Allways use your vpn and just spit tunnel things that don't work with them eg freetube. If you're getting captchas lots you could look into getting a residential socks5 proxy, I use mullvad's socks5 they wont be as good as a residential one though.
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
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Privacy
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UK porn ban, always-on VPN
Phone > WireGuard Tunnel to my House = Reap the benefits of my PiHole and other hosted services > WireGuard Tunnel to ProtonVPN endpoint = Reap the benefits of appearing outside my country
Essentially created my own multi-hop VPN, which I use 24/7 outside of my home-network.
May I ask how you have that setup? I’ve been trying to do exactly that using my Ubiquiti gear in the middle, but I don’t think I Ubiquiti’s UnifFi is capable.
Picked myself up an Asus WRT router (AX86U) flashed it with Merlin firmware - the custom firmware includes a feature called “VPN Director” which lets me connect up to 5 different WireGuard clients and route my devices through whichever one I choose, given that the Asus WRT router is also capable of hosting its own WireGuard server I created a VPN director rule that routes that server through one of these clients.
The VPN director has a priority ruleset, so if for example WireGuard client 5 dies it will either kill all outbound connections and wait until it’s back online or fallback to WireGuard client 4, WireGuard client 1 being the highest priority right before WAN.
I like this setup because it’s my router doing the routing, not a secondary server hosting WireGuard like Tailscale.
Edit; It also works with oVPN if you prefer that protocol over WireGuard.
Must look into Merlin, I want to stay away from closed source or US companies so Unifi was out.
Could you have a residential static VPN as one of the wireguard profiles and have it be somewhat local to you so you could use banking apps etc on specific devices? Trying to get this to pass the wife test but if streaming or banking is affected I will have to roll back to no vpn.
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I should probably try what the O.P. did as I also have an ASUS router with Merlin. However, in my case, I have a Synology NAS and I set up VPN on that and use that server as my VPN. I have a certificate-based sign-in through a single port on the router.
I use a Public VPN service when I'm out and about and then connect to my VPN when I need to do stuff on my network, Like syncing my Joplin notes.
Permanently on. Anything I can't access without it I generally find an alternate with very few exceptions. I have a quarantine virtual machine I use for the couple of websites that are worth making an exception for.
On at all times at the router level. Because it'd be annoying to selectively disable it. My VPN isn't really an anonymity feature anyway; I have a dedicated browser profile for things like banking where I intend the fingerprint to be associated with my government identity.
All the time, baby!
Unless it's absolutely necessary, vpn and kill switch stay on.
Always. Wireguard is easy to setup and work like a charm.
Truenas + wireguard for pc, server and phone. Always everywhere.
Basically all the time.
100% of the time.
My VPN turns on automatically when I leave my home lan. I don't use split-tunneling, so all my traffic goes back to home before going to internet.
Always. The captcha drive me crazy though.
Alll the time with kill switch ON.
98% of the time. I hate having to turn it off to look at my local grocery store's website but I have done it before.
I use tor for everything.
Everything??? Sounds slow
The internet is fast where I live, so there's no noticeable speed difference.
Illive in a country with the world's fastest internet speeds and I notice performance differences
Maybe you're not using a bridge?
If you use Tor Browser in the "safest" security setting, websites will actually load pretty fast since javascript will be disabled. Well, at least for the websites that load at all
I don't use the browser, but I also don't use javascript, and you're right about that. 😂
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All the time basically
Always.
Constantly.
maybe like 75 percent of the time. the Invidious APIs for Freetube.
My job requires secure outlook and access to our database. I do occasionally have to interface with banking sites.
Almost always. I turn off for certain websites that are blocked otherwise, but I hate to leave it off.
My phone almost always has a Vpn on to my home network (gets me pi-hole goodness)
Other than that, very occasionally use the Firefox built in one + the one for my "Linux iso" torrenting container, that's not on most of the time though.
Always, unless by mistake it is off.
Mostly just for torrents, one machine on my local network is always using a VPN to connect to the external internet. I would use it for more things like private web browsing, but without substantial additional setup I think my web browsing is guaranteed to be fingerprinted regardless of whether I conceal my IP so until I bother to set that up it doesn't seem like there is much point.
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In a way always.
Whole family is connected to home network and home network has filters and blockers in the outgoing router.
Additionally home security system doesn't have to keep connections open outside or have ports forwarded.
Outgoing router however does not have VPN set, so home network IP is visible. This is to keep everything operational and CAPTHCA from annoying users.
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