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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

#181

Post by dmix »

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…

Are those mattress startups any good or is it all hype? I keep seeing them pop up everywhere...

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

#182

Post by jstarfish »

scurvy wrote: post #31
cf498 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any experience with using classical VPS as a proxy? Same problem?

That's what I started out with. Pretty useless. Blocking the entire ASN is pretty easy and most won't care what is what.

FWIW, most modern VPN providers spread their infrastructure around to evade ASN bans so there is some value added in paying a service to manage that for you.

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

#183

Post by CiPHPerCoder »

mushufasa wrote: post #172
Kaveren wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> For better or worse, that's just how it goes.

No, it isn't.

You don't have to use "bank-grade", "military-grade", etc. in your marketing. They don't actually mean anything, and only serve as a red flag for "we don't know what the fuck we're doing".

You can use almost-equally meaningless phrases like "state of the art", "industry standard", etc.

You can sell on a "proven track record" of not selling out to data brokers or yielding to government search warrants (although that mostly hinges on "never been subpoenaed" rather than "resisted a subpoena" in practical terms).

There's lots of other paths to take besides using "${DUMB}-grade" in your marketing copy. Saying "that's just how it goes" is yielding to a lazy cop-out with another lazier cop-out. It absolutely isn't just how it goes.

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

#184

Post by whatshisface »

reshie wrote: post #83
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.

the difference is speculation to outright imagination which does no favor to real threats. there are plenty of crackpots and conspiracy nut-jobs out there.

It's one thing to say without evidence, "I know for a fact that intruders are logging in to my system on SSH." It's another thing entirely to say, "it's reasonable to expect intrusion on SSH, so I'm not going to leave that port open on my firewall unnecessarily."

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

#185

Post by theturtletalks »

acdha wrote: post #175
trickstra wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes but at least Reddit has downvoting. I still take the results with a grain of salt, but most times the Reddit user points you in the right direction.

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

#186

Post by Renaud »

auslander wrote: post #135
Renaud wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks interesting and probably without gotcha, but it’s rather naive as it seems to rely on volunteers to act as relay/exit node. I wonder how many ran into trouble due to dubious anonymous traffic exiting their IP...

Why naive? What is wrong relying on volunteers? Goal is to hide your traffic from ISP and your real IP from internet. Volunteer's VPN do just fine :) > dubious anonymous traffic price of freedom from corps and govs.

Naive in the sense that they only address issues such as blocking LAN networks and email spam traffic and there is zero mention of what happens when someone anonymously abuse the service.

The volunteer effort is laudable and quite refreshing but can a VPN relying on volunteers be ignorant of the risks those volunteers incur when they open their connection to anonymous traffic?

I understand that this is an issue that every VPN has to face but there should at least be some mention of how that particular VPN service handles law enforcement and abuse requests, or do they expect the volunteers to face the consequences?

Maybe I’m missing that point and it’s clarified somewhere?

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

#187

Post by hellofunk »

novaleaf wrote: post #167

Private 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 get exactly double the bandwidth with them that you do, so I suspect there are other factors.

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

#188

Post by hellofunk »

typenil wrote: post #177
novaleaf wrote: post #167

Private 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.

I haven't seen a Cloudflare page in ages and I use them often. I honestly cannot recall the last time when browsing the web I saw a Cloudflare page, with any ISP or VPN.

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

#189

Post by ptx »

goldenkey wrote: post #126
dorgo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Yes, because knowledge isn't SEO-optimized by default.

Isn't it? I thought Google was trying to optimize their search engine for finding useful information, so if someone were to make an honest website that just tries to provide useful information (anachronistic as that may seem) wouldn't they hypothetically have the full manpower of Google's search team optimizing for finding it?

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

#190

Post by vbezhenar »

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…

Is it really easy market? I thought about running a VPN service, but how do I deal with abuses? People would use VPN for all kinds of things including bad ones. And investigators will come at me.
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