suzannegoh

The Obama administration has been agressively spraying the atmosphere with chemtrails so that we don't have to worry about global warming.

It's a must to use a VPN and to make sure that you don't have DNS leaks if you are using US financial institutions. Even if they aren't blocking you now, they might put limits on your accounts in the future if they deduce that you are living abroad.

Thanks, suzannegoh, for the tip about DNS leaks. I tried https://www.dnsleaktest.com/ and my VPN seemed to be OK.

If you should happen to switch to Windows 10 you might want to check it again because MS overhauled it's DNS lookup system for Win10 and by default it is not completely secure. But that's a bit off topic -- there have been threads in TV's "Computers" forum where this subject has been explored in detail.

This was on Windows 10, but thanks for the heads up!

Since I'm being a computer geek today, you might also want to test your VPN connection with this web page: https://ipleak.net . In addition to DNS leaks, that web page also detects WebRTC leaks (which are caused by certain browsers) and gives instructions about how to fix that problem if it exists on your system.

Thanks for the information on teamviewer.com

I will try that when I can make all the necessary arrangements.

I have tried different browsers,PC's and operating systems(Windows7, 10)

The normal log on to Vanguard by skatewash is interesting.

Apparently it is not a total blockage of non US access.

I will try to discuss that with Vanguard customer service.

As I've already posted, today I was unsuccessful logging onto Vanguard from Thailand without using a VPN. I was, however, successful when using a VPN. This has never happened to me before. Thought I should respond to your post directly since my experience today was very different from what has happened in the past. It was reporting a user id/password mismatch on my first two unsuccessful attempts, which I am very skeptical about since I use the Dashlane password manager and don't ever actually enter my user id or password when logging on to my account, since Dashlane does that for me.

It's a must to use a VPN and to make sure that you don't have DNS leaks if you are using US financial institutions. Even if they aren't blocking you now, they might put limits on your accounts in the future if they deduce that you are living abroad.

Thanks, suzannegoh, for the tip about DNS leaks. I tried https://www.dnsleaktest.com/ and my VPN seemed to be OK.

If you should happen to switch to Windows 10 you might want to check it again because MS overhauled it's DNS lookup system for Win10 and by default it is not completely secure. But that's a bit off topic -- there have been threads in TV's "Computers" forum where this subject has been explored in detail.

Thanks for the information on teamviewer.com

I will try that when I can make all the necessary arrangements.

I have tried different browsers,PC's and operating systems(Windows7, 10)

The normal log on to Vanguard by skatewash is interesting.

Apparently it is not a total blockage of non US access.

I will try to discuss that with Vanguard customer service.

As I've already posted, today I was unsuccessful logging onto Vanguard from Thailand without using a VPN. I was, however, successful when using a VPN. This has never happened to me before. Thought I should respond to your post directly since my experience today was very different from what has happened in the past. It was reporting a user id/password mismatch on my first two unsuccessful attempts, which I am very skeptical about since I use the Dashlane password manager and don't ever actually enter my user id or password when logging on to my account, since Dashlane does that for me.

It's a must to use a VPN and to make sure that you don't have DNS leaks if you are using US financial institutions. Even if they aren't blocking you now, they might put limits on your accounts in the future if they deduce that you are living abroad.

Have a look at putting some cash - dollars or baht in Laos. Have some reasonable deals. And if you don't mind converting to Kip even better deals. The Laos banks all have similar interest rates but the foreign banks offer lower, obviously because they want to make more and 'presumably' more secure, but who knows. There are also some micro finance / savings deposit companies who lend short time to anyone who needs it, and if you are willing to risk some cash they have a passbook account which pays 8% a year, or fixed term for 2 years pays 16% a year, interest paid monthly into any Lao bank. It may not be what you are looking for but the rates are good, and although a risk I think a very small risk, but for those rates you can't expect more.

Currency risk is an issue there. Getting 8 to 16 percent on Kip deposits would be good unless the value of the Kip declines by another 8 to 16 percent.

my investments are in the European & USA market.

little bit of commodities too like gold, silver...

all my business is managed by a bank. I could do it by myself but too risky. too many of my friends lost all thinking they could make big money and have been hit by the crisis. They have lost most of their money.

when market is based on a fraction of a second, better give this to professionals and have a good night sleep.

I will not invest more(in stocks and bonds ) . better be safe than sorry. this is why I am asking you if there is a better and a safer way to invest.

You have an account large enough for the bank to give you a personal manager? Why on earth are you asking the hacks at TV?

