to spy on, steal from, or just plain embarrass and annoy other people using information that they thought was private.Until Firesheep came along, Facebook didnu2019t consider its data to be private, since a major feature of Facebook is making new friends, and we can always just look at a personu2019s posts anyway, right? Ummmu2024 well, being all private about certain things, or limiting some posts to active friends makes you look unfriendly, right? If you hate people, donu2019t want to get to know them and donu2019t want to let them get to know you, why are you even on Facebook? OH SHIT!!! THOSE PEOPLE WERE SERIOUS ABOUT CLOSING THEIR ACCOUNTS IF WE DONu2019T ENCRYPT!!! ENCRYPT BEGINNING NOW, NOW, NOW!!! OUR GROWTH IS SLOWING, INVESTORS MIGHT BAIL.. ENCRYPT, ENCRYPT, ENCRYPT!!!And thus Facebook, and Twitter, and a whole lot of other sites/services started to encrypt. Processing power had been going up at its usual pace, so servers and clients could handle the extra work the client and server need to perform in order to send and receive the same information that formerly required much less processing. I really wish I had a chart showing the % of the web that was/is encrypted, but itu2019s up over 50%, and the part thatu2019s not encrypted consists mostly of Chinese and Indian baby pictures (well, this last statement may or may not be true, but Iu2019m guessing such baby pictures make up a good chunk of the 50% that is still unencrypted.)So. Thanks for paying attention to the long lecture only partly related to your question. To relate the information above to your question, those underpaid IT people who get irate if you ever expose your company laptop to open wi-fi at a coffee-shop in the US and would have an aneurysm if they found out you also connected in Delhi, Singapore, and Bangkok last winter do have a valid point. You generally are more vulnerable to attack when using public WiFi than you are when you are at the office. However, their evaluation of the risks is out of date, and becoming more so year after year. Microsoft and other companies are generally making an attempt from the beginning of development to make it as secure as possible, as compared to the approach many companies would take of ignoring security issues until the delivery deadline, at which point they created the username/password login page, generally with a testing/admin/backdoor password hard-coded into the program. Once they added the all-important magical security dust by creating the login page and triple checking that the password is obscured as asterixis, it would be released to the public or handed off to the client.Not Linux, nor MacOS, nor Windows is 100% secure. No OS that performs interesting, powerful, complicated and diverse tasks, while maintaining compatibility with older document types and older programs will likely get to 100% u2024 but most of the really big, really easy, really stupid security holes have pr been discovered and mitigated. Programming methods that enhance security donu2019t just apply to software developed by and for the NSA. Security flaws still exist, but nothing like 15 years ago when Blaster on the loose and time-to-infection for a machine running XP on a public IP address without the proper updates was measured in seconds. Actually, Iu2019m sure there are some Blaster infected machines still being used, and some will occasionally be coming out of storage and plugged into the network for quite a while. But those infected machines arenu2019t a real threat, since your computer probably has its firewall turned on. Even if your firewall is down you would need to deliberately change some obscure settings to allow yourself to be affected by the dreaded Blaster. After a few seconds more thought, I am pretty certain that you cannot simply tweak settings and configure a Windows 10 machine to re-create that vulnerability, since the correction was made part of the code long ago, and isnu2019t just one more update in a pile of updates.Anyway, sorry for rambling, back to your question. I state with total certainty that as long as you are paying attention for things that arenu2019t quite right, youu2019ll be fine without a VPN. However, even the good ones are pretty cheap, so it doesnu2019t hurt to have it, even just for peace of mind. Knowing your traffic cannot be intercepted other than as a useless pile of randomized 1s and s due to the encryption the VPN uses could easily be worth $10-$15/month. In countries that censor, then definitely have one, but before you go there, see if you can find out any details such as what VPNs actually work there, since somebody censoring would probably not want you escaping it so easily. to choose one, I recommend that you look at reviews, while paying attention to the sources to get decent information. Some of the review sites appear on the surface to be neutral, but no matter what features/price/whatever-your-criteria, it always tells you to buy the same one. Iu2019m guessing you have a good bullshit detector for things like that.So: why not use your home connection as a VPN?Reliability. In general, ISPs servicing home connections are going to have unpredictable