Can someone explains what's the point of "VPNs" (VPT in reality, there's no network here, just a tunnel) ?
I see the point of having a VPN to my own network but paying for a tunnel to some random place.... why ?
Latest Mozilla VPN features
141–150 of 184 posts
Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they're targeting different demographics This is the question though: who are these demographics? I know Mozilla likely have a lot more data on this than I, but who is using Firefox / interested enough in Mozilla to read their marketing & research their VPN offerings, but is simultaneously not someone who would research VPN providers in general / use Mullvad? What is this techie/non-techie interested/not-interested…
that demographic is huge. most people under 40 today have grown up watching the surveillance industry establish itself, and those with any consciousness of their own vulnerability want to take action to minimize their surface area. until recently that's been extremely difficult and technical, but now firefox with container extensions, adblockers, and a VPN are all easily approachable for the average person, and they'…
> most people under 40 today have grown up watching the surveillance industry establish itself
I'm not sure "watching" is the correct word.
> those with any consciousness of their own vulnerability want to take action to minimize their surface area
This is a pretty small minority, as demonstrated by the number of people that continue to use Google and Facebook properties by choice (refering to their actual services, not their pervasive tracking around the Internet at large)
> firefox with container extensions
As a more-technical-than-average person, my experience is that attempting to get all Google services running in a specific google-only firefox container is a non-trivial and extremely painful experience, as there doesn't appear to be a way to simply add *.google.com to the 'always open in this container' list, so each subdomain needs to be added individually. And then youtube.
> adblockers
Adblocks can break the check-out flow on multiple ecommerce sites. "Don't shop there" doesn't fly when that's the only online outlet that has the shoes she wants. What's the workaround? Spend a while working out what's causing the flow to break, and find a way to explicitly whitelist that domain for that site? Nope, just disable the adblock entirely and hope you remember to re-enable it once you're done.
Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features
#143Can someone explains what's the point of "VPNs" (VPT in reality, there's no network here, just a tunnel) ? I see the point of having a VPN to my own network but paying for a tunnel to some random place.... why ?
A few use-cases I can think of: GeoIP spoofing (watching streaming shows not available in your country), bypassing IP bans from places, preventing DMCA letters from torrenting, and getting past restrictive firewalls that block websites
Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features
#144I 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…
It's as simple as that: You are not the target group. If a regular consumer searches for a VPN product they get a million results, all with different deals and they'd have to figure out how to find the best one and will still be around in a year. If they already trust the Mozilla brand they'll go with that. Just like people go with stock apps on their computer over some maybe better third party app.
If a regular consumer searches for a VPN product
they [...] have to figure out how to find the best
one and will still be around in a year.
Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features
#145Can someone explains what's the point of "VPNs" (VPT in reality, there's no network here, just a tunnel) ? I see the point of having a VPN to my own network but paying for a tunnel to some random place.... why ?
Here's a few reasons:
- You trust the VPN provider more than your ISP
- You want to circumvent geoblocking (Netflix, Sports broadcasts, etc...)
- You have to use an untrusted Wi-Fi
- You want to circumvent your government blocking certain websites/services
Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features
#146The rise of VPNs signals to me that we as an industry have given up on end to end encryption. Instead VPNs try to encrypt the "first hop" with the assumption or hope that the networks further down the line are "secure" Being on an "unsecured" local network shouldnt be an issue for security.
How has the industry given up on encryption? In recent years, HTTPS became the new standard and most apps are forced to use encrypted connections as well. Just because VPN ads are calling local networks "unsecure" doesn't mean that they are a true risk.
Not encryption in general, but end to end encryption.
Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, is NordVPN something an educated VPN consumer should not use? I switched from PIA after their acquisition, so now I'm wondering what I missed.
No one educated should be using NordVPN, more or less. At best it might be acceptable to throw a ton of torrents on as long as you don't use their terrible proprietary client. Even the front page is already freely giving away tons of data to multiple analytics providers. Basically any VPN with an affiliate scheme you should stay away from. NordVPN, Ivacy, VPN Unlimited, FastestVPN, etc explicitly, run like fuck. The…
Thanks, I appreciate the thoughtful reply! Do you use Mullvad? (kyawzazaw, I'm interested in what you use as well.)
Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 b…
It’s less elitist and more it’s a simple measure that the masses can understand and very simple and easy to implement. Security is hard and security/ encryption done right is even harder.
I have piholes with dnssec running at least upstream for privacy. And a vps I use as both a socks proxy and vpn here and there. But I have the technical know how to implement that.
Let’s say, my parents just wanted a way to make sure their traffic was encrypted from either their ISP or Corp provided iPhone. I wouldn’t tell them to go build a Linode or use Pi-hole. They don’t care. But a vpn with a decent trust rating with nothing more than a login would do it and is easily achievable.
Would I still advise them to be congnizant that other lower level spyware may be on their Corp phone, sure, absolutely. But that’s not always the case. My org doesn’t do that. We give you a phone and pay for service. You can use your iCloud and we have the ability to lock it/decom it because we own it. And can lock them out of email but we can’t run find my iPhone on it.
There have been requests to our provider for more traffic data for x user. So even I run a vpn when using their data.
Another example. I had a buddy going to China for a couple months bye wanted advice on how to secure his stuff. I advised him to use burner devices and chnage passwords yadda yadda. But then the question of accessing email, such as gmail came up. The great firewall is pretty nuts. I set him up an account on my vps and enabled obfs etc on the vpn.
But he also used nord as a backup because he had ton of options there geographically dispersed. In the end, all he needed was nord at all. And when the firewall dropped his states to one node he would just reconnect. It worked just fine.
Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features
#149Killswitch and split tunneling are the only things that are keeping me from using it, I want to give Mozilla my money...come on man.
What does split tunneling mean in context of a public VPN?
Re: Latest Mozilla VPN features
#150Earlier 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
Mullvad is simply better than Nord and Proton by a lot. Their policies are more detailed, you can pay with cash and crypto, your accounts aren’t associated with any identifying information or email, they describe what exactly is stored in their database tables, they support WireGuard by default, their client engineering team seems more knowledgeable, etc.