"Personal managers" are not always exclusive. Fidelity will assign you one if you have your retirement money with them but that personal manager will handle numerous customers in addition to you.

Don't fly to London hoping to find some gold somewhere just yet - investment guru Harry Dent says it's going down to $250 to $400 !!

Just kidding Goldbugs - had to slip 'Harrer' in somewhere :-)

but he talks about what happened based on history except there has never been a time in history when the kind of disaster he also talks about was accompanied with every country having just fiat currency? If they get too close to a deflationary situation they can just turn on the printing presses and print to infinity.

However that hasn't worked, instead of causing inflation and boosting gold as expected, the bulk of the newly printed QE money seems to have found its way into the stock and bond markets.

Incoming calls too, it's just that people calling you will dial a US number rather than a Thai number. This is especially useful when dealing with US financial institutions because unless you tell them otherwise they will think that you are in the US.

That aspect of google voice is a lot harder to set up.. You need a USA based google account which is non trivial to establish.

I wish they would implement google voice globally, even if I have to pay for it. I need to set up some inbound calling numbers through Europe and would love to keep it all in google.

Perphaps non-trivial but once setup it makes Skype, Vonage, Magic Jack, etc as relevent as Lotus 123.

Maybe I am missing something.. But are you saying you have been able to set up multiple inbound numbers ?? or even any inbound numbers at all from any other country than the USA ??

While skype can offer DID inbounds I am looking at a small company situation where I would have staff handling lines and a line in each country we would be marketing within.. I was looking at vonage and some SIP Phone voip services as they seem more flexible in hardware options but have not set anything up yet.

If google voice can offer inbound lines in European capitals that would be much better.

I wasn't intending to refer to using multiple incoming numbers but I think that option might be available on Skype. I don't recall seeing that option in Google Voice but maybe it could be done by signing up for multiple accounts and setting it up so that incoming calls on your secondary numbers are forwarded to your main number. As for incoming numbers for countries other than the US, Skype offers incoming numbers for about 20 countries but you might have to trick them into giving you an incoming number in a country in which you are not resident. I'm not aware of google offering incoming numbers for countries other than the US.

I'm not totally sure that I understand the analogy (being a limey!!) but, I guess that means that these others become much less attractive?

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

Maybe I should have said as as obsolete as a Sinclair computer. Only problem that I've encountered with Google Voice (or whatever they call it now) is poor sound quality on calls from Thailand to other countries in SE Asia. Skype seems to be much better for that. I'm not sure the reason for that, but I suspect that it might be because if you have a US-based google account that your calls from Thailand to Singapore (for instance) will get routed to the US and then back to Singapore instead of directly from Thailand to Singapore. Maybe that will improve as google adds more servers worldwide.

Oh, I stand corrected- so outgoing calls to other countries from Thailand are working. That's worth a look.

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

Incoming calls too, it's just that people calling you will dial a US number rather than a Thai number. This is especially useful when dealing with US financial institutions because unless you tell them otherwise they will think that you are in the US.

That aspect of google voice is a lot harder to set up.. You need a USA based google account which is non trivial to establish.

I wish they would implement google voice globally, even if I have to pay for it. I need to set up some inbound calling numbers through Europe and would love to keep it all in google.

Perphaps non-trivial but once setup it makes Skype, Vonage, Magic Jack, etc as relevent as Lotus 123.

Thanks for this, also. My only question is whether this service works for calls to and from UK (theoretically I can't see why not? )

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

Calls to the US are free; calls to the UK range from 3 to 18 cents per minute:

https://www.google.com/voice/rates

Oh, I stand corrected- so outgoing calls to other countries from Thailand are working. That's worth a look.

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

Incoming calls too, it's just that people calling you will dial a US number rather than a Thai number. This is especially useful when dealing with US financial institutions because unless you tell them otherwise they will think that you are in the US.

Oh, I stand corrected- so outgoing calls to other countries from Thailand are working. That's worth a look.

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

I'm sure there will be some numb <deleted> on here soon who thinks budweiser is a good drink

If you are referring to Budweiser Budvar, then I am that numb <deleted>. Not an absolute favorite but, like most Czech beers, very drinkable.

No. I like Budvar also. It was the other stuff I was referring to.

it's strangle that you would start out by saying that you are a real beer drinker and that you "I drink beer because I like it....it's not a pissing competition" and then provoke a pissing contest over a brand of beer that is not the subject of this thread.

Nobody obviously has the answer but if one invests 50,000 usd in Google class A shares on Nasdaq now and doesnt touch it for 5 yrs. How much is the share holding worth in 5 yrs.

