VPNs does not hide distance, a discussion

That’s just like how some cities have tunnels letting you bypass large parts of it to get straight to the neighbourhood you want to.

Do you mean subways?

I don’t see the point of this trivia. Why would you hide where you are from your employer? If that’s the set up you knowingly entered, that’s on you. If the company initially told you that remote work is okay but then now changed tone and wants you to stay somewhere, that’s on you to decide if you want to stay or look for another job. If you decide to stay, then you have to comply with your company’s policies.

I may sound like a stupid corpo shill, but lying about your location to your employer is just straight up wrong. If your employer is shitty, leave. It’s that simple. If your employer is decent, then it’s even simpler. They don’t deserve the deception.

Either way, there’s no healthy set up where this trivia has any practical merit given the contexts of this subreddit.

just…lel.
Unless you are working for the FBI or something, you should be fine

From the abstract to the linked paper:

messenger providers could effectively disable the timing side channel by randomly delaying delivery confirmations within the range of a few seconds. For users themselves, the threat is harder to prevent since there is no option to turn off delivery confirmations.

This suggests that it should be possible for some enterprising software developer to create a vpn that randomizes the delay in data transmission on purpose, doesn’t it?

I’ve thought about this before. If you really want to mask your location, you could add synthetic latency when you’re in your home country.

I accidentally logged in to work while still on a VPN (I was in my home country where I was authorized to work) . I worked for a billion dollar finance company with heavy security and monitoring. Nobody said a word to me.

Some people will get fired some people won’t :person_shrugging:

If the employer is determined, they WILL find out you are lying.

Not equal, but probably somewhat correlated.

Still not something people need to worry about for the foreseeable future.

I live in a rural area and use cell coverage for internet. My ping is rarely below 140, often more like 180

This.

Unless you deal with very sensitive and secretive info like Apple or Google.

OP is an overthinker… and maybe procrastinator. Do your work.

^ this, vpns are not magical privacy tools. If someone really wants to know, they’ll find you out.

If they’re worried about it to this extent, dude should just switch to burner portable equipment and hide from the cameras at the mcdonalds public wifi hotspots.

Actually it is distinguishable to an extent.

your connection while tethering will be a much more unstable connection. So you can have a 200ms latency, but you will have a lot of dropped packets and the latency will vary greatly between packets.

Whereas going thru a vpn via a stable connection is far more likely to not have dropped packets and the ping should be stable, albeit high, as long as it’s not rerouted or you face other factors like network congestion.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

I just simplify the whole thing by using tools like Anydesk. I just leave a machine connected to the the network with anydesk in home country. I remotely login to that computer using anydesk and perform whatever tasks I need. it’s not very slow but definitely not fast as working locally. beats the issue of vpn / geolocation / tracking / latency whatever.

Good question. Perhaps Snowden could have found it useful.

Yes, we need to collectively resist the push to 2fa via apps like Microsoft authy , etc. I’m surprised people are talking about VPNs without addressing the 2fa which seems to be a bigger risk to location privacy , depending on the type of 2fa

I have first hand knowledge that a regional bank from the USA caught somebody working from Bali Indonesia that didn’t have prior approval to be there. Just throwing this out as a data point for what it’s worth. It’s not only high risk countries like china north Korea Somalia etc…

He’s talking about latency, not system time.

I would like more details about this would work. Genuine curiosity

Yes , this is something that the csocs team absolutely does. Not with latency but at least with IP addresses

We should normalize always logging in via a VPN router, even when at “home”. We should be able to make the argument that our own security posture should be just as important as the employers. “Sorry I have all internet traffic at home routed through a secure connection …blah blah blah”