111–120 of 246 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting story, but how does this relate to Mullvad accepting Monero payments?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero#Illicit_use
In other words the cost associated with the extra business that comes via Monero might be higher than the extra money that comes in.
Its too bad monero research lab seems to be slowing down and disbanding. Devs have to eat and all, but I wonder sometimes if a longer and slower emission curve would have helped here. Monero is mostly emitted at this point. For a project that means so much to the world and still has much work to do, its a shame how things turned out with MRL.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a bit of a straw man ain’t it? I was talking about the real world use cases for a vpn paid with monero.
Do you want me to sit here and list out all of the applicable and legal use-cases for VPNs and Monero? How many would I have to list for you to change your views? Is there even a number, or is your mind set that VPN = criminal?
Many years ago I worked for a telco that had a mobile product that you could buy with cash (show up in a convenience store with cash and you would get a SIM card for use straight away without any form of registration). This was 5 times as expensive compared to when you paid by debit or credit card. This offering was extremely popular amongst drug dealers and people needing a burner to call in a bomb threat. (Maybe th…
>Moral of the story: selling stuff to criminals might seem like easy money but may not be worth the trouble. Interesting that you think only criminals want privacy. I use Signal and TLS too, I must be Pablo Escobar's second coming?
People need to understand this. There is no solution for mobile device compromise other than to stop using these devices.
And if you cannot stop using them, then you must understand that everything you type, say and do on or around your mobile device is (or will be) public. So treat it like a public device at all times.
Many years ago I worked for a telco that had a mobile product that you could buy with cash (show up in a convenience store with cash and you would get a SIM card for use straight away without any form of registration). This was 5 times as expensive compared to when you paid by debit or credit card. This offering was extremely popular amongst drug dealers and people needing a burner to call in a bomb threat. (Maybe th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's either your ISP or the VPN provider That answers it for many people, I would guess. Even without censorship, many ISPs have a much worse track-record for gathering and subsequently selling information than, say, Mullvad does. Is it an absolute that Mullvad doesn't log/sell information? No, of course not. But they make a much more convincing case than my ISP does. Geoblock avoiding is another common answer. My…
Here in Germany the rights of ISP users are supposedly better protected than in other jurisdictions. At least that's what I heard on this podcast [0], latest episode iirc. [0] https://www.stitcher.com/show/cypherpunk-bitstream
The German government also threatened to ban Telegram which would have put them in line with places like China, Russia, Cuba and Iran. I think Telegram folded and now removes channels at their request in order to avoid being fully censored.
I gotta say, I love Monero but every single time I see malware deploy a miner it is Monero for obvious reasons. More than any currency I want it to succeed because of true anonymity it provides but when you accept Monero, better beef up your anti-abuse capacity.
Mullvad always seemed too good to be true. So that's why i'd won't use it if i'd had critical stuff to do. I do love Mullvad, but so aircrack-ng
The same goes for anyone else reading this. Are you worried that we are too good to be true? What could we do to become more trustworthy in your eyes?
Cheers, Fredrik Stromberg (cofounder of Mullvad)
What are people using VPNs for mostly, if they're living in a country without internet censorship? It's either your ISP or the VPN provider, which can log the websites you have visited, so there isn't a clear advantage of using a VPN. Sure the VPN provider may claim to log nothing, but that's hard to confirm and not proven to be true in some cases (related thread regarding Protonmail: https://news.ycombinator.com/ite…
I personally use it to evade IP-based tracking, for random example LinkedIn. Try browsing LI from your home. LI will suggest that you connect to others in your home. Even though I have a fake LI profile, not linked to other members of my household, so this doesn't actually invade my privacy, it's still yucky that they maintain a shadow connection between us. There are tons of sites/services that do this kind of simple yet invasive tracking.
I also use it in rare cases for torrenting or downloading content. I normally have other methods for torrenting and seeding privately but in some cases I want another level of privacy (nothing illegal/bad/censor worthy, and therefore would be ok with law enforcement connecting the dots through VPN), a level that VPN serves well.
I am glad that the VPN providers sell people on nonsense, on protections they can't guarantee (to Western countries anyway). This makes the service actually available at all. To me it's an analog of the https-everywhere cargo cult, that makes it super easy these days to get a free SSL cert.
No technology is perfect. It doesn't make it useless.
What are people using VPNs for mostly, if they're living in a country without internet censorship? It's either your ISP or the VPN provider, which can log the websites you have visited, so there isn't a clear advantage of using a VPN. Sure the VPN provider may claim to log nothing, but that's hard to confirm and not proven to be true in some cases (related thread regarding Protonmail: https://news.ycombinator.com/ite…
I find it's a convenient way to prevent services beyond my ISP from knowing where am I based on IP address.
All of those apps you have on your devices presumably have permanent connections back to their servers and they can very easily tell if you're at home, out on mobile data, in an office, or in a cafe/public library or even in a different country.
With a VPN, they currently think I'm in Dallas; which I'm nowhere near right now.