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VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

vpnpro.com

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

#121

Post by aorth »

_8j50 wrote: post #35
secfirstmd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. With the possible exception of Psiphon which is built by and for activists. https://www.psiphon3.com Tor is obviously another option but I don't strictly speaking categorise that as a VPN.

The intelligence community has a record of infiltrating activist orgs to direct their ideas. I wouldn't trust anything made specifically for activism unless some other valuable merit is presented.

For what it's worth, Cure53 did a pentest report on the Psiphon client, server, and iOS app in 2017:

https://cure53.de/pentest-report_psiphon.pdf

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

#122

Post by johnnycab »

emerongi wrote: post #104
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 o…

>Just skip to page 10.

I thought that was the running joke:

Q: Where's the best place to hide a body?

A: Page ten of Google.

But, joking aside, you can install greasemonkey/tampermonkey and get the googlemonkeyr script to manage your search results to be a bit more effective.

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/31607-googlemonkeyr-fix-ju...

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

#123

Post by friedegg »

EastSmith wrote: post #118

Why would I need a VPN for browsing if all my traffic is https and I use HTTPS DNS?

They can also be used to avoid some geographic restrictions, although some services now actively look to block people on VPN. I used to watch new episodes of certain show about a time traveler live via the BBC website despite being in the US.

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

#124

Post by auslander »

pnutjam wrote: post #100
nurettin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is not to make a choice but to be informed about how the industry is somehow tied together in interesting ways. I would also add that many of these VPN services turn your machine into a drone where you knowingly or unknowingly enter into a contract so that they can sell your bandwidth to paying customers to provide them with randomized IP pools so that they can scrape amazon and alibaba.

Don't use any VPN providers client, stick to straight openvpn.

Better yet, use IKEv2, not openvpn. Windows, MacOS and iOS has native IKEv2 clients. And most probably in Linux too :) Just make and install VPN profile as yourvpn.mobileconfig text file.

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

#125

Post by auslander »

My research into VPNs led me to a strange thing: VPN Gate [0]. It is community run VPN servers, by University of Tsukuba, Japan (6953 Public VPN Relay Servers) with free public access, Username: 'vpn', Password: 'vpn'. Still trying to grasp what it is :)

[0] https://www.vpngate.net/en/

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

#126

Post by goldenkey »

dorgo wrote: post #111
emerongi wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> 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. Is a less SEO-optimized site less likely to be a scam?

Yes, because knowledge isn't SEO-optimized by default. It takes time to do so. And time is money. And 99% of the time, those who are willing to spend a lot of time to get on the first page of Google are doing it to gain money, not to spread knowledge.

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

#127

Post by Kaveren »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #117
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 watch a bunch of tech related YouTube channels and the amount of NordVPN shilling is outrageous. Some fine folks making good content telling their audience that "your ISP is seeing everything you do but if you use a VPN you are safe, it's totally not like the VPN provider is then able to do exactly what the ISP could before!" Even worse the VPN provider is usually operating from some country with much less regulati…

don't forget the "military grade encryption" NordVPN makes the youtubers include sometimes.

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

#128

Post by Renaud »

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…

PIA accept bitcoin fine, as a counter example.

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

#129

Post by andreareina »

dorgo wrote: post #111
emerongi wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> 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. Is a less SEO-optimized site less likely to be a scam?

If shilling sites are more likely to be SEO-optimized, yes. One of the implications of Bayes' Theorem is that if observing A makes B more likely, then observing B also makes A more likely. A worked example:

Given:

P(shill) = P(!shill) = 0.5

P(optimized|shill) = 0.8

P(optimized|!shill) = 0.6

Then:

P(optimized) = P(shill) * P(optimized|shill) + P(!shill) * P(optimized|!shill) = 0.4 + 0.3 = 0.7

P(shill|optimized) = P(optimized|shill) * P(shill)/P(optimized) = 0.8 * 0.5/0.7 ≈ 0.57

P(shill|!optimized) = P(!optimized|shill) * P(shill)/P(!optimized) = 0.2 * 0.5/0.3 ≈ 0.33

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

#130

Post by Kaveren »

if a VPN is right for your use case, ProtonVPN is the best possible solution if you want a moderate degree of herd anonymity from endpoints you visit. if you don't care about that, run your own VPN.

those are the only two answers. ProtonVPN is the only VPN company to own any of their own hardware (they own one physical data center in Switzerland). "SecureCore" = route through switzerland data center to destination country, also useful. CEO is a public figure. free service is surprisingly good. company is ideological.

could it all be fake? yes, but it is far less likely than any other company's VPN service to be. if there's one VPN in the world that would go lavabit, it'd be them.

as others have said vpnpro.com and any VPN review websites are all untrustworthy and paid off by VPN companies.

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