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NordVPN disables features when you turn off auto-renew

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Re: NordVPN disables features when you turn off auto-renew

#131

Post by gazby »

grishka wrote: post #128
notRobot wrote: post #5

Honestly, nothing holds up to Mullvad [1]. They don't even take an email address while creating accounts, and you can pay easily with Bitcoin or even with cash mailed to them. I'm not affiliated, just a very happy customer. Mullvad is also who Mozilla trusts for the Mozilla VPN [2]. You can sign up with that if you'd like Mozilla to get a cut. [1]: https://mullvad.net/ [2]: https://vpn.mozilla.org/

You can't use any commercial VPN service and expect privacy. Those are only good for bypassing geographical restrictions. If you want privacy, buy a VDS and host your own VPN server. It'll cost about the same, and you can use it for other things at no additional cost.

Perhaps it depends on the definition of privacy. Now your identity is tied to any and all traffic to/from that IP address for the duration of ownership.

Re: NordVPN disables features when you turn off auto-renew

#132

Post by dheera »

justnotworthit wrote: post #113
dheera wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally understand using a VPN service if you're trying to access the internet from another location, e.g. to get past the China firewall or get access to content from a different copyright jurisdiction. However, I don't fully understand the privacy argument. It would seem to be that instead of handing over your entire DNS query history and unencrypted HTTP history to your own corporate IT department or the Starbuc…

Why do you think corporate IT or Starbucks or AWS is more trustworthy than "some Mullvad dude"? Isn't it possible that Mullvad is more trustworthy? Isn't it more possible to know about Mullvad than what's going on at Starbucks or AWS?

I don't consider corporate IT or Starbucks to be trustable.

AWS I would "trust" slightly more only because I get to implement the infrastructure and among the sea of trillions of requests they serve it would be a bit more of a challenge for them to figure out which of those requests are VPN browsing data and clean that data. I can also mildly obfuscate and pollute requests using their own infrastructure and make it hard for them to extract anything meaningful about me unless they really wanted to.

Basically AWS isn't already set up as a VPN service, so they'd have to put in a nonzero amount of time to extract, parse, collate, and analyze VPN logs, let alone figure out which instances among their billions are actually VPN instances, especially if I run a non-standard, modified protocol. Unless I was some Snowden-like target it's unlikely they would waste a couple weeks of engineer hours to wireshark and clean the data from my instances.

Mullvad on the other hand handles 100% VPN browsing data so if they unscrupulously keep logs, they would have clean logs to begin with, nicely organized by username, which is scary. They wrote the client and they control the protocol. They also rent their instances from various providers (the names of which they disclose on their website) and I could presumably just bypass them and rent an instance with one of those providers directly.

Re: NordVPN disables features when you turn off auto-renew

#133

Post by colechristensen »

gazby wrote: post #131
grishka wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't use any commercial VPN service and expect privacy. Those are only good for bypassing geographical restrictions. If you want privacy, buy a VDS and host your own VPN server. It'll cost about the same, and you can use it for other things at no additional cost.

Perhaps it depends on the definition of privacy. Now your identity is tied to any and all traffic to/from that IP address for the duration of ownership.

The specific issue is the VPN provider harvesting data about your traffic and selling it.

Re: NordVPN disables features when you turn off auto-renew

#134

Post by frr149 »

dheera wrote: post #55
notRobot wrote: post #5

Honestly, nothing holds up to Mullvad [1]. They don't even take an email address while creating accounts, and you can pay easily with Bitcoin or even with cash mailed to them. I'm not affiliated, just a very happy customer. Mullvad is also who Mozilla trusts for the Mozilla VPN [2]. You can sign up with that if you'd like Mozilla to get a cut. [1]: https://mullvad.net/ [2]: https://vpn.mozilla.org/

I totally understand using a VPN service if you're trying to access the internet from another location, e.g. to get past the China firewall or get access to content from a different copyright jurisdiction. However, I don't fully understand the privacy argument. It would seem to be that instead of handing over your entire DNS query history and unencrypted HTTP history to your own corporate IT department or the Starbuc…

Could you elaborate on this? How do you create your own VPN on aws (or any other server)?

