savvy said:
Hi Mg, Thanks for the reply.Yes I can now ping the external IP addresses. And the sites are opening without any lag.
Good to hear.
savvy said:
As for the internet restriction, blocking entire file sharing sites like link-removed also doesn't service any purpose.
Can't disagree, but worryingly, copyright holders in various parts of the world (not just the US) seem to be wielding increasing amounts of power and are using increasingly dirty tactics to get sites blocked, seized or shut down.
savvy said:
There are lots and lots of other filehosting sites. If their motive is to stop piracy, they can easily monitor the files using crawlers like Filestube/rapidlibrary and then notify the site owner for DMCA violation.
Correct, but they're lazy. It's just *easier* for them to convince a judge to issue an order to block an entire site/IP range and be done with it.Unfortunately, they still haven't cottoned on to the fact that this usually results in a Streisand effect.
savvy said:
Further, last night, when I was not on
VPN, opening random images on Facebook showed me the page "This URL is blocked by orders from
DoT". Ridiculous indeed.
Yeah, that'll happen with these stupid blanket bans.
savvy said:
@dovahkiinI hope so. It's good to know that VPN won't be blocked because password safety is very critical when logging into the admin area of your website.
If you're logging in to a site protected by SSL, a VPN isn't entirely necessary. The purpose of a VPN is generally supposed to be such that you *appear* to be on another network (eg the corporate network) so that the admins don't have to go poking holes in the firewall and all that sort of nonsense. In my case, I might use it to access some service (say mysql on one of my database servers, or our internal billing system) by logging in to a VPN server on my network using a token, and then I can allow connections to say mysqladmin only to be from that one IP, rather than having to add rules every time I shift to a different network/ISP/country. Which in my case happens often. It's both more secure and more convenient to do it this way, considering the alternative would be to allow a potentially sensitive page (or indeed and entire server) to be visible to the public internet (both mentioned cases this would be a bad idea). If VPNs didn't exist, I wouldn't *mind* transmitting my password from any given network considering those servers are protected by SSL and aren't going to be transmitted in plain text, but, since VPNs do exist, it affords me the opportunity to simply deny any network other than my own from even trying - or even knowing that the servers in question exist at all.The way consumers use a VPN, however is to get around URL/IP blocks because the regime they happen to live in is oppressive enough that it goes around blocking certain parts of the Internet, that is to say, the tool has been repurposed - and using a VPN only to protect a password is redundant unless the network itself is insecure (open wifi, poisoned dns, fake login page etc). Not a bad thing to be redundant, just... not entirely necessary. You're only moving the end-point for the traffic from A to B, and generally speaking a VPN is only really trustworthy if you own it *and* in reality, passwords aren't usually sniffed out of the air (they're usually obtained from big spankin' database dumps of the company that was targeted that week).