It will be worth $26,142.87 less brokerage fees.

That registry key was introduced on Win 8 or 8.1 and affected what sounds like a similar problem, but that fix does not seem to work on Windows 10.

More:

https://medium.com/@ValdikSS/beware-of-windows-10-dns-resolver-and-dns-leaks-5bc5bfb4e3f1

That article references one thing that does seem to solve the problem on Win10 though it's a bit unwieldy. Solution "B" at this link seems to force all DNS queries to go through the VPN tunnel (at least with StrongVPN):

https://www.dnsleaktest.com/how-to-fix-a-dns-leak.html

But you can disable it through the registry according to an earlier post.

So they must have expected this....

That registry key was introduced on Win 8 or 8.1 and affected what sounds like a similar problem, but that fix does not seem to work on Windows 10.

More:

https://medium.com/@ValdikSS/beware-of-windows-10-dns-resolver-and-dns-leaks-5bc5bfb4e3f1

When I put in a support ticket with StrongVPN on that issue they sent me that article too. This was their full reply:

"Unfortunately this is a new feature of DNS resolver in Windows 10.

I would recommend you to read this article to understand this issue deeper https://medium.com/@ValdikSS/beware-of-windows-10-dns-resolver-and-dns-leaks-5bc5bfb4e3f1"

So basically they are telling customers "I feel your pain".

BTW, there are some other interesting articles on the blog on which the above article appears. For instance, one of them explains how webmasters can programmatically determine that users are connecting though a VPN or proxy by looking at various properties of the data stream.

https://medium.com/@ValdikSS/detecting-vpn-and-its-configuration-and-proxy-users-on-the-server-side-1bcc59742413

Yet the fixes seem to be to the Browsers

Not really, the WebRTC leaks are related to the browser and can be addressed by patching the browser, but the DNS leaks are specific to Windows 10 and have nothing to do with the browser. My guess is that MS might not be inclined to fix this issue anytime soon since they probably view it as being a "feature" rather than a bug.

But you can disable it through the registry according to an earlier post.

So they must have expected this....

That registry key was introduced on Win 8 or 8.1 and affected what sounds like a similar problem, but that fix does not seem to work on Windows 10.

Is this Windows 10 specific? It seems to relate to WebRTC which is a Browser technology in Chrome, FireFox and Opera.

I believe this is more an issue with Microsoft's Smart [Multi-homed] Name Resolution, which in Windows 10 allows the operating system to send DNS queries to all the available interfaces on the machine.

When a VPN client is invoked, even if the connection is set to use "only use remote gateway", the Smart Name Resolution breaks the private tunnel policy by mixing in other interface DNS results.

Yes, that is correct.

Yet the fixes seem to be to the Browsers

Not really, the WebRTC leaks are related to the browser and can be addressed by patching the browser, but the DNS leaks are specific to Windows 10 and have nothing to do with the browser. My guess is that MS might not be inclined to fix this issue anytime soon since they probably view it as being a "feature" rather than a bug.

Little buggy annoyances starting to reveal their hideous heads from that windows 10?

I know this much,windows users will find themselves scrambling to do things that they used to be able to do just a few years ago. Free internet may seem free...but for every laptop that wants anonymity...you will find that microsoft is 3 steps ahead of you. Makes me think that bill sold out to the NSA.

My prediction is ...that the internet will be absolutely free for users in the very near future....***However*** ...the payoff will be an ever more increasing loss of privacy. In other words...do what you will, but remember...they now know who and where you are.

For myself, I just gave up trying to be anonymous...as that just draws more attention. Now I just proceed as a "normal" person would. I am staying away from VPN's and MAC cloning....and Tor browsers. There is just no point in hiding. (Nothing to hide anyways). You can fight this all you want...but with the way things are going....it will take more than tin foil hats and vpn's to fool the prying "FVEY" (google it) eyes.

I might agree that using a VPN is pointless if the reason for using it was to try to hide from the NSA, but with Fidelity and other American financial institutions putting restrictions on the accounts of Americans living abroad it makes all sorts of sense to use a VPN when connecting to their websites

but..unless I read the OP wrong....windows 10 is buggy with VPN....and soon these institutions will be able to know if you are not in the USA...

works for now...because I use a VPN to access sites like Hulu...and a few sites that say you must be in the USA.

My point is that this capability may go away...with windows 10, and future methods used to determine your actual location, mentioned in previous posts. I use windows 7, and refuse to upgrade. However...it will be only a matter of time until windows 7 degrades due to lack of driver support (in the future). The writing is on the wall....