Re: NordVPN disables features when you turn off auto-renew

#135

Post by beermonster »

jorblumesea wrote: post #81

What's the argument for VPNs in 2021? Can't ISP just use metadata patterns and DPI/analytics to tell what you're up to anyways? For example if I want to hide by torrenting, it's not like VPN is going to really help that. ISP should be able to figure that out right? Or am I wrong here? edit: this is a serious question I am not trying to troll anyone here

People use VPN services, as opposed to say why enterprises use site-to-site VPNs, for a variety of reasons:

- Access geo-restricted content on say Netflix

- Privacy - one encrypted pipe to hide what you're doing

- Hide source IP address (perhaps for researching a competitors website etc)

- Protect insecure services (though the services would need to exist on the VPN endpoint or they would be exposed at the VPN->insecure service termination).

- Bypass ISP throttling (yup this works and is always funny as ISPs deny they do this but hey, easy to check!)

- Avoid censorship even in places like the UK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_survei...)

And more. So there's plenty of use-cases for a VPN in 2021. But it's worth thinking about how the threat model changes as a result of using one especially if you're not hosting it yourself.

Re: NordVPN disables features when you turn off auto-renew

#137

Post by rightbyte »

dheera wrote: post #67
wwwwwwwww wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays its probably best to set up your own VPN server for that. Back when I lived there, most VPNs got occationally blocked, then they would get new IPs and work fine again. But from what I heard, it got way worse since Winnie the Pooh took over.

Agree. I always use my own VPN for this. Most VPN services get blocked eventually and then play cat-and-mouse to get themselves back up, so the service is overall unreliable. The China firewall also does some "intelligent" blocking of common VPN protocols by fingerprinting their traffic patterns, handshakes, ports, and other things. If you set up own server, it helps to modify the protocol or wrap it in a proxy that…

Interesting thought. A little part of me want to make a TCP-over-HTML cat pictures wrapper. Maybe put the payload in every fifth cat pixel or something. Should work for bmp:s right.

Re: NordVPN disables features when you turn off auto-renew

#138

Post by gazby »

colechristensen wrote: post #133
gazby wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it depends on the definition of privacy. Now your identity is tied to any and all traffic to/from that IP address for the duration of ownership.

The specific issue is the VPN provider harvesting data about your traffic and selling it.

I'm suggesting it's vastly greater effort to identify individuals in a VPN service than a VPS provider (shared vs dedicated tenancy).

If you're talking about bulk collection, then your ISP is probably already doing that.

Re: NordVPN disables features when you turn off auto-renew

#139

Post by tedunangst »

notRobot wrote: post #5

Honestly, nothing holds up to Mullvad [1]. They don't even take an email address while creating accounts, and you can pay easily with Bitcoin or even with cash mailed to them. I'm not affiliated, just a very happy customer. Mullvad is also who Mozilla trusts for the Mozilla VPN [2]. You can sign up with that if you'd like Mozilla to get a cut. [1]: https://mullvad.net/ [2]: https://vpn.mozilla.org/

So Mozilla VPN is wireguard, but won't let me use my own wireguard client?

Re: NordVPN disables features when you turn off auto-renew

#140

Post by pdimitar »

ev1 wrote: post #110
jorblumesea wrote: post #81

What's the argument for VPNs in 2021? Can't ISP just use metadata patterns and DPI/analytics to tell what you're up to anyways? For example if I want to hide by torrenting, it's not like VPN is going to really help that. ISP should be able to figure that out right? Or am I wrong here? edit: this is a serious question I am not trying to troll anyone here

A correct VPN will make it look like you're just sending garbage traffic to/from one destination, the outside looking in traffic pattern is completely different than a torrent directly (which is many to one + one to many)

What do you mean by a "correct VPN" here? The traffic analysis obfuscation angle is also interesting, do you have links?
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