21–30 of 66 posts
Is there any reason to trust a free VPN service? At least with a paid service I might think that my money ... could be enough to sustain the company. At least it could be. I would assume a free service would have to be selling your information just as a matter of policy / economics.
Almost all of the utility apps (battery cleaners, ram optimizers etc) are owned by chinese, and they are a bigger threat than vpn services. They have a huge footprint of devices outside of china, and have a lot of permissions granted
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not entirely true. Some, if not all, of these companies start outside of china, but end up getting bought by chinese capital. I do not have a source for this, i just know from my chat with friends.
It works both way. I used to use a shadowsocks based service called "God Use VPN" or 佛跳墙 in Chinese, which is a dish name. It was so popular to the extend that google translation used to believe that the English name of that Chinese dish known as "佛跳墙" is "God Use VPN". It was recently sold to a foreign owner and stopped provided any Chinese based services - if you send them some emails in Chinese, you get English re…
For Chinese apps, we can only imagine that the government does really police the ban or that they are honey pots...
Almost all of the utility apps (battery cleaners, ram optimizers etc) are owned by chinese, and they are a bigger threat than vpn services. They have a huge footprint of devices outside of china, and have a lot of permissions granted
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised at all. VPN is useful in both direction. There are quite some Chinese content not accessible outside China.
Is there any reason to trust a free VPN service? At least with a paid service I might think that my money ... could be enough to sustain the company. At least it could be. I would assume a free service would have to be selling your information just as a matter of policy / economics.
If a provider is offering free and paid plans, free plan is usually used to attract customers to try your service. The free plan is "paid off" with money that would otherwise go to marketing.
That's the correct model for onboarding with free services, not offering a free service tier with restricted speeds.
It's simply stupid as a user to forward all of your traffic to another company for free. Thus any VPN that offers such a service does not believe in fully educating its users of the dangers involved in using a VPN, and are operating at an ethical boundary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised at all. VPN is useful in both direction. There are quite some Chinese content not accessible outside China.
Can you mention an example of Chinese content that’s not accessible?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It works both way. I used to use a shadowsocks based service called "God Use VPN" or 佛跳墙 in Chinese, which is a dish name. It was so popular to the extend that google translation used to believe that the English name of that Chinese dish known as "佛跳墙" is "God Use VPN". It was recently sold to a foreign owner and stopped provided any Chinese based services - if you send them some emails in Chinese, you get English re…
VPN use is illegal in China, which is a good reason to quit the market. For Chinese apps, we can only imagine that the government does really police the ban or that they are honey pots...
And there is a university net, it's slightly less blocked than public nets.
They've charged someone for selling VPN online, but charging users is effectively unprobable due to the sheer number, but since Chinese laws are generally vague, judges and prosecutors are easily influenced and arbitrary on party security cases, they can always pick couple guys off to make a statement or set an example, like Sabotaging Computer Systems.
Is there any reason to trust a free VPN service? At least with a paid service I might think that my money ... could be enough to sustain the company. At least it could be. I would assume a free service would have to be selling your information just as a matter of policy / economics.
You can easily pay an ISP $50/mo for broadband, so why should you trust a paid VPN that will handle all your traffic for only $5-8/mo on top? Is the difference all infrastructural costs? What about those cheap $3/mo VPNs? Where do you draw the line?
It doesn't matter where they're based. If you pay with a credit card under your real name the burden of risk is always on you and if the company has agreements with whichever jurisdiction you are in then they will collaborate with LE.
that said, trust is fickle: The ultimate example of why not to put trust in companies was WoSign/StartCom.
WoSign acquired Startcom because they were a trusted fresh player with a still untarnished name and available cheaply (also thanks to Eddy Nigg and his investor Wes Kussmaul who both saw no conflict of interest and indeed claimed in public Eddy didn't know who the buyer actually was until it was too late).
When somebody shows up with a fat cheque and tells your VPN company that Christmas came early, and that they're being bought out, then you have no reason to continue to trust or? Yet people do continue to trust (see the N.N. Taleb Turkey problem). People then are forgetting their trust assumption actually doesn't hold when main mode of growth for the company is M&A and not product development & innovation.
When trust is just a commodity that can be acquired and resold willy-nilly by some people with enough cash, then the product/service is automatically snake-oil (no matter if the crypto and the implementation of the software is 100% rock solid and was written by gods).
For VPN's a good rule is to choose a neutral company that has very little in common with you. If you are doing shit in Iran don't use an Iranian VPN company. likewise if you do shit in Russia then US/UK VPN should be safer than a VPN located in Cyprus.
If you do "shit" against Turkey, with a VPN in Australia while you are based in Taiwan that's 3 jurisdictions and much better than doing shit against Turkey connecting from Australia with your VPN based in Australia.
Finally it is best not to do shit, but sometimes doing shit is the only way crimes by governments and those in power can be exposed.