11–20 of 73 posts
If you do something illegal on a VPN connection and think the VPN providers have no logs/evidence, you'll be very surprised when the cops show up.
Let's do a very quick experiment where we evaluate a few popular VPN services at a glance, and critique them using non-technical insights which can generally be applied to any business trying to sell you a product. In other words, there's no excuse for not being able to develop these insights just because you aren't a "tech person".
Googling PureVPN provides the following summary:
"The best VPN service in 2018. PureVPN leads the industry with its massive network of more than 2000 encrypted VPN servers, around 300000 anonymous IPs..."
PureVPN only has a 150 character limit to describe their business, and they use it for:
1) Overzealous claims about being "the best" and the "industry leader"
2) Throwing out large numbers which they hope the user will correlate to excellence as a VPN service. The clueless user will think, "the more the better, right?"
Nord VPN's summary:
"Protect your privacy online and access media content with no regional restrictions. Strong encryption and no-log policy with 5000+ servers in 60+ countries..."
1) No regional restrictions? That's a given for any decent VPN. Useless noise meant to paint the product in a better light.
2) They claim strong encryption, but again, that's a GIVEN for any decent service. More deception.
3) They immediately try to sucker people in with the "no logs" bullshit
4) More stupid large numbers.
See a trend?
Now look at Mullvad VPN's summary:
"Mullvad is a VPN service that helps keep your online activity, identity, and location private. Only €5/month - We accept Bitcoin, cash, bank wire, credit card..."
Wow! No claims about being the best, no claims about anything. It "helps" keep your data private. No claims about 100% privacy. Then they list the price and payment methods. Informative and non-deceptive.
I'm always curious at how these VPN providers aren't being hit with false advertising. They claim to keep basically no data about you. "You are Invisible – Even We Cannot See What You Do Online We DO NOT keep any record of your browsing activities, connection logs, records of the VPN IPs assigned to you, your original IPs, your connection time, the history of your browsing, the sites you visited, your outgoing traffi…
Them not keeping a record may be true... But the rsyslog was delivering the logs to *.fbi.gov And not retaining logs would still be correct. They said nothing about transporting them to the relevant feds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bandwidth counting can be accomplished without keeping "logs" per se, and with WireGuard, I think there would be very little reason to attempt to limit connections.
WireGuard is very hard to run without logging. It simply wasn’t designed for that and the maintainer was paid once to write “a rootkit-like” piece of code for a VPN provider which hired him to help them fix that. It’s still an open question afaik edit: I've worded this weird. I was typing on my phone at lunch stuff I'd just learned this morning[0] which referenced this[1] article saying running a log-less Wireguard m…
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/newton-man-sentenced-over...
The relevant bit is on Page 22. >Further, records from Pure VPN show that the same email accounts Lin's gmail account and the teleportfx gmail account-were accessed from the same WANSecurity IP address. Significantly, Pure VPN was able to determine that their service was accessed by the same customer from two originating IP addresses: the RCN IP address from the home Lin was living in at the time, and the software co…
In Brazil law requires services to keep logs for a year. This made me very wary of services like ProtonVPN that put some servers there. A lot of people trust them, but I for some reason don't...
No offense or anything, but it sounds like you actually have very GOOD reasons for not trusting them.
The relevant bit is on Page 22. >Further, records from Pure VPN show that the same email accounts Lin's gmail account and the teleportfx gmail account-were accessed from the same WANSecurity IP address. Significantly, Pure VPN was able to determine that their service was accessed by the same customer from two originating IP addresses: the RCN IP address from the home Lin was living in at the time, and the software co…
"the fact that VPN's track activity with logs."
>As an aside, it's good to see another example that the FBI does actually investigate cases of cyberharrasment and takes doxing seriously, contrary to popular opinion.
Seriously, all this over a roommate found on Craigslist. I did like the part where his victim repeatedly smashed his computer monitor with a hammer, though.