From Newsgroup: alt.privacy
Since the referenced article points via affiliation links to IPVanish
who is NOT a provider of free VPN services, I removed the following
newsgroup in my reply:
alt.comp.freeware
<
Marcus90@guess.com> wrote:
Partial part of article:
"Want to protect your device against browsing threats? With browser isolation, you can sandbox your web activities to protect your device
against cyberattacks.
What is browser isolation? Browser isolation (also called web
isolation) is an online security tool that keeps your web browsing
activity segregated from your device and local network. Instead of
loading webpages (and any malicious code they might try to execute,
such as JavaScript) directly on your computer, browser isolation loads
them in a protected environment: either a sandbox (such as a virtual
machine) or a remote browsing session hosted online and accessed via
an interactive video feed.
Browser isolation prevents malicious programs from accessing your
system. It also gives you the freedom to browse the web without
exposing your IP address or device fingerprint data, which can be used
to identify you, track, and engage in profiling."
https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/what-is-browser-isolation/
"Browser isolation"
They're trying to confuse the reader that something new is offered. All they're talking about is using a VPN. If you use their links to go to a
VPN site (they're promoting IPVanish), they get a commission on a sale.
Notice their link to IPVanish isn't just
https://www.ipvanish.com/, but
to that domain along with a huge argument to identify you came from
their website. They're also lying to you. The protections they claim
you get are not afforded by using a VPN. They're pushing IPVanish which
offers VPN services. If you want IPvanish's secure browser feature, you
pay an extra $2/month above the VPN subscription. I have yet to find at ipvanish.com any description of just how their secure browser works. My
guess is it a reduced virtual host similar to how you can rent virtual
hosts at Azure: you'll use your local web browser to connect to their
virtual host to operate the web browser there to connect to a website.
But that's just a guess. Again, I didn't find anything at IPvanish
description just what is their secure browser (versus just another web
browser ran locally claiming to be more secure), or how it works, or how
you use it.
A VPN will let you circumvent geofencing, but it will not overcome
blocks at a website that has blacklisted VPN or Tor connections. The
exit nodes for VPNs and Tor have been mapped, and websites can use those
as blacklists to block access to anyone visiting the website from one of
those exit nodes.
=====
I have used an "out of date" program for years by the name of Time
Freeze* which is a freebie and the simplest Sandbox type program I
ever came across. Nothing in my browsing sticks to my C: upon reboot,
unless I deliberately loaded a program from the Web to a drive other
than my protected C drive. Those downloads, few and far in between,
are immediately checked with online AV sites like -
https://www.virustotal.com/old-browsers/
or
https://virusscan.jotti.org/
*Toolwiz Time Freeze can be found here: https://www.majorgeeks.com/mg/getmirror/toolwiz_time_freeze,1.html
(The Author's site no longer has it. You download from the Majorgeeks
site.)
It was discontinued. It operated as a virtual drive. While active, all
disk I/O went to the virtual drive instead of to the real drive. When
the computer was restarted, the old virtual drive was gone, a new
virtual drive got created, and you started over with a fresh virtual
drive. If you got infected with malware, it could act as a stacked I/O
driver which could still get at the real drive. Also, as I recall, Time
Freeze only protected the OS drive (normally C:), not any other drives,
so you could end up depositing malware on the other drives.
I tried it for a few months, but decided to instead rely on image
backups to restore the state of my drives. There were disk utilities
that ran afoul of Time Freeze's virtualizing the OS partition. Some
games would recognize the drive was virtualized, and their protection
refused to let you play the game. I use Macrium Reflect, but also paid
to get its Image Guardian feature which is a kernel-mode protection to
block any process other than Macrium from accessing the backup files for
read, write, rename, or remove. Not only protects against malicious
access, like ransomware, but also accidental access. I once tried to
move the backup files, got blocked by Image Guardian, had to disable it,
then move the files, and reenabled Image Guardian.
There were other attempts at virtualizing the drive, like Comodo's Time Machine, but that was so flaky that users reported losing everything on
the drive, plus it didn't protect its snapshot files. Other
alternatives are Faronics' Deep Freeze, Reboot Restore RX, Rollback RX, Shadow<something>, and others. A few were free, or had "home" free
versions, but most were payware, especially the more stable choices.
Even Microsoft had a similar tool, Steady State, but dropped it.
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