You underestimate how different some people’s situations and priorities can be. For us, it’s forking 10-20 USD (not a big sum of money) once a year by credit card (which isn’t hard to obtain).

There are parts of the world with dire financial situations or simply outdated systrms that don’t offer easy access to electric or international payments. There will be devs wanting to experiment with web services, but for them it isn’t simply “forking over the bare minimum”.

I won’t reveal my location just for the sake of an internet discussion, but I lived in a country (It’s not exactly a “3rd world shithole”, but not a developed one either) where until around five to ten years ago or so getting a bank account with ‘credit card’ meant you ‘made it’.

Why? If you weren’t lucky and wanted to pay for something international, you needed a friend with the aforementioned credit card to do the transaction on our behalf. Buying on Amazon? Better make it worth before bothering our friend there. What if I wanted games on steam? The friend with credit card, or use an intermediary that charges an extra before they ‘gift’ the purchased game. And so on.

Now it has gotten much better, as fintech apps filled the gap offering virtual visa or mastercard payments, and the banks themselves started offering credit cards with lower quotas, but you have to remember that it wasn’t available until a couple of years ago, or even still out of reach for some.

So what if you’re a developer with no affordable access to international tx and want to experiment regardless? You find the ones that don’t require payment.

Free market at work!

So that setup effectively gives you an all-ports available connection (except 22) from your mobile device and anything that connects through it, like a laptop? The exit node would be the VPS.

Could I skip the home router and EoIP+VPN directly between mobile and VPS, for instance?

I am in a situation (restrictive firewall on ethernet/wifi, prefer personal mobile connection but it’s cgnat or something equally crap) this could be very useful for me.

aalewis really secured his place did he

you mother-

Speaking of which, stuff that frequently comes up in privacy related forums:

Differentiate between your professional accounts (it has your real name attached) and your non-professional ones (you use it to discuss pooping methods for example). Don’t mix them up. I know many will say “so what if people in the fediverse know where I live and how I poop, I got nothing to hide” a lot, but that’s how people got doxxed or swatted.

Even if you don’t feel the need to, it’s good to sit down and identify the potential threats given certain problems. Do you recycle passwords for email and social media accounts? What about banking? If a malicious coworker or an immature family member got access to your social media profile and posted reputation-damaging content, how bad can things get? Identify the outcomes you can mitigate or must prevent, and plan accordingly.

There is no “100%” when it comes to privacy. It’s a process, not an “all-or-nothing” switch. Beginners often ask if “program X and Y will protect me 100%”, and the answer usually boils down to “there isn’t a single magic pill”.

Privacy ≠ Security ≠ Anonymity. A VPN subscription can secure your connection (content secret in transit), but does not make you anonymous (sender known to middle node). You could leave an anonymous message (sender unknown) on a public forum, but the message itself isn’t private (content not secret). And so on.

Encryption is a useful tool, but don’t fall for the “military grade encryption” speech. They often mean “we just slapped whatever shit it came up with”, nothing extraordinary.

There are many more but I will stop for now. No, I am not in Guantanamo.

I’ve seen similar stuff multiple times, often with misquoted statistics. What many miss is that context is as important as stats.