Hi fellow Hiveians,

Today I wanted to point out how some companies are sneaky!

Sneaky VPN Blocking

I have been using VPN's for a while, for various reasons and those people who use a VPN are more in tune with privacy and the importance of those types of things than the average person. There has certainly been a good increase in prevalence of VPN usage which I think is great! What's annoying though is that there are some companies that get pretty sneaky with how they are doing things and adding components to our computers without our knowledge that can negatively affect us in ways that we don't know it!

The VPN I use has been going really well for me for a while, I've switched around VPN providers a little bit to see how things go and based on some of the techy-nerdy reviews. I'm actually likely going to not renew this VPN subscription perhaps but I will keep my eye out for deeper reviews of it that should hopefully be coming to my purview in the coming weeks and months. I'm not super anal about it, but there's a guy I watched a podcast from recently and I trust his judgement based on recommendations from other aspects of life.

Trust is a funny thing, when we think of it. I don't know this guy who is recommending certain VPN providers apart from anyone else in the world on the internet. When I get introduced to him through another party that I do trust though, and has values and ideals that I share and align with, that's when you can set aside some of those guard rails to give them a leg up on the trust factor.

I watched a privacy and security webinar recently and I think it was done really well. The guy who ran it, mentioned above, had mentioned a few different things we can do for our privacy. One of them is to get away from the evil Gulag (G@@@gle) as much as we can, as they are quite an evil company that harvests all of our data and sells it to various governments and agencies that build all of the aspects of the upcoming social credit score system and the various nefarious things that we know they are trying to do without outright announcing it on the news. I think many people have thankfully gotten better at noticing these types of things, though there are still quite a number of people that are sadly vulnerable and wide open to this type of stuff.

One of his strategies to do this was to not log into the Gulag mail service on our computers if we can prevent it. If we can't, then we should use an alternate browser because the way those damn things work is they embed cookies in your browser and harvest other data from the browser and internet activity. It links the session you are on with your mail login in some manner and they can then pinpoint you and what you are doing across the web. Some nasty stuff! I have been making a conscious effort over the last few years to get away from the Gulag mail service for various reasons but mainly because I don't want to let them harvest my data any longer.

In doing so, I figured that I would give it a try to install an alternative browser. I don't really like Edge and I absolutely vehemently refuse to use Chrome, since that comes from the Gulag as well, so I figured I would go with Firefox. My primary browser and what I always use for Hive and other important things is Brave so that's a no brainer there but I was trying to go with another company that seemed to like being better than those other nefarious groups. I think I may have been wrong though!

I installed Firefox and was doing pretty well with it, I was using that browser to let my music run in the background. Little did I know though, that Firefox was being a bitch! I went one day using it and didn't really think of it much. I get onto my laptop the following day and I make sure to have everything closed before I do anything so that I can get the VPN connected and ensure there's no tiny bits of unprotected data being transmitted across the web that the nasty ISP's can harvest. Some may say that's dumb or paranoid or something but these days, you can never be too careful with these crazies!

I go to toggle on my VPN and it connects but instantly disconnects! I was like "wtf!?!?" I pay for this damn VPN so I was pretty pissed at that point lol I needed it to work! I submitted a helpdesk ticket to them and they responded, we were working through some stuff and it wasn't working still. I was about to send them another message but I sat back a minute and went to think what was different over the last few days that I did that could have led to my VPN not working.

The only thing I did differently was install Firefox!!! I was freaking pissed LOL. I was thinking okay what the hell. If this damn uninstall works and gets my VPN working again... I'm going to be pissed! Sure enough, I uninstalled Firefox, flipped the VPN toggle switch and BAM I'm connected to my VPN with no issues now! I am definitely relieved that it's working but damn it am I annoyed that a company that seemed like they cared about the open source nature and privacy of the people they provided browsers to would have been better about allowing a VPN.

Doing some web searches, it sounds like this is a fairly common thing. I wonder if Firefox is blocking VPN's that aren't on the list of ones they like which is a load of shit if you ask me lol. I'm definitely going to look for an alternative browser to use to play my music in the background! I'm also trying to get more accustomed to using Soundcloud to stream my music, as it's got most of the music anyways.

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI.}

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