OT: Is your VPN spying on you?

I'd never use "someone else's" VPN for this very reason. As it happens I don't use VPNs, if I want secure/anonymous connections I use ssh.

I think increasingly people want to be able to pretend to be in different countries to get around arbitrary things like what happened to Tune in radio in the uk courtesy of Sony and Warner, merely due to their blinkered views.

Brian

Exactly, and that's my major use for ssh, no need for a VPN, that's really overkill.

Just set up a socks proxy with ssh:-

ssh -fTnN -D 1080 snipped-for-privacy@system.in.the.uk>

Tell your browser (or whatever) to use the proxy and that's it, it looks as if I am browsing from the UK.

I'm sure there are people on the Costa del Sol who wish to view Eastenders as though they were back home, but I suspect the majority of people wish to appear as *not* from the UK, so they can e.g. watch Netflix, so you'd need a house in the USA ...

You don't need a *house* in the USA, you just need an account on a computer which is (or at least appears to be) in the USA.

can this be done from Windows or is a Linux box needed?

and it appears you're using a UK website as your proxy via its port 1080?

I would have thought any half secure website would lock down many ports, making 1080hard to use?

You can almost certainly do it from Windows using putty.

No, the port 1080 is on the local computer *from* which you are making an ssh connection to the computer in the UK. E.g. in my case it's port 1080 on my laptop.

What have websites got to do with it? :-)

but if you're browsing a website using SSH, several things:

you clearly need to connect to a SSH port on a remote computer which may well be blocked by firewall

Even if the remote SSH port was open, The Remote wwebsite would be wanting your credentials, aka user name and password.

And with Putty, it will want to exchange and share private keys when connecting for teh first time to a remote computer.

You were asking whatr has websites got to do with it... well your SSH command was:

ssh -fTnN -D 1080 snipped-for-privacy@system.in.the.uk>