Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

Internet

How I Made My Own VPN Server in 15 Minutes – TechCrunch

How I Made My Own VPN Server in 15 Minutes – TechCrunch

/

People (rightly) are panicking about their privacy as the Senate voted to allow ISPs to share your private data with advertisers. While it is important to protect your privacy, it does not mean that you should sign up for a VPN service and route all your internet traffic through VPN servers.

A VPN Doesn’t Make You Anonymous

What the hell is a VPN? I already wrote an article explaining VPNs using simple concepts, and I even compared VPNs to movie car chases.

But if you want a brief summary, when you connect your computer or phone to a VPN server, you create an encrypted tunnel between your device and that server. Nobody can see what’s going on in the middle of that tunnel, not even your ISP.

However, it does not magically make you anonymous. You are just transferring the risk down the VPN tunnel as the VPN company sees All Your internet traffic. In fact, many of them actually sell your data to scammers and advertisers.

That’s why I don’t recommend signing up for a VPN service. You cannot trust them.

As a side note, many sites now rely on HTTPS to create a secure connection between your browser and the website you’re using, even TechCrunch. You should install the HTTPS extension everywhere to make sure you are using HTTPS as much as possible.

But VPNs can come in handy from time to time. Sometimes you cannot access a website from a public network because it is blocked. Or maybe you’re traveling to China and want to be able to access your Gmail account. In these cases, it is all about minimizing the risks while using a VPN.

Set up your own VPN server

As Woz commented on my previous VPN article before the Senate disaster, you could run your own VPN server:

But if you don’t trust your home connection or have slow upload speed on your home connection, it’s not really practical.

I’ve played with Algo VPN, a set of scripts that allow you to set up a VPN in the cloud in no time, even if you don’t know much about development. I must say that I am very impressed with the Trail of Bits approach.

You have set up VPN servers on a DigitalOcean server, Amazon Web Services instance, and Scaleway server. I can connect to all of these VPNs from my Mac and iPhone 2 minutes later.

Algo VPN automates the VPN installation process so you don’t have to establish an SSH connection with a server and run complex command lines.

It takes three command lines to install dependencies on your computer. Next, you have to register with a cloud service provider like DigitalOcean and run the Algo VPN setup wizard in your terminal. I won’t detail the installation process as it can change after I publish this post, but everything is explained in the official GitHub repository.

At DigitalOcean, you don’t have to create and configure your own server. Algo VPN takes care of that for you because it uses the DigitalOcean API to create a server and install everything.

At the end of the setup wizard, you will get some files on your local hard drive. For example, on macOS, double-clicking on a configuration profile will add the VPN server to the network settings and connect you to your VPN server. You don’t need to install a VPN client, it works natively on macOS and iOS.

So here’s a quick summary:

  1. Create an account on a cloud hosting provider like DigitalOcean
  2. Download Algo VPN on your local computer, unzip it
  3. Install dependencies with command lines on this page
  4. Run the installation wizard
  5. Double-click the configuration profiles in the configuration directory

Disposable VPNs

Running your own VPN server doesn’t mean you’ll be more secure on the internet either. Again, you pass the risk through the tunnel to your cloud hosting provider.

If you’re using Algo VPN on a Microsoft Azure instance, the NSA can still ask Microsoft for more information about you if it thinks you’re a bad guy. Microsoft has your billing information.

But there’s something refreshing about Algo VPN – it lets you set up disposable VPNs. You can launch a new VPN server and connect to this VPN in just a few minutes. Once this is done, you can just delete your instance and pretend that this VPN server never existed.

It’s much cheaper than signing up for a VPN service, where you can expect to pay around $0.006 per hour of use, or even less with free credit. And you will get much better performance because you will not share your VPN server with other VPN users. I got amazing networking performance from my AWS VPN server for example:

While Algo VPN makes it easy to set up a VPN server on DigitalOcean, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, I also tried it with Scaleway to see if you can use it on any hosting provider. And it worked fine on the smallest Ubuntu cloud server.

If you have a bit of technical knowledge, I don’t see any reason why you should sign up for a commercial VPN service after playing with Algo VPN. I trust myself not to hand my data over to the authorities (duh). I don’t necessarily trust the Amazons and Googles of the world to fight for my privacy, but I know they won’t sell my hosting data to third party advertisers and scammers. I’m not very confident about my personal data in consumer services, but that’s a topic for another article.

[ad_1]
Don’t forget to share this post with friends !

Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related

Internet

AnyConnect: Install a self-signed certificate as a trusted source 👨‍💻 kmgmt-2879-cbs-220-config-security-port objective The goal of this article is to walk you through creating and...

Internet

ITProPortal . Portal 👨‍💻 We live in a dynamic moment in terms of technology. Even criminals are becoming more technically savvy and are using...

Internet

Top 5 Free AV Packages – 👌 Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition best interface Positives Works on Windows 7 and 8.1 Very easy to use...

Internet

Download antivirus for free. Best antivirus protection 👨‍💻 Protecting your identity, banking information and privacy Cybercriminals want your credit card details, passwords and other...