Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use ProtonVPN. Same company as ProtonMail. Highly reputable with a business model around doing privacy and encryption well.
IMHO ProtonVPN (and Mail) are the perfect honeypots
How/why?
Mozilla VPN
61–70 of 531 posts
Re: Mozilla VPN
#62"For example, over 70% of early Beta-testers say that the VPN helps them feel empowered, safe, and independent while being online." What have these "feelings" got to do with anything? This is a measure of successful marketing and has nothing to do with the product or its efficacy. Personally I use Windscribe and I really like it (I've used PIA & Mullvad in the past). I use it for watching US Netflix and to make it sl…
Tech became toxic years ago. Instead of facts and data, feelings and diversity matter.
Re: Mozilla VPN
#63Isn’t $4.99 pricey for a VPN? I pay about 3 for Nord.
Nord locks locks you into an eternal contract and has a pretty bad reputation for multiple reasons.
>Nord locks locks you into an eternal contract
What do you mean? I paid NordVPM for a 2-year contract, which expires in a few weeks. What does "locks locks" refer to?
Re: Mozilla VPN
#64What good is a VPN if you have to reveal all of your personally identifiable information to the vendor? You're better off using Mullvad directly--it looks like they don't require you to fork over personal information to use their service. Shameless plug: SatoshiVPN ( https://satoshivpn.com ) gives you access to your own private and anonymous VPN server with Outline pre-installed, no questions asked. Payments in Bitco…
Might want to make pricing easier to find.
Re: Mozilla VPN
#65Who is the target market for this in the markets it actually operates (US)?
The only people I know that uses VPNs do so to download torrents and evade DMCA notices. And in that case it only really works if the VPN provider is itself located outside of US jurisdiction and collects little to no information about you the user.
Re: Mozilla VPN
#66> At Mozilla, we are working hard to build products to help you control of your privacy and stay safe online. > We know that we are on the right path to building a VPN that makes your online experience safer Commercial VPNs are good for censorship circumvention or location spoofing. It is irresponsible to market VPNs as something which “protects” you online. In reality, they do nothing to improve security, and very l…
The "Don't use VPN services" argument is weak because it doesn't acknowledge one of the most common reasons for using a VPN: avoiding DMCA notices.
That’s what I said. VPNs are good for “location spoofing,” i.e. changing your web-facing IP address to a different region. VPNs are great for this purpose.
The issue is, VPN companies (Mozilla included) are marketing their service as one that improves your safety when it doesn’t.
Re: Mozilla VPN
#67"For example, over 70% of early Beta-testers say that the VPN helps them feel empowered, safe, and independent while being online." What have these "feelings" got to do with anything? This is a measure of successful marketing and has nothing to do with the product or its efficacy. Personally I use Windscribe and I really like it (I've used PIA & Mullvad in the past). I use it for watching US Netflix and to make it sl…
=== edit because I feel this comment is not substantive enough / engages with a strawman version of your comment ===
I understand you're talking about where those feelings come from -- ie, that the feelings are more useful information when backed by the reason for them. And you do provide some of that in your post (privacy, watching US Netflix). But those are things that any trustworthy VPN with US-based endpoints can provide, so they're not a unique selling point, which means your recommendation basically boils down to unsubstantiated feelings again, to which:
=== Original comment ===
I don't use a VPN and have no horse in this race, but surely you see the irony in:
> What have these "feelings" got to do with anything?
Followed by
> I use Windscribe and I really like it.
Re: Mozilla VPN
#68> At Mozilla, we are working hard to build products to help you control of your privacy and stay safe online. > We know that we are on the right path to building a VPN that makes your online experience safer Commercial VPNs are good for censorship circumvention or location spoofing. It is irresponsible to market VPNs as something which “protects” you online. In reality, they do nothing to improve security, and very l…
I see this take a lot. Serious question: doesn't the U.S. government surveillance program focus on collecting communication metadata for U.S. citizens? While it isn't clear what that metadata includes, we do have examples of past programs that have leaked (and the legal theory used to justify them) to guide us.
Given what we publicly know about these surveillance programs I could see FISC approving bulk metadata collection for the IPv4 header content, insecure HTTP header content, and DNS queries.
Wouldn't using a VPN, DNS over HTTPS, and HTTPS everywhere shield you from these bulk metadata collection programs? I run https://everytwoyears.org, a political non-profit focused on ending these programs, and I view VPNs as a key technical piece of preventing these metadata collection programs from functioning; if the security community doesn't believe they are effective, I would really like to know!
Another way of saying this: collecting _content_ of a communication requires a warrant (and our mass surveillance programs respect that from what we publicly know). Most people that I know aren't trying to avoid active (we have a warrant to search you) monitoring with a VPN, but trying to avoid passive warrantless monitoring. Obscuring communication metadata through encryption and tunneling seems to be an effective way of doing this.
Re: Mozilla VPN
#69I am surprised at how much money exists in the VPN industry. Whenever I watch even a mildly-popular YouTube video, it always has an advertisement for the latest VPN provider. As far as I can tell, there is only one reason there is this much money in the field -- to subscribe to US-based video streaming services from outside the US. But they never ever say that that's the reason, they always say things like "work from home securely" or "avoid being tracked". But, of course, your IT department already has a secure VPN for working from home, and that Facebook cookie works regardless of what your IP address is. In general, the sell of "you can't trust your network provider, so pay for an additional network provider that doesn't keep logs and only accepts payment in Bitcoins," doesn't seem particularly strong to me. Of course you can't trust the network layer. Nobody trusts the network layer. That is why we have TLS. (Anyone remember "wired equivalent privacy" when WiFi was a cool and new thing? Turns out wires don't offer much privacy.)
So why people are buying this service confuses me.
I am also confused at why people can run these services so cheaply. I looked into doing it myself (I had some ideas for actual value add), and the economics didn't seem that good. There is a lot of software between "ifup wg0" and "collect money from people that want a VPN". It seems expensive to write all that, unless a "yolo" strategy of starting up openvpn and setting up a couple NAT rules actually scales. (At the very least, you need to be able to distribute keys to pre-built clients, and if you want to make it smooth, you are looking at writing your own Windows/Mac/Android/iOS clients. Then you need all the business management software on top of that -- didn't get the Bitcoins so delete their private key, etc.) It seems like quite a bit of work that is quite expensive.
But these things exist left and right and have huge advertising budgets. So obviously I am misunderstanding something.
Re: Mozilla VPN
#70> At Mozilla, we are working hard to build products to help you control of your privacy and stay safe online. > We know that we are on the right path to building a VPN that makes your online experience safer Commercial VPNs are good for censorship circumvention or location spoofing. It is irresponsible to market VPNs as something which “protects” you online. In reality, they do nothing to improve security, and very l…
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