alt Hacker News> First, I just upgraded to 2.5 Gbps internet and I don’t want to route all my traffic through a VPN and take the speed hit. I have this bandwidth for a reason
You don't have to. You create a container which runs openvpn to connect to your vpn provider, and also hosts an ssh daemon. The ssh daemon receives incoming SOCKS5 connections from a firefox portable browser, which has been configured to use the proxy (your Docker openvpn-container) for browsing and DNS resolution, and pipes it through the VPN tunnel.
So you have that one browser just to surf imgur. if that's your thing. And you could also use Firefox on Android (maybe also iOS) with those proxy settings (a secondary Firefox browser, like the beta version).
So you get very high control about what you are using the VPN for, you don't just pipe your entire OS's network traffic through the VPN.
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This is a great idea except for me (and for the author I suspect) I regularly come across attachment of Imgur hosted images on sites (like a post on a DIY forum but not all of them) so it wouldn't solve my issue unless I were to use your browser in the container all the time (I suspect the author also doesn't just 'surf imgur' but randomly comes across images hosted on imgur linked to from other locations).
That doesn't seem very practical. The issue is that imgur links are everywhere and you wouldn't want to switch browsers whenever you encounter one. Not to mention it requires per device setup. Author's solution is much better than what you describe.
Nope, security/privacy is always a trade off. It's much much safer just to route all your traffic through a VPN. I get ~200-500 Mbps with Mullvad, that seems good enough. Sucks if you upgraded to 2.5 Gbps before checking, but oh well
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-pro...
You can default route domains through a VPN using a Firefox tab container, you don’t need a separate browser instance running!