The performance is quite bad at the moment. It takes 5-7 seconds to load google.com using either the Germany or US location - from Sweden...
I watched some YT videos and seems ok for me. US server from Romania.
Free VPN integrated in Opera for better online privacy
121–130 of 133 posts
Re: Free VPN integrated in Opera for better online privacy
#122The performance is quite bad at the moment. It takes 5-7 seconds to load google.com using either the Germany or US location - from Sweden...
I watched some YT videos and seems ok for me. US server from Romania.
It works better now.
They under-dimensioned the launch peak capacity. This is peculiar, I do know they have much, more more capacity than needed for in that terms of both servers and bandwidth. ;)
Re: Free VPN integrated in Opera for better online privacy
#123slightly off topic, but does anyone know a good proxy-as-api service? the ones I've seen are either really bad, or really, really expensive.
Re: Free VPN integrated in Opera for better online privacy
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that fairly standard amongst the privacy respecting VPNs? We store nothing / log nothing. We'll comply with law enforcement as far as we're able (ie not at all beyond billing, email and perhaps bandwidth used). So that seems to say they'll perhaps be able to tell when you were logged in, who you are + payment info, and perhaps volumes transferred. Where and on which ports? No clue officer. Private Internet Acce…
But what happens if law enforcement specifically ask them to start recording more information?
My information is a couple of years out of date (I left in August 2013), but that would be hard(ish) for SurfEasy to do, and doing so would affect the entire system (all users), because we didn’t user-level pen-tapping capabilities into the system.
The proxy/VPN machines were designed to be disposable (to potentially cycle IP addresses for various reasons) and to record a minimum of information. It would have required non-trivial effort to make it so that we could do a pen-tap on just one individual given that they could end up on a different server each time. Additionally, I believe that the proxy/VPN machines had no information on the user's identity, just the device's identity (devices were given unique, derived identities when they were created; we could work that information backwards to some degree of accuracy with enough effort, precisely for LE purposes).
I don’t always use a proxy or VPN, but when I do, I trust what my former employer wrote precisely because I know what we didn’t do then, and didn’t believe would be right for us to do. Nothing I have heard from the SurfEasy team since suggests that this has changed.
Re: Free VPN integrated in Opera for better online privacy
#125If they are bought out by the Chinese, does using this mean the new Chinese owners will see all your traffic?
Since Opera is still a norwegian company, they still will need to abide by norwegian data privacy laws.
SurfEasy (the provider of the service) is a Canadian company, so it follows Canadian data privacy laws (which are pretty good; when I worked there, Michael Geist was an advisor).
Re: Free VPN integrated in Opera for better online privacy
#126What stops someone from making a Firefox plugin that (ab)uses Opera's free VPN?
Ultimately, nothing. They could still aggregate your usage data, though, and not necessarily be out anything investment-wise, compared to using the Opera client proper.
There’s a few things that would (probably) stop this from working, but it is possible that the new Opera-based implementation is different than when we implemented it (the proxy version) as a custom Firefox browser back in 2011–2013.
Re: Free VPN integrated in Opera for better online privacy
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data of course! Opera (the company) are one of the big players in mobile advertising. They have their own mobile ad platform [0], and a few years ago acquired a couple of agencies that specialise in mobile advertising [1]. [0] http://operamediaworks.com/ [1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/16/opera-snaps-up-mobile-theor...
Connection is encrypted
To their servers.. Allowing any non end-to-end encrypted information to be harvested at Opera's VPN point.
Re: Free VPN integrated in Opera for better online privacy
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data of course! Opera (the company) are one of the big players in mobile advertising. They have their own mobile ad platform [0], and a few years ago acquired a couple of agencies that specialise in mobile advertising [1]. [0] http://operamediaworks.com/ [1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/16/opera-snaps-up-mobile-theor...
Just to point out, if you have a distaste for this monetization strategy and you're reading this in Chrome I've got some bad news for you.
How so? I'm genuinely curious what information Google collects? Is Chromium better to use in this case?
Re: Free VPN integrated in Opera for better online privacy
#129Couple with native adblocking I'm very tempted to switch browsers (from FF) and probably do so when available. But it just sounds too good, what is the catch?
I switched to opera on Linux recently as Chrome and then Firefox had gotten a bit slow or unstable for me as of late. Have to say, I am very pleased. It's tidy, fast and integrates in pretty well on Linux. It's also featured packed without the agonizingly long startups Chrome was giving me. I know they monetize with ads and such, but I haven't found them intrusive at all. I think one of their major sources is that th…
Yeah people give the new Opera a pretty unfair rap, it's a good browser.
Re: Free VPN integrated in Opera for better online privacy
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
You realise that you could have just given HN a new startup? I'd gladly pay someone to access a portion of their bandwidth - at least enough that I could stream content.
A danger is that stranger will abuse your connection to send spam or even worse things. And you might have a visit from police. Also, I'm sure, reselling your home connection is forbidden by your provider. So it's kind of grey zone.
It could be restricted to a set of domains and only allow HTTP and DNS traffic.