making your own VPN server

people are (rightfully) freaking out about their privacy as the Senate to let internet providers share your private data with advertisers. While it’s important to protect your privacy, it doesn’t mean that you should sign up to a VPN service and tunnel all your internet traffic through VPN servers.

 A VPN doesn’t make you anonymous
What the hell is a VPN? I already wrote an article explaining VPNs using simple concepts, even comparing VPNs to movie car chases. But if you want a brief recap, when you connect your computer or phone to a VPN server, you establish an encrypted tunnel between your device and that server. Nobody can see what’s happening in the middle of this tunnel, not even your ISP. And yet, it doesn’t make you magically anonymous. You’re just moving the risk down the VPN tunnel as the VPN company can seeyour internet traffic. In fact, many of them sell your data to scammers and advertisers already. That’s why I don’t recommend signing up to a VPN service. You can’t trust them As a side note, many sites now rely on HTTPS to establish a secure connection between your browser and the website you’re using, even TechCrunch. You should install the HTTPS everywhereextension to make sure that you use HTTPS as much as possible. But VPNs can be useful from time to time. Sometimes you can’t access a website from a public network because it’s blocked. Or you could be traveling to China and you want to be able to access your Gmail account. In those cases, it’s all about minimizing the risk while you use a VPN.

Setting up your own VPN server

As Woz commented on my previous VPN article before the Senate debacle, you could be running your own VPN server:

But if you can’t trust your home connection or you have a slow upload speed on your home connection, it’s not really practical.

I played around with Algo VPN, a set of scripts that let you set up a VPN in the cloud in very little time, even if you don’t know much about development. I’ve got to say that I was quite impressed with Trail of Bits’ approach.

I created VPN servers on a DigitalOcean server, an Amazon Web Services instance and a Scalewayserver. I could connect to all these VPNs from my Mac and iPhone just a couple of minutes after that.

Algo VPN automates the VPN installation process so that you don’t have to establish an SSH connection with a server and run complicated command lines.

It takes three command lines to install the dependencies on your computer. After that, you should sign up to a cloud provider like DigitalOcean and run the Algo VPN setup wizard in your terminal. I’m not going to detail the installation process as it can change after I publish this post, but everything is explained on the official GitHub repository.

On DigitalOcean, you don’t have to create and configure your own server. Algo VPN takes care of that for you as it uses DigitalOcean’s API to create a server and install everything.

At the end of the setup wizard, you’ll get a few files on your local hard drive. For instance, on macOS, double-clicking on the configuration profile will add the VPN server to your network settings and connect you to your VPN server. You don’t need to install a VPN client, it works natively on macOS and iOS.

So here’s a quick recap:

1. Create an account on a cloud hosting provider like DigitalOcean
2. Download Algo VPN on your local computer, unzip it
3. Install the dependencies with the command lines on this page
4. Run the installation wizard
5. Double click on the configuration profiles in the configs directory

   Disposable VPNs

   Running your own VPN server doesn’t mean that you’ll be more secure on the internet, either. Once again, you’re moving the risk down the tunnel to the cloud hosting provider.
   If you use Algo VPN on a Microsoft Azure instance, the NSA could still ask Microsoft more information about you if they think you’re an evil person. Microsoft has your billing information. But there’s something refreshing about Algo VPN — it lets you set up disposable VPNs. You can boot up a new VPN server and connect to this VPN in just a few minutes. Once you’re done, you can just delete your instance and pretend that this VPN server never existed.

It’s much cheaper than subscribing to a VPN service, as you can expect to pay around $0.006 per hour of usage, or even less with free credit. And you’ll get much better performance as you won’t share your VPN server with other VPN users. I got amazing networking performances from my AWS VPN serverWhile Algo VPN makes it easier to set up a VPN server on DigitalOcean, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, I also tried using it with Scaleway to see if you could use it on any hosting provider. And it worked perfectly fine on the smallest Ubuntu cloud server. If you have a bit of technical knowledge, I don’t see any reason why you should sign up to a commercial VPN service after playing with Algo VPN. I trust myself for not handing over my data to authorities (duh). I don’t necessarily trust the Amazons and Googles of the world to fight for my privacy, but I know they won’t sell my hosting data to third-party advertisers and scammers. I’m not so confident about my personal data on their consumer services, but that’s a topic for another article.

