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Mozilla VPN

blog.mozilla.org

181–190 of 531 posts

Re: Mozilla VPN

#181
post #81
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask yourself why you want a VPN. Is it to avoid your ISP collecting browsing data off you and selling it? Perhaps using 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 as your DNS might be good enough. Is it to watch geo region blocked videos? Then pretty much any service will work for you. Except that video streaming sites have caught on and blocked hosting provider IP blocks. So that might require you to shop around. Do you want the most priva…

Just FYI just setting your DNS to 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 may not do that much. Not only is DNS in plaintext, but some ISPs simply redirect all port 53 DNS requests to their own DNS. If you want privacy with your DNS, you should setup DoH using dnscrypt-proxy or perhaps DNS over TLS. Personally, I think a better strategy with this whole vpn aspect is to just setup a vpn with pis in various countries + pihole. At least tha…

Unless you are using a VPN/Wireguard/Proxy your ISP can simply look at the source address on the IP packets and do a reverse IP lookup to find out what site you are accessing. Doesn't matter if you are using DoH, DNS over TLS, DNSCRYPT, etc....

At a conference I was talking to one of the OpenDNS engineers on the DoH project and when I asked "so how does DoH help snooping if people can just look at IP headers?" they conceded that it really doesn't help if someone is determined to snoop.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#182

Every time someone mentions a VPN provider in my techie social circles, the "A VPN doesn't protect you" crowd piles in, usually with links to something like: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29 I don't understand this argument, but would like to. I run https://everytwoyears.org , a political non-profit focused on ending the warrantless metadata collection of U.S. citizens' communications. From every…

There’s a lot of gross stuff that your ISPs (which includes your mobile phone provider) do to further monetize your relationship with them, and having a VPN can negate that.

ISPs can observe your DNS lookups to their servers and assemble a profile on you based on the domain names you look up, and put you into a series of audiences that marketers can then use (for a fee) for ad targeting.

ISPs can also observer your DNS lookups to Google’s or anyone else’s public DNS servers.

ISPs can snoop on your unencrypted traffic, proxy it, and inject headers into HTTP responses to facilitate (you guessed it) the creation and sale of audience data to advertisers.

ISPs can transcode (and downsample) multimedia content to decongest their pipes or airwaves.

If you are a spy or a member of a disfavored political group, you should almost appreciate the scummy practices of ISPs, as it drives a bunch of non-spies and people not associated with disfavored political groups to adopt privacy-enhancing technologies.

If I worked at the NSA or CIA or FSB or Mossad or wherever, I would highly encourage lawmakers to enact laws to protect consumer privacy in order to drastically reduce the perceived need for people not in the above groups (et alia) to adopt VPNs and other technologies; there would be fewer “boring” people using such technologies, giving the needles a lot less haystack to get lost in.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sorry, it was meant to be a single "locks". And yep, I'm referring to that type of contract.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#184
post #141

Come on Mozilla, hurry up! I want to give you money for goods and services (I also donate monthly [1]), but I'm not that interested in a VPN (I can and do also pay Mullvad). Give me that real internet stuff - email, calendar, file sync, chat(?) - give me Firefox Premium. Bundle in the Lockwise password manager. I'd pay good money to see a company fill the void of paid, privacy first essential internet services and I…

Wait... why are you encouraging them to charge for it?

Re: Mozilla VPN

#185
post #141

Come on Mozilla, hurry up! I want to give you money for goods and services (I also donate monthly [1]), but I'm not that interested in a VPN (I can and do also pay Mullvad). Give me that real internet stuff - email, calendar, file sync, chat(?) - give me Firefox Premium. Bundle in the Lockwise password manager. I'd pay good money to see a company fill the void of paid, privacy first essential internet services and I…

I'm a Fastmail and Google Suite paying customer. I would SO transition to a "Firefox Suite" email+calendar service if Mozilla provided one.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very totally legit that public VPN services are complete trash. Online anonymity is very hard. However, you can still create your own VPN server on cloud providers for at least have some privacy while you are on an untrusted network. Because of this reason, I created zudvpn.com - It is a free and open-source mobile application that's used to deploy a private VPN server on major Cloud Providers! Github repo: h…

Why would a VPS server be any more secure than a VPN provider? They have the same ability to view outgoing traffic and can very easily log the source ip address.

http://zudvpn.com does not provide complete anonymity. The idea is that you control your own server and you make sure that nobody is logging your every move. Even though public VPNs claim that they don't log, you should not blindly trust them.

Check GH repo to see how https://ZudVPN.com generates SSH key on your phone and locks the VPN server with the key that is only available for you.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#187

It uses Mullvad, and is the same price as Mullvad. I am assuming Mozilla gets a cut. When my current Mullvad subscription expires, I will switch over.

I’ve been speedtesting a few VPN networks, and the biggest surprise has been how fast Mullvad + Wireguard are. I need to try NordLynx (NordVPN’s flavor of Wireguard) for more of an apples-to-apples comparison, but at least on the speed metric, it looks like Mozilla chose a good partner.

Making deeper data exploration possible is a work in progress, but you can see what I have so far here: https://vpnwire.co

Re: Mozilla VPN

#188
post #29
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask yourself why you want a VPN. Is it to avoid your ISP collecting browsing data off you and selling it? Perhaps using 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 as your DNS might be good enough. Is it to watch geo region blocked videos? Then pretty much any service will work for you. Except that video streaming sites have caught on and blocked hosting provider IP blocks. So that might require you to shop around. Do you want the most priva…

>Want to do something illegal? Don't expect a VPN to save you. I'm not condoning piracy, but VPNs are generally a foolproof way to avoid DMCA letters from your ISP. Privacy means something different to every individual, everyone's threat model is different. And many models can benefit from a VPN; journalists, activists, and many others might find benefit from using a VPN.

Yeah, I think "VPNs won't protect you from the law" is far too broad a brush to paint with. There's no credible evidence that these services won't prevent a court or regular law enforcement from tracing an IP to a name without some specific arrangement to unmask you beforehand (there's a specific case where Private Internet Access replied to a subpoena saying they had nothing to provide), so people worried about that might benefit from a VPN, but of course it does nothing for the rest of the threat model. Torrents are pretty much the perfect crime in that it's a simple exchange of bits between parties that have nothing to do with each other, most other types of illegal activity involve myriad other ways to get caught that have nothing to do with a VPN. People who rely on VPNs alone to protect them from getting prosecuted for things like hacking and people who say VPNs are useless are wrong in exactly the same way: they don't have a complete/realistic threat model.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#189
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ProtonVPN provides the source code for their desktop and mobile clients in their GitHub organization [1]. Yes open source != safe; however this level of transparency is at least a step in the right direction. They also have regularly been audited by independent organizations that are openly available for the public to see their compliance [2][3][4][5][6]. Do you have any evidence to suggest that they are honeypots? […

And how do you know if what they built is exactly what's in that source?

Hehe, exactly, oldest trick in the trade

Re: Mozilla VPN

#190
post #184
post #141

Come on Mozilla, hurry up! I want to give you money for goods and services (I also donate monthly [1]), but I'm not that interested in a VPN (I can and do also pay Mullvad). Give me that real internet stuff - email, calendar, file sync, chat(?) - give me Firefox Premium. Bundle in the Lockwise password manager. I'd pay good money to see a company fill the void of paid, privacy first essential internet services and I…

Wait... why are you encouraging them to charge for it?

it ensures that they have a sustainable revenue stream and won’t cave into selling data or shutting down
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