Not really. The majority of such blocks are implemented at the DNS level. You can bypass that simply by using 1.1.1.1 from CloudFlare which is going to be far better than whatever DNS your ISP or in this case "free WiFi" is using anyway, so it's a double win. With the push to HTTPS (thanks to browser vendors) and TLS 1.3 on the horizon, VPNs have actually become less relevant than they used to be. They will still continue to be relevant though.
Yes, that's one option also. Personally I still prefer to use VPN when connecting to unknown WiFi and by this encrypt all traffic passing through it.
Sure. But ISPs etc can still see what you're accessing. With HTTPS, not specific URLs. But for sure hostnames.
You can use programs such as DNSCrypt, or Firefox which has built in DNS over HTTPS. Android 9 has built in DNS over TLS and I'm sure Windows will soon. Again making VPNs less and less relevant, but possibly never irrelevant.
I'm not talking about ISPs seeing DNS lookups. They see the actual traffic, regardless. Unless you use a VPN or Tor. But whatever, if you just care about evading censorship, and don't mind being surveilled, then you needn't worry.
@mirimir DNS over TLS would in theory work if there were many domains hosted on same IP address and all content is delivered through HTTPS (that way ISP wouldn't know which domains you visited). But since you don't know if that is true for all websites you're going to visit, you can't expect that your traffic will be hidden from your ISP. That's why VPN is IMO still a must. EDIT: I'm also not sure what data can ISP get from certificate being used for SSL connection before SSL is established (maybe they could get data about domain you are connecting to?). More info here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions...uest-headers-protected-as-the-request-body-is
Torrenting is usually used for piracy, which is a bad idea because of how easily you can get viruses and other malware from pirating stuff online. And plus, torrenting websites are notoriously full of cp that you can accidentally download, and nobody wants to even accidentally download that stuff, right? And plus, you can even get busted from torrenting stuff because TPTB want to crack down on people who infringe on copyright laws by pirating/torrenting.
Well, I'd never torrent on Windows. So maybe I have downloaded malware in media and software from torrents. But I've never had any problems on Linux. And furthermore, I do all that stuff on dedicated machines, with network isolation, no shared USB drives, etc. But CP? I've never seen CP accidentally. Except, I suppose, in some Japanese stuff, in that they aren't so uptight (or maybe just more kinky). And about getting busted. That's why one uses nested VPN chains. Plus Tor, when it really matters. And FDE on everything.
I'm ashamed (I guess) to say torrenting never was of much interest to me. I've read oodles of posts over time of peeps who torrent but long ago when I experimented with it using something called LimeWire I became extremely suspicious of reserving one of my local folders for other's/unknown's to dip into (or plant something?) as well as the list that I remember seeing never had the same size for same named program. As I studied up more it became clear this wasn't going to be a practice to get excited over, plus you ran the risk of opening up a can of worms in more ways than one. Apparently around that same time a ton of my own ISP's customers were tearing it up and must have been sucking out gobs of bandwidth and mailed out a notice that if anyone was logged using a peer to peer their contract would be terminated. That said enough for my experimenting and I never looked back again. I still to this day have virtually zero knowledge of torrenting (or how to go about it) and since I really never needed it to begin with, or it's complications, i'm no more the worse for wear in not spending any time on another web adventure that yields zero gain from my time or effort with that.
I agree with everything you said, except I wouldn't go through all the effort because I don't think anything is safe enough to hide you from tptb if they are truly interested in finding out who you are. I know the existence of certain illicit websites, but I am IT saavy enough to know that they are definitely never safe to visit . I know about these sites because I've heard about them in the news, but I ll be a fool to actually think it is ever safe to visit one.
Steam, Proud Adopters Of Hands Off Games Policy, Very Hands On When Banning All Of TorrentFreak October 30, 2018 https://www.techdirt.com/articles/2...ery-hands-when-banning-all-torrentfreak.shtml
OK, not a gamer So is this about browsing websites from within games? Via what they call a "chat interface"? But why would you do that? Why not just open a browser?
Valve, much like other companies, outsource blocklists to dedicated blocklist companies. But simply notifying said company of a false positive directly is boring, so better make some money from a clickbait article instead.