I think that you are giving bad advice if you are telling people not to bother using a VPN when connecting to US financial instutions. That logic seems to be the same as telling someone who has holes in his trousers that instead of patching the holes that he should just not wear pants. I think that it is possible to patch the holes in Win10's VPN.

Little buggy annoyances starting to reveal their hideous heads from that windows 10?

I know this much,windows users will find themselves scrambling to do things that they used to be able to do just a few years ago. Free internet may seem free...but for every laptop that wants anonymity...you will find that microsoft is 3 steps ahead of you. Makes me think that bill sold out to the NSA.

My prediction is ...that the internet will be absolutely free for users in the very near future....***However*** ...the payoff will be an ever more increasing loss of privacy. In other words...do what you will, but remember...they now know who and where you are.

For myself, I just gave up trying to be anonymous...as that just draws more attention. Now I just proceed as a "normal" person would. I am staying away from VPN's and MAC cloning....and Tor browsers. There is just no point in hiding. (Nothing to hide anyways). You can fight this all you want...but with the way things are going....it will take more than tin foil hats and vpn's to fool the prying "FVEY" (google it) eyes.

I might agree that using a VPN is pointless if the reason for using it was to try to hide from the NSA, but with Fidelity and other American financial institutions putting restrictions on the accounts of Americans living abroad it makes all sorts of sense to use a VPN when connecting to their websites

FWIW, below are my work-arounds for the problem. These work-arounds won't guarantee that your DNS queries go through your VPN tunnel but they should make it such that the websites to which you are connecting will only be able to detect US-based DNS servers.

First, find the IP addresses for a DNS servers in the United States. Do not use Google or OpenDNS's servers for this because from here (Thailand) they will route through Singapore and that will be detectable by some websites in the US. One option is to use StrongVPN's pubic DNS servers in California: 216.131.95.20 and 216.131.94.5 .

Next, open your routers configuration page, go to LAN settings and look for DHCP options. There you should find a place to enter the IP address of your IP servers. Enter 216.131.95.20 and 216.131.94.5 . If you are on a public wifi or do not have access to the router's configuration page, then instead use the man-in-the-middle method described in the final paragraph of this post.

Then, on Windows 10, go into “Network Connections” and change the IPv4 section of ALL of your network adapters such that instead of the default DNS servers that 216.131.95.20 and 216.131.94.5 are used instead. Together with the DNS being set to 216.131.95.20 and 216.131.94.5 in your router's configuration, this will ensure that websites to which you are connecting (with or without VPN) will only be able to detect those two US-based DNS servers.

If you do not have access to your router's configuration page (perhaps because you are using a public wifi or because whoever owns the router doesn't want you to touch it), then the only work-around that I have found is to put a “man in the middle”. The concept is connect another device to the (public) wifi and to tether that device to your Windows 10 PC either via a cable or via Bluetooth. For instance, if you have an Android smartphone, connect the smartphone to wifi and then share the smartphone's internet connection with your Win10 PC by Bluetooth. Once initially connected, you'll find that you're unable to surf the internet because Windows is unable to find any DNS servers at all, so what you need to do is go back to “Network Connections”, look for the Bluetooth network adapter, and change it's IPv4 setting such that it's DNS servers are 216.131.95.20 and 216.131.94.5 . Once this is done, you should be able to surf the internet through your Win10 machine's Bluetooth connection and any websites that you go to should only be able to see US-based DNS servers.

The Chinese stock market has no relationship to Chinese industry and/or economic conditions hence it is just like a casino. Even the numbnuts on CNN have reported this, this week. No one with any brains in the West invests in the Chinese stock market.

Here's one such person "without a brain": http://jimtalksmarkets.blogspot.com/2015/08/china-bought-more-stocks-when-they.html

He said in that link, "10 years from now no one will be trading in US dollars." Ya right. I like Jim but when he moved to China he must have left his brain in NYC.

I recall an economist saying exactly that some years back, and that timeline has long gone.

That's part of Roger's modus operandi. He often will throw in one or two seemingly outlandish predictions into otherwise level-headed opinion pieces. Ten years ago he was throwing out nuggets like "sugar farmers will become the richest men in America" but presumably some of his other market calls made money.

If I see the IP and country changed when I go to whatismyip.com is that good enough?

In most cases that's all that websites that care about what country you are in look at. However it would be possible for someone to put code on their web page that would allow them to extract additional information that would allow them to figure out that you are using a VPN or proxy and what country your DNS servers are in. My fear is that US brokerage firms might start doing that in order to figure out which of their customers are living overseas..