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Mozilla VPN

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Re: Mozilla VPN

#201

Post by rubber_duck »

Vysero wrote: post #184
DCKing wrote: 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?

Because running it is not free and paying for it directly is the best way to align interests - you are the customer instead of being the product for advertising and analytics.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#202

Post by bobajeff »

DCKing wrote: 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 still want Mozilla to release a Android keyboard.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#203

Post by dingaling »

ryantgtg wrote: post #59
Jonnax wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are DMCA letters still a thing? It seems like Torrenting died out significantly over the last 5 years.

Can't wait for the "you don't need a VPN" folks to acknowledge that they don't understand why lots of people actually use VPNs. It's DMCA, man. DMCA.

Rather ironic that people pay for VPN services to access content that they won't pay for.

Just don't bother with Big Media content and they won't need a VPN...

There's plenty to do in life other than torrenting the latest HBO series.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#204

Post by kfreds »

Every time the VPN service industry is discussed on HN there is a barrage of comments that use keywords like “honeypot”, “snake oil”, and “shady”. I’m not denying that the industry has problems, but in this thread I’d like to focus on how we can improve it.

Please tell me - What makes a VPN provider trustworthy, and how do you _know_?

Personally I believe a trustworthy provider is _characterized_ by consistent actions that show transparency, honesty, and conscientiousness. Nevertheless, such consistent action doesn’t actually prove trustworthiness.

A good VPN honeypot, or reseller of your network traffic, is publicly indistinguishable from a trustworthy one. So what can the users do? What tools, technology, process, or ecosystem do they need to tell honest and dishonest apart? What do we need to build?

We all recognize that VPN providers are in a great position of power over their users. How do we tilt the scales in the users’ favor? What are _strong_ signals of trustworthiness?

Disclosure: I co-founded Mullvad.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#205

Post by vorticalbox »

bobajeff wrote: post #202
DCKing wrote: 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 still want Mozilla to release a Android keyboard.

Me to currently using swift key as it came preinstalled but its owned by Microsoft.

I use net guard to stop basically everything in my phone from contacting the Internet.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#206

Post by onyva »

DCKing wrote: 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…

Agree. I’m currently on Proton but I’d like to see Mozilla bundle the essentials, with vpn and mail as the basics.

Also, consider if possible affordability for students and senior, who might not be able to afford a subscription. Maybe limited bandwidth for free w/o subscription? Something like ProtonVPN provided.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#207

Post by julesallen »

fataliss wrote: post #178
koheripbal wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are correct that VPNs are a sort of half-solution. There are a lot of people that think anything less than 100% isn't worth your time, so they suggest TOR - but TOR has all sorts of annoying limitations that preclude daily usage. Absolute solutions are seldom worth the 10x extra effort they frequently require. Another set of half-solutions can be seen here which will make you more secure... https://www.cl…

Do you have a good write up on how to get all that setup by any chance? Also, any body has a comparison of Brave vs Firefox when it comes to privacy?

https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/brave-browser-caugh...

I was using Brave until this story came out and switched over to Vivaldi for the stuff that absolutely demands the Blink engine.

Point one, if they _repeatedly_ continue to do this kind of thing, what kind of stuff are they also getting away with? Or what's the next big surprise around the corner?

The second point is I really no prefer Vivaldi as things like sync work (it's been broken for a long time in Brave) and there's more exposed in the prefs for techie types who like to tinker with that kind of thing.

Firefox continues to be the every day browser and it keeps getting better as time goes on (another +1 for take my money for email, calendar, file storage, etc.).

Re: Mozilla VPN

#209

Post by solarkraft »

orra wrote: post #55
solarkraft wrote: post #27

It's a rebranding of Mullvad. I'm happy with Mullvad itself, and while I think Firefox is the most important browser I'm not very happy about Mozilla arguably destroying its brand and seemingly pivoting away from maintaining it. I'd directly pay for the development of FF, but not Mozilla's "btw, we now sell $completely_unrelated_product_without_even_an_ethical_business_model". They seem to be relatively safe from for…

You say that, but not enough people do directly pay for the development of Firefox. Of course, you are welcome to donate to the Mozilla Foundation. Also, your complaint about an ethical business model seems unfounded, especially in this instance.

> Also, your complaint about an ethical business model seems unfounded, especially in this instance.

I have no concern about the VPN service itself since it's Mullvad which I like, but the devaluation of the branding (which I consider a long term problem).

Look at stuff like Firefox Send and Pocket. The latter is proprietary (holy shit, how is that ethical?) and the former bugs you with in-page pop-ups to get an account when you try to change the settings that looks either very stupid or malicious (and they invested a lot of money). I thought it was a bug at first.

They may sound like specific petty issues, but I consider them symptoms of a gigantic systemic problem.

I am aware of Mozilla's financial struggle, but don't think this is a good way to solve it, or much of a viable one at all. I fear it will completely dilute the Firefox brand, lose core user's trust (what they have left, anyway) and result in barely any revenue. It may well result in the permanent ruin of the Firefox (the browser) project, especially since it appears to be 100% dependent on Mozilla because of its high entry barrier.

I do see the idea behind the pivot I think, which is banking on the rising popularity of privacy, but honestly I don't think they even have much of a good reputation on that front. The wide public doesn't know ("Mozilla is like Google, right?") and the techies have been burned too often. Neither do they explain much in their surprisingly widely deployed phsyical ads (how much did that cost?).

Re: Mozilla VPN

#210

Post by xrisk »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #181
kd913 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Doesn’t work with a large number of sites because of Cloudflare.

Edit: it _is_ easy to read the destination address from TCP packets though.

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