this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
324 points (97.6% liked)
Privacy
32156 readers
854 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I appreciate the breakdown, but I meant i was ignorant on why port forwarding was important for a VPN :) Was still a great write up that should be used as reference for others! :D
I didnt realize you still had to port forward to get around ISP traffick shaping/blockage with a VPN. Thought the encrypted tunnel between you and the VPN disguised that, and any port stuff was done at their end, after exiting the tunnel.
VPNS with port forwarding matter if you want to stay anonymous while using P2P services.
@Helldiver_M @Dubious_Fart @leraje actually the port forwarding thing is about accepting inbound connections. Without port forwarding, NAT routers (including VPNs) randomly allocate ports for outbound connections but still won't accept inbound connections on those same ports.
There's a trick where you discover the randomly allocated port numbers and then both connect to each other at the same time so both routers think it's outbound. It works unreliably and BitTorrent doesn't use it.