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VPN Gate - Univ. of Tsukuba launches Academic Experimental [Crowd] Project.

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IainB:
@Shades: Thanks for that. Interesting. Looks like "misuse" alright.

IainB:
Well, I have just about given up re malicious IP addresses. My post to the VPN Gate forum seems to have taken a somewhat surreal turn. I can't understand it. It's nonsensical.
You can take a look at the discussion thread here:
Evidence that SoftEther VPN Service exe has embedded malware
I had to remind myself of this:
Timothy 1:7 - For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

--- End quote ---
- which quote I came across when I was using VPN Gate and went to take a look at my IP details here: http://aruljohn.com/details.php
- and was surprised at how much of my anonymous ID browser's "fingerprint" was revealed.

Shades:
A lot of that info is being sent by the browser when it asks for the data from the webserver that hosts the webpage you are visiting.

You can change that by altering the user agent info from the browser.

Besides this, for the TCP/IP protocol to function properly the location of where you have been and where your packets need to go is included. This is by design, because your packets have to be re-routed if a section of the internet network would be unavailable. This way you can trust the information that is sent to arrive at the destination, no matter what.

As your packages arrive at the destination, the destination still has the information of where you have been.

As you might have heard, the IPv4 range of IP addresses have been divided up all over the world and have practically ran out. There are only a handful of organizations that do the dividing of IP addresses and each of these organizations is responsible for a defined section of the globe. When asked, these organizations freely give out the general global location for any of the IP numbers in their care (WHOIS).

It is quite easy to deduce where you are physically located with this info, especially when one would fill a database of their own with the results of these WHOIS requests. Because all addresses are almost given out, there is little chance of an error anymore.

IainB:
@Shades: Thanks. Very informative.
I was generally aware of the reasons why all that information was sent out, and that you could change/obfuscate the information by altering the user agent info from the browser. However, I am unsure of how many VPN Gate users might be aware of this.
(I use the Firefox add-ons UserAgentSwitcher and now UAControl for this.)

What I was rather appalled at though was that the user profile provided by that information was effectively a kind of fingerprint (or at least a semi-unique ID) in VPN Gate - where VPN Gate is supposed to be an anonymising network to make it "safe" for people in totalitarian regimes where "Big Brother" scrutinised their every move.
Post-Snowden, it seems that it is now certain that those regimes include the US (where BB's agent is the NSA), so I am somewhat averse to using any US-based volunteer server nodes in the VPN Gate network. (Zero trust.)

IainB:
New announcements:

* SoftEther VPN Became Open Source on 2014-01-04.
* There is an update to vpngate-client-2014.01.12-build-9411.128655.zip
* More details + an interesting table comparing OpenDNS v. SoftEtherVPN on the download page.
Here's a snippet from the download page:
SoftEther VPN Became Open Source on January 4, 2014
January 4, 2014
By Daiyuu Nobori, SoftEther VPN Project at University of Tsukuba, Japan.

We are very happy to announce that the source code of SoftEther VPN is released as open-source software under the GPLv2 license. SoftEther VPN is the underlying VPN engine of VPN Gate. The source code is provided as packages in .tar.gz and .zip formats, and is also published on our GitHub repository. You can build the full SoftEther VPN programs from the source code in Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD or Solaris computers. You can also generate your own customized installer packages of SoftEther VPN automatically from the source code.
--- End quote ---

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