VPN FOR IPHONE

ThisIsSoFETCH wrote:

oh my goodness I see…. wow 😮 What a trip that is to know. Let me explain I live in a small town that I moved to a couple years ago with my BF well I caught him in bed someone so I broke up with him and in return he took our vehicle and left I text him after a month went by and told him I was done and not to call me again.

Well he showed back up and I told him it was over dont contact me again Ok So here’s the problem I have Because I told him never to contact me an he retaliated by ruining my name in this town where he’s from and I’m not he drained our bank accounts and took the car so the problem I have is, I can’t move and the bigger problem I have is he is related to and also friends with the police the mobile phone carriers, ext …. individuals here in the town play by there own set of rules not by the corporations or even HIPPA they can access anybody and everybody they want you and I found out that on my other plan which was an AT&T prepaid plan he somehow managed to hack into my device and know who I was calling when I was calling, where I was going and some how even had my outgoing call redirected to people he knows so I for a while thought I was calling to or even online chatting with companies etc. etc. so with that said no, I don’t need to hook up to a business work or school or whatever you said but everything I read whether it’s free or not says use a VPN because that can hide even to my Internet provider or my cell phone service the sites called and apps.

I need it to hide everything I need Security on my advice. If you can give me any advice I’d really appreciate it with all that said, and thanks for your time in reading this everybody I appreciate your help and answers.

Line breaks help with readability.

Adding a second (and weak) layer of encryption (with added logging and tracking) is unnecessary. Add-on VPNs do nothing for your case, or for your security. They can detract from it, and from your privacy. Add-on VPNs solve a problem that hasn’t existed for a decade.

Generally: Read and follow this:

… Personal Safety User Guide - Apple Support

Usual way we ourselves get hacked:

… Recognize and avoid phishing messages, phony support calls, and other scams - Apple Support

That’s us ourselves getting fooled, scammed, phished, or otherwise compromising our own security. Hacking an currently-updated iPhone is both difficult, and very expensive.

What to do? Robust and unique passwords, enable two-factor authentication, keep everything updated to current, Wi-Fi WPA2 AES or better and a password of sixteen characters or so, secure your carrier account, etc.

Re-used passwords, compromised passwords, known passwords, short passwords, short passcodes, all bad.

As for most of what you’re referencing and alleging in that thread, that’s better an issue for local or for state law enforcement, or for a discussion with a victims’ rights representative or lawyer.

Please read the other replies and click on all the links for all the reasons why you would NOT want to install a VPN on your phone.

For example, click this link: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29

The only legitimate reason to do this would be if your employer requires you to use a VPN connection to connect back to the main network at the office.

Otherwise, a VPN will do more harm than good. VPN is less secure than what you are using now. There's a current marketing blitz to try to sell VPN.

You will do best to ignore the "infomercials" and hype. Keep your money in your pocket. No need to line the pockets of the folks who are trying to sell useless software.

ThisIsSoFETCH wrote:

Hi Bob, thank you for replying. I appreciate it. I’m totally new to Apple when using an iPhone. could you please elaborate? or through the VPN is good to use when online using a smart phone. I don’t know though I’m extremely green and ignorant to all of it but regardless, thank you for your answer.

Okay, let us start with some background.

Did you know that every connection from your iPhone uses a VPN? Yes, it’s true. You already use a VPN. For all of your network connections. That’s what SSL/TLS and HTTPS are, if you’ve heard of those. They’re VPNs. And these are end-to-end VPNs. From your iPhone, all the way to the servers you are connecting to. Connection protection that doesn’t stop, part way through to the servers you're accessing.

So here, you are asking to wrap your existing VPNs in a second VPN, but only for the first few hops. Not end to end. Weakly protected, too. Just enough to get all your traffic to a central server. Even better for those collecting your traffic data, it’s all reliably personally identified. From where your connections are being logged and tracked—more than a few “no logging” VPNs were found to be logging, when the logs leaked. from the collection and tracking servere, with no added protections to the destination. None.

Did you know that commercial first-few-hops VPN providers are quite often, well, shady? Some of the vendors reportedly in the malware business, even.

Did you know that commercial VPN security is just hilariously bad, given the VPN credentials are known to anyone interesting? And did you know that the problem these VPNs claim to prevent doesn’t exist any more?

And here’s the best part, these VPNs consolidate all of your network traffic, personally identified, for easy collection and tracking.

First-few-hops VPNs are hot garbage, vastly overhyped, and vastly overhyped by those that are inexperienced, or technically unfamiliar, or are getting paid or subsidized.

Two of the worst ideas in computing right now are first-few-hops VPNs, and cryptocurrency. (A third idea currently getting massive hype, ML, has actual good uses, but generally not the uses getting the hype.)

ThisIsSoFETCH Said:

"VPN FOR IPHONE: What’s the best VPN for my Apple Iphone? […]Oh my… ok Which forums should I read? I don’t see any or a link here. Thanks for replying.”

———-

Just Google My Replies:

Use this Search Queue: intext: “thelittles”+”vpn”+”just get in the way” site: discussions.apple.com

ThisIsSoFETCH Said:

"VPN FOR IPHONE: What’s the best VPN for my Apple Iphone?"

-------

Avoid VPNs:

Unless required for school for work, then it is best not to use one. It gets in the way on an Apple device. Read these forums over the years, and you'd find out just how and why.

Hello Bob Timmons!

When listening to Ben Shapiro, his main sponsor is Express VPN. Apparently, it’s the best of the best. End to end encryption so that not even the VPN’s servers can store your data. 🤔

What’s your opinion on this one? Still the same? Assuming you know what I’m talking about, is it “the one to get”? Or is it “just another one”?

I’m not planning on getting a VPN, I’m just curious on your thoughts.

ThisIsSoFETCH wrote:

What does first few hops and ML mean?

Network paths are a series of hops, from source to destination, usually from origination to destination. First few hops means, well, the first few of those, and not end-to-end. Only the first few routers will have the second wrapping, as the servers of the VPN provider are the end if that VPN, and those servers will then forward your packets to the destination with the SSL/TLS or HTTPS security.

The traceroute tool is commonly used to check the path from origin to destination. The command will return the hops in the path—also called a route—and that list will usually be a list of routers handling your IP network traffic.

(Trivia: the path or router your data packets take to the destination server does not have to be and variously won’t be the same path or route as the data packets being returned to you will follow from the remote server back to your local computer.)

ML is machine learning, a form of statistics. Machines “learn” to do something by using statistics on training sets of data, and then repeat that. ML is at the core of the text-detection processing Apple offers in recent versions of iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The over-hyped term for this is AI, though “intelligence” has little to do with it, and the results of training mistakes and of adversarial data can be quite dumb.

None

About VPN -> see Lawrence Finch response in this thread.

How will this work with private VPN’s? - Apple Community

The last few sentences in MrHoffmans post just above pretty much says it all.

I see, thank you for the clarification MrHoffman, And Mr. Timmons!