Odd message

With the VPN back on, I sent this:

Aha, with my VPN off, I posted the above new message.

and it wasn't posted. Now that the VPN is off again, I think this reply will post.

VPN users, is this normal?

For what it's worth, my VPN is the one included with Norton 360, my longtime antivirus software, and I finally got around to trying Norton's VPN. But it's obviously playing poorly with POI Factory messages and emails.

Wow, I even lost my windmill. Thank goodness I still have my General Maintainer stars.

I have a subscription to Bitdefender VPN and normally don't use it for day-to-day browsing. So I just turned it on to test your theory and see if this message gets posted. For location, I tried, Germany, then Lichtenstein. On both POI Factory refused to open with the message "This IP has been banned". So I tried Canada which let me open POI Factory. So if you see this message, it passed through the Canada VPN connection.

Switched my VPN location to UK so this message comes from there.

Switched location to South Africa. It would seem location (or at least assigned IP) makes a difference.

Both came through fine. Does the VPN have an ability to accept a user defined site that starts with http as opposed to https?

The issue has been resolved although I think I'll keep the VPN off by default and turn it on only when I want a bit more security. I understood why another issue was happening but hated to go to a store's website and have it suggest that my nearest brick & mortar store was about 400 miles from me, oddly always in Ohio.

My VPN wasn't set to Germany or the L...stein, but was set to, I think, some sort of evil place...I think it's called ShihCahGo in the Ill Noise state.

This message was posted using cloudflare warp vpn on 20241205 @ 2243 hours central standard time.

Edit, This message was immediately visible after posting. Edit made @ 22:44.

heads up. When you do stuff like that at work (switch VPN gateways), the InfoSec team will be alterted with this being suspicious activity.

What is funny to me, is, how much trust we place into people we don't know and things we don't understand.

For example, I've used LastPass for 2.5 years personally since it's free from work.

Imagine say having home internet, and then sending all the traffic through yet another unknown entity who may, or may not, be legit.

Probably the fact that this forum is not a secure website is considered a no no by that vpn co. I'm not posting anything that would be interesting to the bad folks on the web, but it is highly unusual for a forum to not be https

Secure http (https), really just means traffic is encrypted end to end. This is a public forum, with really no confidential information being shared to necessitate encryption....

With http, all traffic is transmitted in plain text (easily readable).

That said, the forum does request an email address and password. I use a burner email (hotmail), and a unique password. The worst that can happen is someone may try to impersonate me on here. The password will do him/her/it no good anywhere else as its unique to this site only. I will never use a real email on sites that don't implement even the most basic security. Burner emails/pass is all they get.

If you use the same password elsewhere and a more "real" email address, then there is cause for concern.

Setting up https is not that difficult. Lets encrypt offers FREE 89 day certificates. There are plenty of tools out there to implement auto renewal on most platforms with minimal effort.

On the flip side, some entities have taken security to the extreme. Been a paypal customer for 20+ years. This year it all went to shit when I got locked out of the account. The phone number on the profile (google voice number) was rejected for sending 2FA codes to. Same number on the profile since 2010. Regular india based customer service was a waste of time. We just kept going in circles.

It took a CFPB complaint to get the attention of someone with more than half a functioning braincell to unlock the account. As of today I still have issues receiving 2FA codes ONLY from paypal, even with an actual cell phone number on the profile. It does allow entering a full credit card number on file as an alternate means of authentication. But, I need to do this every time.

So, my business with paypal is mostly done. I will only use them when linked credit cards offer 5% back. As for sending funds to someone else, either zelle or bank's bill pay.

/rant off

FWIW the password username page for signing onto this forum is https, the rest is not.

Good catch! I sit corrected.