I’m using CloudFlare to hide my home IP and to reduce traffic from clankers. However, I’m using the free tier, so how am I the product? What am I sacrificing? Is there another way to do the above without selling my digital soul?
I’m using CloudFlare to hide my home IP and to reduce traffic from clankers. However, I’m using the free tier, so how am I the product? What am I sacrificing? Is there another way to do the above without selling my digital soul?
I have the same setup but using frp which stands for fast reverse proxy.
The term VPN is pure marketing bs. What is called VPN today used to be called Proxy Server.
I’ve also heard good things about using Pangolin for the same setup.
Good luck I’m behind nine proxies!
I used to use HAProxy but switched to Nginx so I could add the modsecurity module and run WAF services. I still use HAProxy for some things, though.
Oh I forgot to say: I have crowdsec on the VPS in front of frp and traefik on the server at my home, where I add all the modules I want.
frp just pipes all the packets through transparently.
But yeah, same thing, should work the same and there are dozens of ways to set that all up.
I’ve been looking into crowdsec for ages now and still haven’t gotten around to even a test deployment. One of these days, lol, and I’ll get around to it.
It’s pretty neat and I feel like there is a clear value exchange for both parties in the free tier, so less shady than cloudflare.
Don’t see an issue yet even though they are crowdsourcing their list generation. At least they are giving you something for it or you can take it. But if you do you get smaller lists.
Perhaps if you are only talking about the consumer level stuff advertised on TV. Otherwise I can assure you that “Virtual Private Networks” are a real thing that have absolutely nothing to do with Proxy Servers.
On down the comment chain you mention "…our computers would not see each other and would not be able to connect to each other via that service. " as some kind of test of whether a thing is a VPN or Proxy Service but what you’re missing is that this is a completely common and advisable configuration for companies. In fact Zero Trust essentially demands configurations like this. When Bob from Marketing fires up his VPN to the Corporate Office he doesn’t need access to every server and desktop there nor does his laptop need to be able to access the laptops of other VPN users. They get access to what they need and nothing more.
Hell the ability to access the internet via the tunnel, called Split Tunneling, is also controllable.
It’s that ability to control where the tunnel terminates that allows consumer VPNs, like Proton, to be used the way they are.
So while private individuals absolutely do use VPNs as an ersatz replacement for Proxy Servers they are nowhere near the whole use case for VPNs.
you can do the same split tunneling via proxy servers
I agree. That also means that for certain usecases they are equivalent. It’s sometimes worth checking all options to find the best one for that specific case.