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Mozilla VPN

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla VPN

#221

Post by closeparen »

wongarsu wrote: post #160
closeparen wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A VPN is just a tunnel from one point to another. You'd have to establish why the remote end is more trustworthy than the local end. Being located in a hostile jurisdiction may be somewhat protective, but it would also seem likely that compromising foreign VPN services is within the NSA's wheelhouse.

Unless I set up my own VPN I'll share a VPN server and IP with other people. That makes my traffic inherently more anonymous once it has left the VPN server, since you can't correlate traffic to a single person anymore. So even if traffic in the data center is analyzed, that's better than my ISP analyzing traffic. Thus we only have to establish that the VPN provider is at least as trustworthy as my ISP. That's a pret…

You should expect that the government can compel a VPN provider to correlate traffic to subscriber information exactly the same way it does with a residential ISP.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#222

Post by benhurmarcel »

mderazon wrote: post #211
neuronic wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, migrated from Gmail and very happily so :)

I want to migrate from Gmail but I have my Gmail address tied up to so many things. How do you make the move ?

I went through all accounts in my password manager and changed it. Not so bad. It doesn't need to be done quickly.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#223

Post by ryantgtg »

dingaling wrote: post #203
ryantgtg wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rather, it is used for accessing content that you can't pay for, given that Amazon Prime, Disney+, HBO Go, and I'm sure many more are (or were in the past) simply not supported on linux devices.

And, "Plenty to do in life" is a value judgment, and isn't relevant to this discussion.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#224

Post by ryantgtg »

surround wrote: post #66
ryantgtg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The value of location spoofing is to access geographically-restricted content (like a netflix show that is available through their service in Europe but not the US), not to avoid DMCA notices. VPNs are valuable for avoiding DMCA because it hides from your ISP (the entity serving you the notice) what you are torrenting.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#225

Post by __turbobrew__ »

xrisk wrote: post #210
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea, you are correct. I got it mixed up, your ISP would look at the destination address of outgoing packets from your home.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#226

Post by michaelbuckbee »

lilyball wrote: post #173
typon wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only Mozilla can make me pay for Google services like Email/Calendar etc. I think I subconsciously trust the brand more than most internet companies out there.

How about FastMail? They have a stellar email service. They also offer contacts and calendars, though I don't personally use those (I use iCloud for that).

Very happy Fastmail user. Not so happy that so many different services don't interoperate with it. Things like Calendly or many standalone Calendar apps.

Seems like it is Apple, Google, Outlook or nothing.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#227

Post by qchris »

petejodo wrote: post #145
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 don't have much too add, I'm just replying in case Mozilla devs see this. I want this so much as well! I don't mind the VPN though. I pay for it now even though I run mostly Linux

I'm in exactly the same boat. Paying for the VPN to use on exactly one device because everything else is Linux, and would happily put more money towards it if they offered a paid equivalent to GSuite that was privacy-respecting.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#228

Post by mistahchris »

lilyball wrote: post #173
typon wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only Mozilla can make me pay for Google services like Email/Calendar etc. I think I subconsciously trust the brand more than most internet companies out there.

How about FastMail? They have a stellar email service. They also offer contacts and calendars, though I don't personally use those (I use iCloud for that).

I'm also a very happy fastmail user. I don't use the calendar or contacts feature either. But I use the webapp a lot on mobile and it's quite good. I don't even need to download the native app for my phone.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#229

Post by _jal »

Kelamir wrote: post #200
edw wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 D…

> ISPs can also observer your DNS lookups to Google’s or anyone else’s public DNS servers. edw, could you elaborate on that, please? I thought changing to public DNS servers like OpenDNS provides some security from ISP tracking.

In addition to the lack of encryption mentioned, some ISPs transparently intercept DNS requests and reply to them with their own.

Test your own ISP: try something like

nslookup news.ycombinator.com 1.2.3.4

If you get a response, your ISP is gaslighting you.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#230

Post by Skunkleton »

Spivak wrote: post #154
Skunkleton wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DNS is super trivial to redirect. I've been on ISPs that redirect _all_ DNS traffic to their servers regardless of where it was sent. The best solution here is to switch to DoH. Of course then your DoH provider gets to log all of that sweet info instead.

Not if you run your own DoH endpoint on a VPS!

I have my own unbound running on a VPS. My network intercepts all port 53 traffic, filters out ad servers, and then forwards over wireguard to my VPS. I should probably enable DoH as well. I'm feeling kind of lazy about it though.
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