Recently we have become friends with the team over at IPVanish VPN and have had a chance to test out their VPN services. You all know we love Usenet here at TotalHTPC, as do many of you. One glaring concern for a lot of Usenet subscribers, has been security. This hasn’t been a huge concern for me over the past few years of using the Usenet service, but now with government organizations pressuring ISP’s to really start monitoring our traffic; I’m starting to take note. This summer, there’s a great possibility internet service providers will begin to monitor internet usage traffic and this SHOULD concern you. If your ISP can start seeing that you are downloading questionable items from Usenet (not that we endorse this, of course) they may be able to start flagging you. Now I don’t want everyone to get worked up and throw away Usenet, because that is not the solution.
Loopholes are your friend, my friends. If they want to monitor your traffic, let them. You will route your traffic elsewhere, and then mask it back to your home! The way you do that is using IPVanish’s VPN. The team over at IPVanish have created an amazingly simple app to use to connect to their VPN servers which are located around the world. No country restrictions, no traffic type restrictions, nothing.
In order to use this solution to secure your Usenet downloading what you need to do is sign up for their service for the price of $10/month. If you consider the fact that your Usenet provider can cost as low as $9.99/month (less if you buy a year) plus $10/month for this, that’s $20. $20 for unlimited content, films, shows, games, etc. Whatever you want, unlike Netflix’s $15/month for just the content they are able to acquire. The world is yours my friends. In order to get started with IPVanish protecting your Usenet habbit, head over here and sign up.
- After you have signed up, you need to decide (depending on your OS) what VPN software you want to use.
- If you are on Windows, you should use IPVanish’s native VPN client (it makes setup WAY easy)
- If you are on a Mac or Linux (or prefer OpenVPN) they have config files for that too.
- Assuming you are on a Mac and semi-lazy, like most of us Mac users are, download the XML configuration files.
- Then once you have the configuration files on your HTPC where you are downloading all your Usenet content, follow these simple guides for setup Instructions!
Do you have an affiliate link? If we’re gonna sign up, might as well give credit to you for sending us there
nvm, i found the link in the text.. stupid me
I agree about the VPN’s taking privacy equally, but I can assure you these guys do. I have been doing extensive testing and work with their team to verify they are secure and do not filter traffic of any kind. Completely secure, and unfiltered VPN solution.
I appreciate you looking for the affil link too 😉
this is worth checking out too: https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anonymity-seriously-111007/
Not all VPNs treat privacy equally
Just a question, aren’t files encrypted when they are transmitted using Usenet?
The connection is encrypted if your Usenet provider supports SSL, but the file itself is not encrypted, no.
Right, but the transmission is correct? Thus, your ISP shouldn’t be able to see the content/file….
Correct. If you are using SSL, then your connection (and everything passed across it) should be encrypted. Your ISP would not be able to see WHAT you are downloading specifically, but they would still be able to tell that you are pulling a TON of a data from IP addresses that are known to be owned by whatever usenet provider you are using.
That isn’t necessarily grounds for legal action, but could be reason enough to throttle your connection.
Really doubt that comment! They can see you are downloading huge amount of Data from a VPN provider..
Whatever happens from their network on, your ISP has no clue about that!
I clicked through your affiliate link and subscribed to IPVanish last night after setting up SAB and Sickbeard throuh SSL. Downloads are super fast and I see no speed degradation even through VPN. Excellent setup! However, there’s just one little flaw with having this much security – no remote access to SAB and Sickbeard anymore!
VPN blocks all incoming ports by default and even IPVanish said that they won’t be able to port forward for me, which makes sense – it’s akin to putting pin holes in a boat. I’ve been thinking of a workaround solution to this, but nothing easy for the general public comes to mind. My Usenet setup is on a Windows 7 VM to isolate the VPN traffic from the rest of my home network, so I figure if there was some way to set this up, it would be through the LAN. You might need to make note of this when you setup a guide for Usenet + VPN.
I’m also facing this issue. I have a debian linux nailed up VPN connection to ipvanish. Sab traffic (and everything else) by default routes through the VPN tunnel so incoming server connections work, but their responses (such as the HTTPS servers within Sab\Couch\Sickbeard) travel through the tunnel. Web browsers don’t seem to like requests going IN via your standard WAN address, but receiving a response from the VPN instead..
I’m planning to work on this, but my solution will be to use iptables to default all traffic through my normal interface except for traffic on the SSL port being used by Sab and DNS traffic.
I think it should solve the problem.
IPtables will work. I am looking into an easier way to do this though.
Can anyone comment on implementing a VPN service solution (such as IPVanish) when using the Synology based NAS? All my research suggests you can only set the NAS as a VPN server for secure access to the data residing on your NAS and not connecting to a VPN server elsewhere. Thoughts.
glad your posting again! anyways maybe you can help me. im using ipvanish on my mac but how do i access my plexserver which is on the same mac, from my phone or outside my house now? you cant port forward if you have vpn service going right?
Hi Keith, did a bit of research and found the following two options:
“1) Enable Split tunnelling in the VPN client, and configure it to pass only the IP’s/network ranges that you want to access via the VPN over the VPN tunnel, or
2) talk your VPN provider into adding a port forward on their internet router back to your computers IP address, and modify your myplex config to use that port. ”
I will be contacted IPVanish to see if they plan on implementing Split tunneling.