I'm using Mullvad because I like their company. F***! These is no way I can formulate this sentence without it sounding weird...

Anyway!

It seems like the state's websites and the municipalities' websites allow Mullvad but the counties' websites block it.

What the actual f.... πŸ˜‚

What's the situation in YOUR country/region? Are you able to do taxes, surf on healthcare related websites (hospitals etc) and on government bodies' sites without issues?

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[–] 13 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I'm in the US. It varies widely.

I think what happens sometimes, is we get caught up in anti-abuse lists. Sites see legit abuse coming from VPN IPs. After that happens enough, those IPs end up on anti-abuse filters. Then those blocklists are used by some sites, and not othrs, so some sites won't work.

There are also whole countries who block VPN now for social control. And others who talk about blocking them soon. That's not the case where I live. But there are still many individual sites that use blocklists.

There are also more sites using identity resolution services now. If the identity service can't pin you to a human real life person, it increases your block score. If your block score is high enough, you get , um, blocked.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I'm in India, and most government websites block VPN usage. I have to turn off my VPN to access them. There is no other way.

    One more thing I have noticed is that when I using Mullvad's ad-blocking DNS (just the DNS, no VPN), many government sites do not load, as in the domain name does not get resolved.

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  • [–] [S] 8 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Online anonymity is not appreciated by authorities, it would seem...

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago

    Ayup. This quote is from a techdirt article linked a few posts down. I like how they put it.

    As the researchers put it to The Rage: β€œThe state wants to see everything. The corporations want to see everything. And they’ve learned to work together.”

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I can do whatever with Mullvad VPN here in Sweden besides of logging into my bank. They are blocking the Swedish servers for whatever reason so I just change to the Norwegian servers instead.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    That is so... Interesting? πŸ˜… What do they have to gain by blocking their own IPs/locations but not the neighboring country's...

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago*

    That is a good question. I contacted Mullvad few years ago and since I download my emails for local storage and then delete them from the server, I can't find their response (am not home at this very moment).

    But I want to remember is that my bank blocks the Swedish VPN servers due to fraud/misuse.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    From a security perspective it seems 100% the correct call for the government sites filtering out traffic that is probably used for fraud rather than legit purposes 99.9% of the time. How are you doing any those the tasks you mentioned without inputting your personal information into the government website? And I assume you are, so then why are you using a public VPN at that point unless your just trying to make things difficult.

    You can use a VPN to try and hide your activity from the government, but becomes a fools errand when you are purposefully interacting with the government.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 6 months ago

    Actually, I'm not really sure why I have my VPN on at all times. I guess I just want all my online traffic to be encrypted, including when I come accross some host that doesn't support https. It's not so much a technical reason at this point. Perhaps a philosophical one? As in, I want my daily conversations to be overheard only by those whom I interact with.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (3 children)

    Why do you use a VPN? I only use one when torrenting. Basically all my traffic is over HTTPS, and my DNS is encrypted via NextDNS so I don't think I need one usually

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  • [–] 11 points 6 months ago

    No amount of traffic/DNS encryption actually hides where your requests are coming from, or where they are going to. Your IP address and the IP addresses of the sites you visit are always unencrypted. VPNs hide both of these; realistically that's their sole purpose on the modern web.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Not all websites support https.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    I use strict HTTPS-only mode in my web browser and legitimately can't remember the last time it's broken a website that I wasn't personally hosting as a dev server. At this point, I would never expect to be able to keep my interactions with any website that doesn't support HTTPS private, VPN or not.

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