How to Avoid Fake and Scammy Amazon Sellers online

Amazon is one of the biggest direct-to-consumer marketplaces on the planet. And not just of its own goods and services: though the company operates huge warehouses all over the world, it also lets smaller companies sell harder-to-find items on its marketplace, including individual sellers of new and used items. But with a relatively wide-open policy towards third party sellers, a few with less than noble intentions are sure to slip through the cracks. Here’s how to spot them.

Check the Listing for “Fulfilled by Amazon”

Third-party sellers show up in the main search results when Amazon doesn’t sell that particular item. Occasionally, if the third party is selling for lower than Amazon itself, it will be the default listing. (Amazon’s third-party sellers call this “winning the buy box.”) At all other times, you can find third parties under the link for “Other Sellers on Amazon.”

For the most part, these are either companies that are simply using Amazon as a secondary marketplace for visibility, retail stores that want to find a larger audience (like pawn shops listing their inventory), or simply individuals listing their items for sale, like Craigslist or eBay. Generally these items are perfectly legitimate, but this page is also where most of the fakes on Amazon are going to be lurking.

There’s a middle ground here that’s somewhat safer: products that are “Fulfilled by Amazon.” If an item is marked as sold by [company name] and Fulfilled by Amazon (note the capital letter), it’s been shipped to an Amazon warehouse and checked beforehand. If anything goes wrong with this item (which can still happen), Amazon will generally be very quick to resolve the issue. Items which aren’t coming from an Amazon distribution center, instead being shipped directly from the independent seller, will be marked with “shipped from and sold by ‘company name.'”

Just like pretty much any exchange market for the last few thousand years, hucksters on Amazon know that the best way to catch the eye of buyers is with a good price. Amazon often offers items for sale at a significant discount over other vendors thanks to bulk purchasing and efficient distributing, but if you see something for sale from a non-Amazon vendor that’s marked at half off the regular price or more, be extra careful. If it’s combined with one or more of the red flags elsewhere on this list, it’s not worth the risk.

New Accounts May Be Illegitimate

Despite being inundated with fake sellers and accounts, Amazon is surprisingly diligent in policing its marketplace: if it sees a spike in reports, it will remove a seller’s privileges without hesitation. To combat this, fake sellers play the numbers game and run multiple accounts at a time. This means that the majority of scammers don’t keep an active account for more than a few days, two weeks at most. So it follows that almost all of the truly fraudulent sellers on the site will be labelled with the “just launched” badge on item listings and on their seller profile. Again, just because a seller is new doesn’t mean it’s illegitimate…but combined with other warning signs, it’s a good reason to steer clear.

Odd Spelling and Grammar is a Warning Sign

In addition to manual reviews and takedowns, Amazon runs automated behind-the-scenes checks to keep fake sellers away once they’ve been kicked. Just like emails trying to get through a spam filter, vendors will fill their supplied Amazon names with alternate characters and deliberate misspellings to get through Amazon’s defenses. Sometimes they’ll simply use random groups of characters, like “aef43tsrf8.” If the name of the vendor is something that looks like it was typed by a drunk monkey, it’s probably fake.

Watch for Extra-Long Ship Times

Even though customers pay for their items right away, Third-party sellers on Amazon don’t get paid immediately: the income from their item sales are credited to their bank accounts every fourteen days. So a new vendor with fake merchandise has to keep up at least the image of propriety for two weeks before Amazon will release any of the money they’ve “earned.” To forestall customer complaints of missing items, they’ll often set the shipping time for more than the Amazon processing time, i.e., three to four weeks. This lets them make off with your money (and Amazon’s) before anyone gets suspicious.
Now there are certainly items that are backordered for three weeks or more, and there’s certainly cases where international shipping takes that long. But if a third-party seller in your country says it’s going to take a month for an in-stock item to get to you (especially if they issue a shipping confirmation right away), you may just be looking at a fake.

Check the Seller Reviews

Just like most items on the Internet, seller reviews on Amazon are easy to fake. Sellers will buy up items from themselves dozens of times right away, using their own money to pay themselves without ever shipping any products, leaving fake reviews from multiple accounts on their seller profiles. Check a seller’s reviews (not the reviews for the item itself) using the same techniques as you do on other websites, especially if you see multiple identical or single-word user responses.
The good news is that Amazon seems to be taking fake sellers more seriously than they used to—formerly I saw them on a fairly regular basis, but I had trouble even finding relevant examples for this article. The better news is that Amazon guards its reputation fiercely. If you’ve been scammed by a fake seller that disappears into the night, just contact Amazon’s customer service department: odds are pretty good that they’ll be eager to return your money.