VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies • Hacker News Board

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#101

Post by colemickens » Sat, Jul 06, 2019, 11:05 AM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #72

colemickens wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this downvoted? It took less than 30 seconds to fire up Orbot, connect, open YouTube and start streaming a video without any issue or fuss. Sometimes when people talk about Tor, it reminds me of how people talked about Linux up until a couple years ago - often touting very out-dated impressions as if they were current observations. Tor bandwidth is very different than it was 5-10 years ago.

It's not very consistent. Sometimes you get a gateway which is great, sometimes one which is limited to 10kbps, sometimes one running some monitoring experiments which doesn't care if you get any bandwidth (I was running one for a while).

My understanding is that bad/poor gateways are penalized. In my own experience, I've only ever needed to change circuits manually once (but I'm primarily using Tor to NAT punch to hidden services, not sure if that matters ).

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#102

Post by oceankid » Sat, Jul 06, 2019, 11:07 AM UTC

jen729w wrote: post #84

ExpressVPN are on a podcast advertising spree, so I thought I’d give them a look. I tried to pay using Bitcoin and got a generic “There was an error” error. And when I say generic, I mean ‘I recognise the Semantic UI React default error block’ generic. I used their live chat support. “Is this normal,” I asked. “No,” I was told. I tried again a day later. Same. I tried them on Twitter. Nothing. So, it seems that Expre…

Good observation.

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#103

Post by mercora » Sat, Jul 06, 2019, 11:08 AM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #78

GordonS wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Snowden affair showed anything, it's that the tinfoil hat wearers were right all along - you'd have been ridiculed if you'd suggested just about anything from the Snowden files.

I still think the NSA employs Linux devs so they can deliberately insert flaws. Why would they not? It would be very easy. But every time I mention it people reply "But but many eyes! They'd get caught!"

I want to point out that they could similarly hire someone working at microsoft, or get someone up for a position there, to do this and it would be at least as hard to detect...

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#104

Post by emerongi » Sat, Jul 06, 2019, 11:10 AM UTC

Traster wrote: post #91

People should take this list with a serious health warning. Firstly, a lot of this is just 'internet sleuth'ing and innuendo. Plenty of companies want to operate multiple services to be able to use different marketing and differentiation strategies. Secondly, the fact that the site is funded by affiliate links to a coupole of the big VPN services should really ring alarm bells. I trust we all learned from the Mattres…

I know someone making tens of thousands a month from shilling VPNs. They have site where they "review" and "rate" VPNs.

The reality is that the customers of those products barely understand them and are buying into the BS of "stay anonymous" and "be private online". It's an easy market, especially considering you don't even need to develop the VPN software, just run instances on some cloud/VPS provider and do a ton of marketing.

The person doing the shilling is marketing himself as a "privacy & crypto expert" and having a masters degree in cybersecurity, reality is dude barely graduated high school. He actually works for a friend of his who runs a whole variety of these sites and is about to clear $10M+ this year alone.

What I've learned from this is that if you Google for some popular product, the first 5 pages are going to be SEO-optimized shilling sites. Just skip to page 10.

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#105

Post by tgragnato » Sat, Jul 06, 2019, 11:15 AM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #44

nordsieck wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A VPN on the other hand consists of an application and usually unmetered usage of the company's bandwidth, which costs money. Precisely. I imagine one of the more popular uses of VPNs is Bittorrent.

Though if you're in the right DCs, that traffic will be mostly internal, I suppose, since VPN providers and seedboxes aren't that spread out (for price and TOS reasons).

Can you name some of these DCs?

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#106

Post by jjakque » Sat, Jul 06, 2019, 11:21 AM UTC

krn wrote: post #77

This post is almost surely funded by affiliate commissions paid by ExpressVPN, NordVPN, and Astrill VPN, all of which are listed as "Top VPN providers" before the article even begins. Therefore, there are some serious omissions[1] in this list. [1] https://i0.wp.com/vpnscam.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/201...

Serious question: What's the context of the provided diagram?

Is it to imply that the named companies are closely associated with each other? ie/ Tesonet, NordVPN, HolaVPN, ProtonMail/ProtonVPN (and other named company I missed) are proven to have common interest and the common interest involve/include putting customers' privacy in danger?

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#107

Post by krn » Sat, Jul 06, 2019, 11:34 AM UTC

jjakque wrote: post #106

krn wrote: post #77

This post is almost surely funded by affiliate commissions paid by ExpressVPN, NordVPN, and Astrill VPN, all of which are listed as "Top VPN providers" before the article even begins. Therefore, there are some serious omissions[1] in this list. [1] https://i0.wp.com/vpnscam.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/201...

Serious question: What's the context of the provided diagram? Is it to imply that the named companies are closely associated with each other? ie/ Tesonet, NordVPN, HolaVPN, ProtonMail/ProtonVPN (and other named company I missed) are proven to have common interest and the common interest involve/include putting customers' privacy in danger?

> Serious question: What's the context of the provided diagram?

There are multiple partnerships and ownerships in VPN and data mining industries that are not publicly admitted, unless something goes wrong[1][2].

Although the presence of these relationships alone is not always enough to claim that customers' privacy has been violated, it makes these companies look much less trustworthy in the long run.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/29/8685251/hola-vpn-botnet-s...

[2] https://torrentfreak.com/images/Luminati-Networks-LTD-vs-UAB... [pdf]

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#108

Post by gchamonlive » Sat, Jul 06, 2019, 11:34 AM UTC

icelancer wrote: post #79

krn wrote: post #77

This post is almost surely funded by affiliate commissions paid by ExpressVPN, NordVPN, and Astrill VPN, all of which are listed as "Top VPN providers" before the article even begins. Therefore, there are some serious omissions[1] in this list. [1] https://i0.wp.com/vpnscam.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/201...

Probably. So what? Doesn't make the facts of the article any less true. Just need to do research on those three companies as well independently if you want to know more.

There are many ways to lie using facts and statistics (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51291.How_to_Lie_with_St... )

If you extrapolate a bit, apply some basic correlation twisting you can infer a lot of wrongful conclusion that is useful to specific agendas. We see this a lot in politics

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#109

Post by luckylion » Sat, Jul 06, 2019, 11:36 AM UTC

tgragnato wrote: post #105

luckylion wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though if you're in the right DCs, that traffic will be mostly internal, I suppose, since VPN providers and seedboxes aren't that spread out (for price and TOS reasons).

Can you name some of these DCs?

LeaseWeb and OVH (both .eu and .ca) are the major players from what I know.

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#110

Post by petronio » Sat, Jul 06, 2019, 11:38 AM UTC

SXX wrote: post #82

andreareina wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The marginal cost to Cloudflare for the extra engineering, compute, and bandwidth is lower than it would be for many other organizations, and it's good marketing for the things they actually make money on.

Actually it's provide them much more than just marketing. They'll be only one company to know detailed information about client connection quality, they'll able to optimize routes for their CDN even more. It's crucial competitive edge for their primary service.

That's a really good point, they'll be able to place VPN endpoints near their CDN endpoints and minimize additional latency, while still knowing the client's original IP for filtering, analytics, and providing geography based views. There's value added for both the VPN users and Cloudflare clients.