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This is an update to my previous post Tor Relays are NOT Tor Exit Points
I moped around for about four days wondering how I am going to word this discussion to people who don't really care about privacy at all. I wondered if I should attempt to #metoo the company somehow. You know something stupid like, "$COMPANY hates women and minorities because they do not allow them to express their plight on the internet anonymously with Tor!" I've realized that the issue isn't going to go away unless either I have a conversation with the person who put the block in place (and there is a chance he will just take a high moral ground 'you transport abuse which put US and our CUSTOMERS at risk. How DARE you. Stop putting MY servers and MY customers at risk with YOUR actions') or get a new IP address that wouldn't appear in some random Tor blacklist.
The first idea was to turn my RPi into a wifi router and when it detects an attempt to access the company's webpage it would ask a remote server to access the webpage and return what it sees. There would be communication between the RPi and the remove server at all the steps. However, this would require a wifi adapter that is capable of endless 'Netflims', 'Alyxia', and every other stupid smart-device in the house. This seemed unlikely to work or likely to be unsustainable. It is a needle which would work if the things connecting to it were just a small applications but since everything (+50 devices) need to connect to it... eh... Also, I would need know what software I will need to do that which I do not and to even search for HOW to do something like that, I would need to know the specific terminology to search for, which again I do not. So the hardware option was out. What about the software option?
I am assuming that you know how to read or that you are using a screen reader which hopefully makes it obvious where I am going with this. In order to avoid having awkward discussions with people who are unlikely to see the point of Tor (and who are going to 'ask' me to 'fix it' if I do explain it (I'd also rather them not google 'Tor' and freak out because some CNN article says only evil criminals use it)) I created a VPN which has access to the internet. This allows me to actually access the corporations website... Bastards. They caused me a lot of emotional distress.
I am somewhat proud of myself for mitigating this problem, but I wish that I did not have too. I've always wanted to have my own VPN server that can interface with the internet (I do not trust NordVPN/PIA or any VPN services that can afford advertisement) but I never expected me to REQUIRE one. Yet another discussion topic for the mythological creature known as 'job interview.'
Anyway! I'm proud to introduce https://jakes-vpn.top/, a top tier electronic virtual private network that is owned by me, Jake! I secure and protect your data from the NSA! Give me your money for 10 dollars a month and if the NSA asks me for logs, I'll tell them to shove it! Your money is more important to me than a lifetime in Gitmo! This paragraph is sarcasm NSA already has your data anyway
Also, unrelated, why does OpenVPN Connect (official OpenVPN 'app' for windows) neglect to ask for PEM password? That is really, really, dumb. There is nowhere to specify password for the key file! OpenVPN GUI however, does allow you to put a password... Albeit in the .opvn file as a parameter: askpass, which loads a file that contains the password in plain text. Really dumb.
Hopefully, this entry will not need part 3.