outages, maybe for two minutes, maybe for over a week if they really disdain the fools who pay for their lousy service and enough of the workers feel like making customers suffer. Well, itu2019s more likely to be lighting strike or a large truck taking out some critical utility pole than deliberate cruelty, but the end result is the same. Even a power outage can shut down your home connection and even if you made arrangements for somebody to have a key to get in and turn the router back on, itu2019s a hassle for them and hassle plus delay for you. Also, not being able to tell if the power is out, the router is shut of following an outage, or your ISP decided to inject more hatred and pain into the world is frustrating, and could be frustrating for the person with the key.A paid VPN *might* have dual service providers (if one company cannot keep them connected, use the other company), but it certainly will have proper equipment and a proper building so that they can keep rolling through a power outage, at first using a battery and if needed, possibly a diesel generator for a really long outage. However, I havenu2019t noticed any VPNs claiming to have such measures in place, and when I think about it more, if they have, for example, 200 distinct endpoints to choose from, if one goes out, no big deal, just connect to another. Having redundancy of servers themselves feels weird to me, but losing all (or even 5%) of the servers is highly unlikely, so modifying 200 buildings to add the generators and UPS, and that the buildings are all are hurricane/earthquake/tornado/terrorist resistant probably isnu2019t a good use of resources. I was semi-serious about mentioning terrorists, but in general, they should have highly secure buildings, probably use a keyboard code or the equivalent to open a door.Why VPN? With a good VPN, all traffic is encrypted, regardless of what type of traffic. A critical one many people donu2019t think about is DNS servers. Itu2019s kinda silly to encrypt all bowser traffic while your ISP still knows everywhere you went because each time you went somewhere new, your computer made a request that asked to translate the readable, hopefully easy to remember host name into a numeric IP addresses. Look for the term u201cDNS leaku201d or u201cDNS Leakageu201d and how they will prevent it (sometimes a computer will revert to using the ISP for DNS even when it has been explicitly configured to use the VPN server. You can always (with or without the VPN running) use Googleu2019s DNS, which is probably faster than your ISP anyway even if the ISP is physically closer. Addresses are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. A proxy shares the major feature of a VPN, that is, making request on your behalf so that any device you connect to only sees the VPN or proxy serveru2019s address, not yours. This grants you some sense of anonymity and privacy, but donu2019t be fooled u2024 with cookies they can monitor you even better than by IP address. If you reject cookies or use incognito mode with a proxy or VPN, you actually do get your privacy back unless they really, really want to monitor you, see Now sites can fingerprint you online even when you use multiple browsers . Anyway, some proxies add features beyond hiding your IP address, a major one being encryption of traffic between you and the proxy so your ISP doesnu2019t know where you go. Kinda like a VPN, but kinda not like a VPN. Remember, a VPN takes care of *all* traffic for you, regardless of the program or protocol or anything. A proxy however, only gives you one connection for one program, and generally you need to manually configure your browsers, email client, and whatever else with the proxy information. Then when you revert to a connection directly to your ISP because you need max speed for something, you have to configure things back. The VPN just takes care of all traffic without you needing to do anything else. Just click on the shortcut and maybe decide which server to connect to.Most middle-to-high-end routers can manage a VPN service for you. Unless you are so broke you eat ramen seven days a week and long for a can of catfood in order to grab some protein, donu2019t bother using it if youu2019re going international. I discussed reliability above. Revisiting reliability, even if you have a high end router, they sometimes fail. if you pay for a VPN, worst case is you choose a different server.Also, realize that most home connections are split as 10% up, 90% down, because most people most of the time are downloading a whole lot more than they upload. I suppose if you have fiber, this doesnu2019t apply. But if you have a cable modem or DSL, it becomes a major bottleneck, since to your laptop or whatever device, down is up and up is down. So if you have a very moderate DSL connection which might give you 2 up and 18 down, on the road, you will experience 2 down. No movie night for you!I donu2019t know if you care, but realize that the connection between your laptop and the router is encrypted, but your ISP can still monitor traffic that happens to be the router making requests on your behalf.Wow. Iu2019ve written enough on this.
