Are VPNs no longer the recommended practice? I was under the impression a VPN was pretty much required for sharing stuff in a copyright-sensitive country. I'd be delighted if I could simplify my app stack.

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[–] Overspark@piefed.social 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Also: VPN is only really needed for torrenting, and that's not the only way to pirate stuff. Usenet is perfectly fine to use without a VPN, since it's encrypted (TLS/SSL if you configure it right) and other parties can't just join your P2P network to see what you're doing.

[–] onslaught545@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I still use one with Usenet, because why not.

[–] Overspark@piefed.social 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Worse performance, not everything works, and depending on the country you live in and which VPN provider you pick a VPN can actually be a downgrade in privacy since a second commercial entity now has the ability to look at all your traffic and distil valuable data from it to sell. The better VPN providers say they don't do this (and some probably don't) but a lot of them will definitely do so.

[–] onslaught545@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If the traffic is already encrypted, then it shouldn't matter that your VPN provider can see it.

I agree about performance, but for my *arr stack it's not something I care about too much since I'm never actively waiting on a download to complete.

[–] Overspark@piefed.social 0 points 1 week ago

If you only route your encrypted Usenet traffic through it then sure, the privacy argument is moot, you're just spending money for worse performance without any benefit.

But way too many people route all their traffic through a VPN under the assumption that it improves privacy somehow, which often isn't the case.