Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Latest Mozilla VPN features

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 184 posts

Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features

#131

Post by cyberlab »

qw3rty01 wrote: post #128
cyberlab wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. A VPN should only ever be used for the following: - Shifting traffic over a VPN when using untrusted/sketchy wifi hotspots - Spoofing your geo-location to use geo-specific content And that's it. If privacy is your goal, Tor is much more suitable since it's not a single-hop proxy like a VPN and compartments all your traffic. (But of course Tor is not a silver bullet and there are caveats).

Tor is explicitly not private, only anonymous. The end node can see all the traffic you send through it if it's not encrypted. If privacy is your main concern, tor is definitely not the right tool to use.

> TOR is explicitly not private, only anonymous

It depends on how you use Tor. For example, visiting your own personal homepage and then using the same relay to visit a NSFW site would be bad OPSEC. Also, Tor comes pre-installed with HTTPS Everywhere, and you can toggle a setting that disables all http traffic if you're worried about sketchy exit nodes analyzing your plaintext traffic.

Remember: Tor can't read your mind. If you want true anonymity you have to go through extraordinary lengths to achieve it, and even then, you could make mistakes.

Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features

#132

Post by scrose »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #108
Fergusonb wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using mullvad you have likely already done a lot of research on which provider you want to use. A lot of consumers are interested in a quality VPN but wouldn't do this kind of research. Mozilla provide additional eyeballs and billing support, and mullvad provides the service itself. It's a mutually beneficial transaction. They're not in competition for your money, they're targeting different demographics.

> A lot of consumers are interested in a quality VPN but wouldn't do this kind of research. In that case, they will probably use NordVPN or ProtonVPN

I used to use Mullvad, but a lot of their servers were blocked for shows my wife wanted to watch and even on Netflix. I've had much better luck with ProtonVPN for that reason.

Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features

#133

Post by croutonwagon »

hnlmorg wrote: post #124
croutonwagon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think hes talking about VPN's in the context of these companies selling vpn services under the guise of "privacy" or "security". ProtonVPN, Nord, Mozillas, Mullvad and there are a ton others, many with less than stellar reputations and some that outright lie. Thats a bit separate from a road warrior, corporate vpn or even one that one may host on a VPS that they have full control over and are willing to allow the h…

I got the context. My point is that the whole “privacy” VPN industry is snake oil and people miss the point of VPNs when they buy into these services.

I wouldn't go that far. There are some reasons that one could be useful. I dont personally have a use case cause I have other mitigations in place but i wouldn't consider a company like Verizon particularly trustworthy in general.

Even Comcast has been known to inject ads. The core tenant of these VPN services is trust, with it they dont survive, but for an ISP with a de-facto monopoly thats a non factor. There are also plenty of sites and services that use IP tracking. Google is really bad but others are doing it behind the scenes and not telling you. Reddit 100% does. Amazon too. To the point that if i proxy my connection and try and login to one of my google accounts i sometimes have to verify or go through recovery.

So in some cases its better than no vpn. And I wouldn't use any authenticated service over tor that i wish to keep. There are so many malicious relays and exit nodes.

TOR is easily tracked at the nation-state level. China can axe tor traffic, even with bridges and OBFS4 configured.

With a service like nord, you can get on and do your thing to bypass the great wall for the most part. And the the great firewall drops that connection you have a very large pool to choose from for your next.

So there are definitely some reasons I could understand some would use them based on their own assessments/needs.

Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features

#134

Post by qw3rty01 »

cyberlab wrote: post #131
qw3rty01 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tor is explicitly not private, only anonymous. The end node can see all the traffic you send through it if it's not encrypted. If privacy is your main concern, tor is definitely not the right tool to use.

> TOR is explicitly not private, only anonymous It depends on how you use Tor. For example, visiting your own personal homepage and then using the same relay to visit a NSFW site would be bad OPSEC. Also, Tor comes pre-installed with HTTPS Everywhere, and you can toggle a setting that disables all http traffic if you're worried about sketchy exit nodes analyzing your plaintext traffic. Remember: Tor can't read your m…

The caveats you're mentioning are exactly why tor is a bad tool if privacy is your main goal. None of those concerns would be an issue with a service that focused on privacy.

Also HTTPS everywhere isn't enough; you also need ESNI, which requires server support.

Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features

#136

Post by hnlmorg »

croutonwagon wrote: post #133
hnlmorg wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got the context. My point is that the whole “privacy” VPN industry is snake oil and people miss the point of VPNs when they buy into these services.

I wouldn't go that far. There are some reasons that one could be useful. I dont personally have a use case cause I have other mitigations in place but i wouldn't consider a company like Verizon particularly trustworthy in general. Even Comcast has been known to inject ads. The core tenant of these VPN services is trust, with it they dont survive, but for an ISP with a de-facto monopoly thats a non factor. There are a…

I get why people want proxies and such like. I'm just saying it's weird how VPNs have become peoples de facto go to when they want something proxied. Most of the time when people think they need a VPN, what they actually need is something else that is incidentally provided by VPN. As in they're covered as a side effect of using a VPN rather than using a VPN for it's intended purpose. But I guess you could argue I'm being elitist and what not, which is fine. Literally the only reason I bring it up was because it just tickled me when someone posted on a nerd forum a list of the purposes of VPNs and actually missed off the primary role of a VPN.

Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features

#137

Post by passivate »

acatton wrote: post #74

I genuinely don't understand what is the incentive for using Mozilla VPN? I'm a Mozilla and Firefox fanboy, but this new product had me sceptical since the beginning. They literally bring nothing to the table except their brand name. They don't even do the server side, but just resell Mullvad's infrastructure with their brand. I'm already a Mullvad customer, and if I were to switch to Mozilla VPN: * It would not be a…

>I genuinely don't understand what is the incentive for using Mozilla VPN? I'm a Mozilla and Firefox fanboy, but this new product had me sceptical since the beginning. They literally bring nothing to the table except their brand name. They don't even do the server side, but just resell Mullvad's infrastructure with their brand.

The incentive for you is that Mozilla will keep Mullvad under close watch and make sure promises are kept - so you don't have to. Furthermore, there is no limitation for Mozilla to not seek other partnerships and/or develop the server side service themselves - they have the in-house dev talent to do so.

So, yes, they do bring quite a lot to the table besides their brand name.

Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features

#138

Post by Deathmax »

croutonwagon wrote: post #133
hnlmorg wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got the context. My point is that the whole “privacy” VPN industry is snake oil and people miss the point of VPNs when they buy into these services.

I wouldn't go that far. There are some reasons that one could be useful. I dont personally have a use case cause I have other mitigations in place but i wouldn't consider a company like Verizon particularly trustworthy in general. Even Comcast has been known to inject ads. The core tenant of these VPN services is trust, with it they dont survive, but for an ISP with a de-facto monopoly thats a non factor. There are a…

Unfortunately as GP has mentioned, advertising around these typical VPN companies (Nord, Proton, ExpressVPN, Surfshark and many more) tends to be very misleading. Tom Scott put out a good video[1] that tries to debunk various marketing claims.

Sure there are use cases like getting around georestrictions, and like you mentioned you can use it to get around tracking. Except that for privacy and evading tracking you need more than just a VPN, you need to be doing things like adblocking, tracker blocking, clearing all of your cookies, not signing in to anything because then the service gets to link your new VPN IP with you again. VPN ads that sell "privacy" is snake oil unless it is paired with a guide on the additional things you should be doing.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features

#139

Post by miniyarov »

acatton wrote: post #74

I genuinely don't understand what is the incentive for using Mozilla VPN? I'm a Mozilla and Firefox fanboy, but this new product had me sceptical since the beginning. They literally bring nothing to the table except their brand name. They don't even do the server side, but just resell Mullvad's infrastructure with their brand. I'm already a Mullvad customer, and if I were to switch to Mozilla VPN: * It would not be a…

If anyone wants to have a mobile app that creates VPN on DigitalOcean, AWS or GCP checkout ZudVPN.com (https://github.com/zudvpn/ZudVPN)

Completely transparent server cloud init: https://github.com/zudvpn/ZudVPN/blob/master/src/providers/D...

Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features

#140

Post by Semaphor »

scrose wrote: post #132
kyawzazaw wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of consumers are interested in a quality VPN but wouldn't do this kind of research. In that case, they will probably use NordVPN or ProtonVPN

I used to use Mullvad, but a lot of their servers were blocked for shows my wife wanted to watch and even on Netflix. I've had much better luck with ProtonVPN for that reason.

I think for Netflix there are dedicated VPNs where privacy is less important than frequent IP changes ;)
Post reply on HN