Are there any Pale Moon compatable VPNs? Topic is solved

[Walter Dnes]

Canadian big media has lobbied the Canadian government to pass "link tax" legislation. Google has decided that it could could get rather expensive and has stopped linking to Canadian news sites. Not only that, Google is rather draconian and isn't even showing CNN or BBC in a search I did this morning. See https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r33701070-Google-Facebook-to-end-linking-to-Canadian-news-stories for a thread full of unhappy campers.

I've been looking through ads for VPNs and I've noticed that their ads talk about Chrome and Firefox extensions, which sounds rather ominous. Looking through the Pale Moon add-ons and extensions, I didn't see anything that looked like a VPN. Am I missing something? Pale Moon is my "daily driver", but I do have Google Chrome to use Netflix. I'm running Gentoo linux.

[andyprough]

I've only ever tried a VPN through a browser extension once and it was not good. Most VPN programs run through your operating system and re-route all of your system's network traffic. Look for one that is known to work well with Gentoo.

[Moonchild]

Actual "real" VPNs should not need browser extensions. VPNs are configured in the OS at the networking level. While most do offer VPN "clients" for easy control of the configuration, even that should not be strictly necessary if you want to configure things manually. It just provides (I'd say necessary) convenience by having a small application doing the configuration for you, especially if you want to have quick and easy control over which VPN server/point of presence to use.

Pale Moon is compatible with every real VPN out there. It doesn't care whether its packets get routed through a VPN server or not. In fact, part of the reason why Firefox and Chrome might need extensions is because of DoH that punches a hole through the normal DNS chain to reach out to a TRR; Pale Moon will simply use what the system provides which is a lot safer and less fragile when rerouting.

[Walter Dnes]

Thanks, Moonchild, for the concise explanation. It led me to look through the Gentoo repo. There are multiple entries under the "net-vpn" categorry. I'll ask in the Gentoo mailing list about people'sr experiences. I've never run a VPN before.

[suzyne]

Canadian big media has lobbied the Canadian government to pass "link tax" legislation. Google has decided that it could could get rather expensive and has stopped linking to Canadian news sites.

Here in Australia, similar laws have already been passed. Beforehand, Google and Facebook lobbied hard claiming they would have no choice but to retreat from Australia, Google in particular saying it would "shut down" its search here.

As it turned out, the law passed, and both companies backed down from their threats, they still operate here with plenty of links to news, and chose to pay the "tax" by doing deals with the main media sites.

So, while you may want a VPN for many reasons, your current drought of news may only be temporary? And there are other search engines to try, who I imagine are not blocking their news search results to make some sort of statement and show their power.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/australia-says-law-making-facebook-google-pay-news-has-worked-2022-12-02/

[noellarkin]

I just use OpenVPN Community (enabling the VPN at the system level)
https://openvpn.net/community-downloads/
+ getting the ovpn files from the VPN provider (Windscribe, in my case)