Hey Freak, how would you use Proton to access a network remotely? It seems to be a way to access the Internet anonymously, no? Or do they offer other services? Thanks.
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You use the VPN on both ends to tunnel to each other.
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What @komemiute says. Proton is big on privacy, so that’s what their summary is about, but a VPN can do a lot of things.
A VPN is a Virtual Private Network: it simply makes your devices believe they are on the same LAN (as if they are all behind your router, on your home Wifi or cable, no matter where they are).
The privacy part is this: normally websites you browse see the public IP of your router, which does not change often. The VPN is a virtual network, so it can (and will) change which public IP is used for you to access the internet through all the time. Making it a bit harder to track you.
That is also how people use VPNs to get around region blocked content: just use a public IP from the other side of the Atlantic and now the internet thinks you’re from Canada.
The big privacy risk, and why I won’t use just any VPN services, is that the VPN provider now gets to see all your private data, if they want. That is why I explained why I trust Proton.
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That very much depends on the VPN service though. If your VPN connection always terminates at the same server and that server uses a static IP to route your traffic through, then from the outside your traffic will appear to originate from that very same IP. It is implementation-specific and not an inherent feature of VPN.
And if you do naughty stuff (or you’re a nuisance to them), depending on the jurisdiction, executive authorities may try to access your usage data and the VPN provider may be obliged required to cooperate. Caveat emptor.
Getting OT here, but for maintaining privacy while browsing the net, TOR is probably a better choice than VPN for the exact reason that you don’t depend on trusting a corporate entity (although as far as corporations go, proton is probably as trustworthy as any). One should know though that a lot of TOR exit nodes are either operated by or infiltrated by intelligence services. For the purpose of most users, it obfuscates who’s doing something, but not what is being done.
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Exactly! And the one reason why some people still need a VPN, is that even though the VPN provider will now see all your data, you regular ISP will not. If you live in a country with a totalitarian government or very invasive security agencies, it can be beneficial to hide data from your ISP and give it to a Swiss firm instead. That is what they mean by providing a free VPN for those who need it
I wish I could go into detail but ‘I’ trust Proton as a VPN and secure (end-to-end encryption between Proton users) email provider.
Their encryption is very robust and they don’t keep any logs of user activity, so there is nothing to hand over to your ISP or authorties even if it is requested.
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Thanks komemiute. So, one would install the Proton VPN client on a remote computer and also on a computer that sits on a network that the remote client needs access to? I’m just trying to understand how Proton works, because when I read their literature it’s all about accessing the Internet securely (anonymously). I want to use it to access another network. Possible? Thanks.
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Exactly. Then once you’ve done that, the computers share a (virtual) network, and so you can do whatever you would do within your home network and it should work. Such as RDP.
This means you never actually open up your home network to the big bad internet and is thus much safer
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I used to use a software like fail2ban but for Windows before, but my brain refuses to cooperate with me to remember the name. Either way, you should probably always use something like fail2ban for every devices that is open to WAN.
But yeah, VPN is a great solution for most things though.
Edit: So the name turned out to be too simple for me to remember; IPBan.
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Great, thanks for that. Will test and follow-up here.
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