Could they find the IP address of your phone? What if you aren't linked to a router but instead tether your phone to the computer to use it as a modem? I will try the school VPN soon. It just seemed like an overwhelming pain and seeing as I haven't had a day off in a month between work and school, this has not been a priority. Thanks though man- you've been a tremendous help/inspiration. My child will owe his name to you...little Darkie. It'll be awkward being a white boy named Darkie but it'll tough'n 'im up.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Creating a VPN
- Thread starter anon2345
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Yes, if you used your phone it would still be possible to trace your IP back to your phone. When tethering your wireless carrier becomes your ISP the same way Comcast or Verizon would if you use them in your house. You would also want to be really careful about doing that if your carrier has data limits so you don't rack up a crazy high phone bill.
Don't be fooled into a false since of security with a school VPN. I have setup a good number of VPNs (network security engineer and consultant by trade) and most of the time when I setup VPN's for end user access its using a method called split tunneling. This means only requests for internal resources (like email or file shares or internal web pages or services etc...) get encrypted and sent over the VPN. All other traffic gets forwarded out your internet connection like it would normally. It's completely possible that the school will more pass types of traffic over the VPN but that varies from school to school.
Then there's the issue of P2P traffic over the schools internet connection. Again this really widely varies from site to site, but a good number of sites typically have had some type of solution for filtering and policing (throttle the speed of the download/upload) internet traffic.
I saw earlier in the thread that someone suggested encrypting traffic between your router and your computer. This wouldn't do anything meaningful because your outside connection on the router would still be sending out data unencrypted.
I also someone say use a NAT router. This is a little misleading. NAT simply translates your inside IP address to your outside IP address and remembers which connections go with which internal computers. This is how we can have many computers using the same public IP address. This does have the effect of hiding your *internal* IP address to the outside world but does nothing to protect you outside IP address. As far as the MPAA or RIAA would be concerned they can still see that *someone* using your outside IP address downloaded something they didn't like and will go after the person that owned that outside IP address regardless of who on the inside did the downloading.
There really is no magic bullet for privacy when it comes to P2P sharing.
In my opinion there are two options to mitigate the insecurities that come with P2P; use a proxy services or private trackers. The proxy services are hit or miss, never really looked into them too much myself but they are out there. The private trackers as mentioned tend to have all sorts of rules about seeding and being an active contributor.
If anyone has any questions I would be happy to do my best try and explain what I know about VPN's and the like. I love teaching, looking at becoming a Cisco Academy instructor for CCNA material eventually.
Don't be fooled into a false since of security with a school VPN. I have setup a good number of VPNs (network security engineer and consultant by trade) and most of the time when I setup VPN's for end user access its using a method called split tunneling. This means only requests for internal resources (like email or file shares or internal web pages or services etc...) get encrypted and sent over the VPN. All other traffic gets forwarded out your internet connection like it would normally. It's completely possible that the school will more pass types of traffic over the VPN but that varies from school to school.
Then there's the issue of P2P traffic over the schools internet connection. Again this really widely varies from site to site, but a good number of sites typically have had some type of solution for filtering and policing (throttle the speed of the download/upload) internet traffic.
I saw earlier in the thread that someone suggested encrypting traffic between your router and your computer. This wouldn't do anything meaningful because your outside connection on the router would still be sending out data unencrypted.
I also someone say use a NAT router. This is a little misleading. NAT simply translates your inside IP address to your outside IP address and remembers which connections go with which internal computers. This is how we can have many computers using the same public IP address. This does have the effect of hiding your *internal* IP address to the outside world but does nothing to protect you outside IP address. As far as the MPAA or RIAA would be concerned they can still see that *someone* using your outside IP address downloaded something they didn't like and will go after the person that owned that outside IP address regardless of who on the inside did the downloading.
There really is no magic bullet for privacy when it comes to P2P sharing.
In my opinion there are two options to mitigate the insecurities that come with P2P; use a proxy services or private trackers. The proxy services are hit or miss, never really looked into them too much myself but they are out there. The private trackers as mentioned tend to have all sorts of rules about seeding and being an active contributor.
If anyone has any questions I would be happy to do my best try and explain what I know about VPN's and the like. I love teaching, looking at becoming a Cisco Academy instructor for CCNA material eventually.
One idea is using a service like liNode to get a Linux VM to do all your seeding and torrenting for you. This way, you can set up what you need, and walk off while the machine grabs everything on fast connections. However, one needs to make sure about bandwidth and perhaps consider throttling so one doesn't accrue a big bill due to bandwidth used.
Another caveat is to not use the VM for illegal stuff, because if handed a court order, the VM service provider can easily snapshot the VM, hand it over (with whomever registered and paid for it) to law enforcement.
Linode and other VPS services are great but they don't work too well for torrents because they don't give you very much bandwidth or storage.
I also have heard of services that do the torrenting for you, (you upload the .torrent document), and you then download the completed file. However, I don't know which ones (if any) are really legit.
http://www.superseedbox.com/
You get a web interface to the server. 100mbs connections. Builds your ratio very fast. Then you just download the finished file to your home computer (at the full speed of your home internet connect)