At this point, I'm not even going to bother trying to go on there anymore.
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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It's easy to disable a VPN remotely though, especially on handheld devices.
All you need to is to point the user to a post or a website that is bloated with JS and contains high rez images and/or video.
The device then has to either begin paging memory like crazy - or more likely - begins to kill background processes that it thinks are not used by the foreground apps (e.g. your VPN).
For newer smartphones this is less of an issue, since their RAM can handle it. For > 5 year old smartphones though? They might struggle.
Who told you this?
In theory, yes. In practice, I can definitely tell you that the kill-switch service gets killed too, despite whatever level of niceness it's assigned.
I'm not going to dox myself but I can tell you that it's a near daily occurrence for me on Lineage 18 (Android 11) on my phone with 2GB RAM.
Here is a related issue from 10 months ago, for an android TV device:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ShieldAndroidTV/comments/13st92f/vpn_app_disconnecting_in_background/
I'm happy it works flawless for you man, and I'm sure on official Lineage builds which are as close as possible to AOSP things work exactly as you say.
I have an unofficial Lineage 18 ROM patched to hell to work with my old phone. All I can do is tell you what I see, and what I see is that when my phone tries to play a 720p or higher video, with an impossibly high bit-rate for the phone, the phone starts to aggressively background-kill apps, and that includes my VPN.
Again, happy it works for you, and I agree that in principle the default route should point to nothing if the VPN dies. On my device, when the virtual network device of the VPN goes down, it drops to the default network and finds another gateway.
Sure, fair. Though I have enough phones I've collected over the years, I'm not sure if I need any more. As long as I take care not to go media heavy sites, my current device meets my needs almost all of the time.
If you run a VPN app, you can use AFWall to force all traffic through the VPN. So if the VPN app isn't running for some reason, the apps set to only go through the VPN service will have no internet access.
You run your VPN on your router to fix this. Then every device on your network are forced through the tunnel, and this risk does not exist.
Not sure why you’re getting downvotes. I’ve seen VPN apps get background killed on some devices.
Hmm, I’ve had that fail on some cheap Chinese phones. They have other software that kills things in the background irrespective of the setting. I developed a VPN client and was never truly able to solve this problem on some low memory devices.