I’ll say what I’ve said before: making a VPN purchase is non-trivial.
The best I’ve been able to do was use Mozilla as a proxy (because I trust ‘em), and thus bought ProtonVPN (which admittedly has been imperfect).
VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies
171–180 of 236 posts
Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
eh. I wouldn't take that as a strike against them. It's pretty impossible to communicate crypto to laypeople using technical language, like AES or even SSL. You have to use analogies, to banks or militaries. For better or worse, that's just how it goes.
Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I self host algo vpn. I seriously doubt my hosting provider would jeopardize their business by snooping on/messing with a vpn given the breach of trust would cause large customers to ditch them.
Unfortunately, your hosting provider gets to see 1. Tunnelled & encrypted (and in most cases, easily identifiable as VPN) traffic coming from your VPN client to your server 2. Untunnelled traffic from your server to whatever server endpoint you're visiting. Correlating the two, even when it's a massive multi-user service, is not difficult for a hosting provider with half a clue to do. Especially when handed a police…
Running your own VPN server doesn't provide you with anonymity, but if configured right, it'll give you more privacy compared to just blindly trusting some random VPN companies with your data. Your data that passed through your own VPN server will only be seen by you and your vps vendor (as opposed to your VPN provider and whatever vendors they used to run their services).
Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now you just need to figure out which one owns which and then chain them cross vendor, and hope that "he's connecting to a chinese spy vpn" doesn't put you on any list ;)
Most people on HN are probably on several lists. If I mention "The Anarchist Cookbook" then I imagine every username on this page will be added to a GCHQ list, I'll probably have my internet traffic mined to establish if I downloaded it (which they arrest people for in the UK -- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-41802493 ). Presumably they have my online purchase history that relates to reagents, etc.. I…
Had it on a floppy for my Amiga.
Brings back memories.
Jolly Rogers cookbook :)
Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you trust reddit, though? There's plenty of social media campaigns out there that have people plugging stuff on reddit to promote some company or agenda.
the per-community moderation makes marketing spam much harder
Blatant spam, yes, but if it’s like what’s being discussed here I’d be hesitant that it goes much better than amazon reviews. It’s just too easy to create fake accounts and you don’t need to be that smart to avoid telegraphing this.
Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies
#176People 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…
In the US, we know that ISPs and government agencies are harvesting data for their own proposes.
So using a VPN comes down to the fair gamble that someone who promises not to log and use your data is possibly better than the guys who definitely log and use it.
Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies
#177Private Internet Access (PIA) doesn't seem to be mentioned in the article nor HN posts. I think that must be good then. I've been a happy PIA customer for about 5 years. They probably arn't the fastest (I get aprox 3.5mbit/sec on them) but so far none of the mud slung against them sticks. There's a lot of shady shit in the VPN industry, so glad they are above it.
I used PIA for a long time, but at some point it seemed like every single site I visited triggered that Cloudflare protection page that forces you to fill out Google Recaptcha before proceeding.
Hopefully that's not the case now.
Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Safe? Against what? - Preventing websites from seeing your true IP? (you'll want to disable webrtc as well[1].) Mostly yes. - preventing your ISP from spying on your traffic? (allowing Amazon to spy on your traffic in exchange...) Yes. - Avoiding risk of legal threats if you engage in copyright infringement? Mostly no. They can subpoena Amazon instead of your ISP, and your lightsail/EC2 ip isn't shared. Routing throu…
I live in Turkey and I got myself Wireguard set-up with wireguard+lightsail. I can say I got same trouble as no-VPN. For example I cant view profiles on Twitter when im on VPN. btw Turkey is notorious for blocking sites, Youtube got blocked for months, Wikipedia is still blocked today..
They can’t block sites when going via a Wireguard VPN surely?
Where are you exiting?
Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies
#179None of these are seriously privacy-centric VPNs. I was very pleased to not see any of my old favorites (AirVPN, IVPN, Mullvad and PIA). Although it's not easy to find them on their site, I believe that the https://cure53.de/ vulnerability assessments are more interesting. Google "vpn site:cure53.de".
Mullvad is great! They don't require email, and they accept crypto for payment.
Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies
#180ExpressVPN 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…
Podcasts/Youtubers attract the shadiest of sponsors. If an amateur content producer is pushing something its almost always a subpar product paid for by an obscene marketing budget.
(They also have no discretion-- no problems at all shilling Bang energy drinks to an audience of children...)