121–130 of 135 posts
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Your theory is an American could start a company that violates US laws so long as they form the entity somewhere else?
GP didn't say anything like that. They were talking about > avoid[ing] local laws (i.e. legally) which is a whole different matter.
Some information that could be of interest to those running VPN servers. I live in Kazakhstan and recently our government decided to shut down the Internet. But apparently there were ways to get out: they did not filter two TCP ports. My guess it was some "backdoor" put by employees who had to obey the orders but wanted to provide people some way to get around those blocks. Those ports were used to run VPN software.…
When I hear about things like this it makes me glad I have a simple satellite communicator - it will only do short text messages but that is a hell of a lot better than nothing. Of course one could get a full satellite based mobile internet device or phone but the plans on those get quite expensive.
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While I agree the founder's response was informative, it does not justify the completely erroneous statement/accusation that prompted it. That most certainly should be called out -- especially when it was, at the time, the top voted comment.
People make mistakes. Maybe if you were less you combative your comments would get more upvotes.
And I'm not here for upvotes. Who's being combative, again?
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if only there was any proof of this actually being the case and there not being some "accidental" debug log enabled, or some other network level component having "accidental" access to the keys. There's just no good answer to perfect trust-no-one private internet access. If you need to hide all of your traffic from other users in your local network, you can accomplish that in a trust-no-one fashion by running your ow…
> There's just no good answer to perfect trust-no-one private internet access. What about Tor?
For maximum privacy, Tor should be used with software designed for Tor from the start.
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Disabling USB in BIOS only disables the emulation of classic PS2 keyboards and IDE storage so that old OSes or bootloaders without USB stacks can work with modern equipment. As soon as the OS kernel initializes the PCI bus, USB will work again - however they could go and remove the xHCI modules from the kernel and image.
Mullvad has a custom-built bare metal UEFI implementation based on coreboot, I assume stboot is an evolution of that, which means it takes as close as you can get to full responsibility for initialization of all system components like processor, chipset, Ethernet, USB, everything. As a result they can absolutely disable USB entirely by never exposing those parts of the device tree to Linux.
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So what is the point? I already assume the code on their server is not malicious by using it. What extra trust does an untrusted TPM chip give me?
System Transparency reduces your trust assumptions on us. As a VPN provider we are in an immense position of power over you. We aim to reduce your trust assumptions on us to a few things that we would need to explicitly lie about in order to betray you. As an example, let's say that we offered any of our users to at any time during the year show up at our office and inspect our VPN hardware, without warning us before…
Have you ever thought about doing something like that with some big youtube personalities? Maybe have them hire some pen testers, randomly show up to one of your datacenters, and post recordings of what is done and attacks that could be possible. Since your software is open pen testers could prepare some things to try to attack days in advanced. I'd love to see something like this with Level1Techs or something.
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A server in Sweden cannot easily be raided by the Swedish, is the first reason. The second reason is "Swedish laws apply to people in Sweden" seem to make assumptions about what the government can force people to do, or specifically, punish people for not doing. In many cases, authorities just threaten/raid the data-centers so never have to bother take that route. Lastly, I'm not sure this is true: "Swedish laws appl…
This isn’t really responsive to what I’m saying or what you asked me. I didn’t make any assumptions about what Swedish law can or cannot do. Swedish laws apply to people in Sweden. If Swedish law says that you can’t use Helvetica font on your website, and the punishment is 10 years of hand-tracing a better font on stone tablets, then they’re able to apply that law to a Sweden-based web developer, regardless of whethe…
> If Swedish law says ... they’re able to apply that law ...
This is a big assumption, and depends if you mean literally that they can do this, or if they can do so sustainably. Any country can violate international practise, but are unlikely to do so (at least in Europe) because of the consequence on international relations.
A law on Helvetica font would require legal authority. Very often, companies themselves are help liable for the actions of a company - laws that allow the government to punish individuals would have to specifically criminalise the act even for locals acting on behalf of those corps. These kind of laws are much rarer, at least in US/Europe, and not the kind of law we are talking about here which appear to apply to corporations. There is a good reason for this; as soon as any nation officially declares it would punish individuals like this, corps will leave - or at least no longer employ natives into decent positions.
> But the Swedish government gets to make those laws and determine which apply to whom.
Technically, but not really, they have to remain compatible with their international agreements, and their economic ambitions.
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GP didn't say anything like that. They were talking about > avoid[ing] local laws (i.e. legally) which is a whole different matter.
How is that different from saying Swedes can avoid Swedish law by incorporating somewhere else?
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You are allowed to start companies in other countries, and thereby avoid local laws, without moving i.e. changing you country of residence. If you believe any different, please say why so. Just "wouldn’t do them any good" is pretty meaningless.
Your theory is an American could start a company that violates US laws so long as they form the entity somewhere else?
It also depends on which country, and to what extent agreements exist between those countries wrt policing their own territories. Those that don't have such agreements, are often also limited in what extent they can do business in the US.