Hey Reddit, after learning about GDPR I made a peer to peer VPN service. This lets you trade your internet with users from another country. What do you think? Check it out here PenguinProxy.
Posted Jun 26, 2018, 3:50 PM UTC
what does gdpr have to do with this? your priv policy makes no mention of it.
GDPR is interesting because now the internet on both sides of the Atlantic are functionally different. If you are an American and you want to browse without being tracked, you can use a European IP. On the other hand, if some site if blocking you because you are in Europe, you can use an American IP.
It's a great service if less people abuse it. I've tried it for less than an hour and I'm already facing CAPTCHAs and bot detection pages, just like using Tor (but slightly faster). If I'm sharing my IP with random guy, I'd hope he won't abuse it, which could increase the possibility I meet harder CAPTCHAS using my own IP.
My naive questions:
Do you think "Proxy HTTPS Only" should be turned on by default?
Why Electron?
Is the client going to be open source?
Is there going to be a CLI version for Linux?
Nice questions.
I don't think it should cause your ip to deteriorate, since I limit the number of connections at any given moment. I think it may be due to some ips that I have rented to bootstrap the service. Can I ask what sites did you got the captchas from?
Do you think "Proxy HTTPS Only" should be turned on by default?
I'm not sure. It's one of those cases which shouldn't even be necessary if people did the right thing. The upcoming Chrome policy change may be good enough. Anyways, right now I'm not sure that it's a major issue to use HTTP with PenguinProxy. Our server currently acts as an intermediary, so the person completing a HTTP request won't know who it's from.
Why Electron?
Typical reason of easy cross-platform support. It also has built-in WebRTC support, which I'm planning to built on to allow direct p2p.
Is the client going to be open source?
Maybe, for the time being its too dependant on my setup and won't be easy to release.
Is there going to be a CLI version for Linux?
I'd like to but its not high on the priority list at the moment.
Thank you for your response :)
I think it may be due to some ips that I have rented to bootstrap the service.
I think this explains.
Can I ask what sites did you got the captchas from?
Actually the page (url starts with "https://www.google.com/sorry/index?continue=") didn't even show me reCAPTCHA, it just tells me they detected unusual traffic and let me try again. It happened when I accidentally searched a url I found in r/SideProject, removing "https://" in the keyword worked. At first I thought it was my fault because I blocked many Google's scripts and cookies. But then www.doctor.com, the page's title became "Pardon Our Interruption" once I clicked the link, which indicates I have bot behaviors, so I thought it might be the proxy. Sorry I can't remember if the site is using Google's recaptcha or not.
Our server currently acts as an intermediary, so the person completing a HTTP request won't know who it's from.
I see. I saw the option in the client so I thought you might have thought about it. Indeed it's not a major issue right now.
It also has built-in WebRTC support, which I'm planning to built on to allow direct p2p.
Using WebRTC might also raise privacy concerns since it may expose the local network topology. But I guess this is one of those tradeoffs.
Anyway, it's a cool project and I really like what you said, "We are trying to build the kind of VPN that we ourselves would like to use." Thanks for making it! :)
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Thanks! Right now this is just a side project, and I don't really want to deal with monetization and all that at the moment. I'm just looking for feedback to decide if there is real demand.