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

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

#231

Post by chemmail » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 12:30 AM UTC

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…

In all honesty, i have friends with masters in cybersec who don't know what sha256 is. This guy probably knows way more. That said all hosting/vpn are all circlejerks of the same 3-4 companies.

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

#232

Post by dontbenebby » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 12:30 AM UTC

auslander wrote: post #169

dontbenebby wrote: post #141

Earlier 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.

> This is why I self host Goals are to hide your traffic from ISP (1) and your real IP from internet (2). Self host VPN achieves (1) but not (2), your VPN's IP is yours truly.

How do you know my goals? :)

Maybe I just can't always trust my ISP (ex: public wifi).

If I want to also hide my IP I can use Tor with or without a VPN.

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

#233

Post by oarsinsync » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 12:46 PM UTC

neurostimulant wrote: post #173

oarsinsync wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Completely agreed, however the parent comment suggests that they aren't aware that their vps provider's underlying network infrastructure is 'snooping' on them by default:

> I seriously doubt my hosting provider would jeopardize their business by snooping on ... a vpn given the breach of trust would cause large customers to ditch them.

Any half decent network provider logs sampled flow data by default. This is all that is needed to de-anonymise any vpn session. Even on a host that is shared by hundreds of VPN sessions.

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

#234

Post by thr0w__4w4y » Fri, Jul 12, 2019, 5:54 AM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #97

None 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".

Yep, IVPN user here. Couldn't be happier. Have used 3 other VPNs over the years, IVPN's privacy, features, speed, and corporate policies are the best I've found.

Just a satisfied user. Its 2x what I used to pay, but IMO it's worth it. I don't think it's /always/ true "you get what you pay for", but sometimes it really is.

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

#235

Post by pradeepchhetri » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 4:30 AM UTC

ubercow13 wrote: post #47

debaserab2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what organization with that kind of credibility is offering a free vpn? If Mozilla did, it probably would get the kind of attention and focus you’re suggesting. I just don’t see a lot of companies with a similar vision as Mozilla that are successful.

Cloudflare is going to offer a free VPN

Last year, Cloudflare announced[0] a product called Cloudflare Access[1] which solves the same problem as VPN, not sure if it can be used as a replacement of VPN totally.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-access/ [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-access/

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

#236

Post by nurettin » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 11:17 AM UTC

atmosx wrote: post #147

grepthisab wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not illegal, it's against their TOS, bug difference. In any case, if there's money to be made, you'll find even more reputable entities will operate at the margins of ethics and legality. In any case, probably more cost effective to come up with a technical solution rather than suing every pop up scraper of Amazon. Or just sue the VPN provider itself?

I was talking about the VPN provider of course.

Not sure about VPNs, but data centers usually harbor their own RBL services to blackmail you to stop doing whatever you are doing as soon as you put their network under stress or continually visit a certain domain/ip range (or get hacked and be used as a drone to DDOS some website)