WirelessPhreak.com

So the congress and senate decided to look out for its constituents and protect the privacy of the people who put them in office.  In the immortal words of Borat, "NOT"! The repealing of the FCC's Broadband Privacy Rules only benefits the internet providers. It actually provides a substantial revenue stream for big business, Comcast, Time Warner, ATT, .etc. that did not exist before. One of the analogies used to justify the vote was, "it evens the playing field", what they meant was because the Googles, Yahoos, and Facebooks, can use your information to deliver targeted ads why can't we (the ISPs) do it?

Well let's start with the reality.  Today Google does deliver targeted ads from information they gather through browsing history, email, etc. For most this is a trade off for service. Google can provide the most popular free email client and web browser in the world because of the advertising they sell. When you sign up for Google or Yahoo, you are the product.  That is a well understood concept, and most people are willing to trade their information for free services. This is where the level playing filled analogy breaks down. ISPs such as Comcast or Time Warner charge for their services, and in most cases a lot. Its true they have been monitoring your traffic, just ask anyone who has received a cease and desist letter after a torrent download. Now they can act on that information, they can start injecting adds into your web browsing, selling your non identifiable browsing data, and collecting everything you do online.

So what impact does that have ultimately on the users? In the short term for the average user maybe not a lot, but these are different times. We should trust our ISP to be responsible for our privacy, but with the collection of this data it makes them a rich target not only for hackers, but the government. Think about a world where the government in conjunction with the internet providers have identified every person using the internet. With their browsing data is able to conclude their illnesses, banking information, relatives, sexuality, hobbies - I challenge you to think about your life and what if any part you have never searched on the internet or uploaded to social media.

That is an extreme example, I hope, but very plausible. Our privacy and freedom of speech is a cornerstone of America and to just give it up to benefit- lets face it- horrible companies make more money seems like a stupid thing to do.

Check out these links if your interested:
EFF Electronic Frontier Foundation
ACLU American Civil Liberties Union
Bruce Schneier Schneier.com
cloudwards.net

Please check out the EFF's Surveillance Self-Defenense site.  It has a ton of tools and information to help you understand and what to do about your online privacy.  Of course it was original put together to aide individuals in repressive regimes, but maybe thats where we are at.
https://ssd.eff.org/en

If your a techy and do it your self kind of person, here is a link to Open VPN's AWS guide to deploying your own VPN server in AWS.  If you want to give it a try AWS will give you  free year and OpenVPN includes a free 3 device license with their OpnVPPN Access Server. It was really easy to set up and it will work with PC, Mac, IOS, and Android.
Open VPN Access Server on AWS

Recently we have been moving services to the Cloud (AKA other people's computers.) Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers two different types of cloud service: Gov cloud and Commercial cloud. Gov cloud is marketed to federal, state, and local government entities and offers hosting within the Untied States. The biggest issue I have found with Gov cloud is that only a fraction of the functionality offered in Commercial AWS is offered in Gov cloud. Gov cloud is pretty much a stripped down version of the Commercial AWS.

The cloud in my opinion serves a purpose, first and foremost to host stand-alone public facing applications. This is not a place to host heavy web applications that depend on data or content you are not wiling to host in the cloud. But there is still a need to connect to your corporate network for monitoring, auditing, or publishing content.

That being said, we have recently built out AWS infrastructure and wanted to share the design we came up with. Our first hurdle is the amount Amazon charges for VPN connectivity to a VPC. And if you want connectivity to a VPC it must have its own VPN connection. This was a limitation that drove us crazy. So we asked ourselves, if we are hosting truly stand-alone websites, why do we need direct connectivity to those servers? So with that question in mind we came up with the idea of creating a management VPC that is connected to or corporate network. Then as we create new applications we could add application specific VPCs that where connected to that management VPC. This not only provides a single VPN connection to our corporate network but also isolates each application in its own VPC giving us segmentation at a network and billing level.

Here are the steps we went though:

1. Assigned a /16 network to the AWS infrastructure and set a static route to our AWS IPSec device. (This is not mandatory since you will only be routing the management VPC network, but I did it to tag those networks for AWS)
2. Build out the management VPC with a /24. (This will be where we build our management servers such as Bastion hosts, patch server, LDAP, etc.) This VPC does not need to have internet access.
3. Per application build out of new VPC networks using /22 this gives you 4 /24 networks to use between a web, app, and DB tier across two availability zones. (Remember Elastic Load Balancers are going to burn up a number of IP addresses.)

Pros and Cons of this design:

Pros