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Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

mullvad.net

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Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#171

Post by throwaway92394 »

kfreds wrote: post #118
andreisbc wrote: post #67

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

Thank you for the compliment! We are indeed for real, but I don't expect this comment will convince you. I'd love to know what we could do that would change your mind. 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)

This isn't meant to be criticism just curious. Why did it take so long to add monero support? For the past several years there's only ~2 other VPNs that tick all the privacy boxes, and you're the most preferable - other then lack of monero support. It always seemed weird that you went so far for privacy, but didn't support monero.

Was it just on the backlog and took a bit of time to implement? I appreciate that you built your own implementation for crypto by the way.

Thanks for the great service.

EDIT: I've heard a rumor that you've shared a user IP because of a government subpoena (live during a connection, so it wasn't logged). Has this happened? I think according to your swedish-legislation page says "However, the Swedish police authority may have access to information by way of coercive measures such as seizure and search of premises." which would allow for this to happen in theory? I.E. intercepting or seizing control of your router to see what IP a connection is on?

EDIT: One other question - is there plans to add more IPs? Services seem to flag most mullvad IPs but I'm not sure there's much you can do about that.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#172

Post by brightball »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #161
brightball wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea problem from an admin perspective is that all malicious traffic attempts to use privacy respecting technology. It’s more guilt by association than anything else for the legitimate users. One of the weird realities is that in order to combat fraud you need to be able to identify the source, which is a hard reality as a privacy advocate.

Not specifically picking on you (thanks for replying) but may I rephrase that a little and then ask something; "Sinners look just like saints, so it's necessary to punish all, to destroy the riches of the many in order that wicked few do not escape." Is that a fair framing of the "ethics" of what you said? (I'm not attributing that as 'your' argument, I understand you're kinda just trying to 'explain' something as yo…

Short answer: I think companies will act to solve the problems they're experiencing.

I added some of my own experience here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31252676

If an army is attacking your border and somebody walks through them saying, "It's okay, I'm totally legitimate!" that person is probably still going down in the crossfire. Enter from the direction where the attacks aren't coming from and your odds will increase significantly.

Ultimately, companies will either adopt a very strict security policy on their own or they will respond to the problems that they are experiencing. If you are a US only company and you start getting malicious traffic from Romania, it's fairly common to just block all of Romania. When you're using tools like Maxmind for network identification, VPNs and Tor are just another traffic source that you can choose to block if it's causing you problems.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#173

Post by nonrandomstring »

brightball wrote: post #172
nonrandomstring wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not specifically picking on you (thanks for replying) but may I rephrase that a little and then ask something; "Sinners look just like saints, so it's necessary to punish all, to destroy the riches of the many in order that wicked few do not escape." Is that a fair framing of the "ethics" of what you said? (I'm not attributing that as 'your' argument, I understand you're kinda just trying to 'explain' something as yo…

Short answer: I think companies will act to solve the problems they're experiencing. I added some of my own experience here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31252676 If an army is attacking your border and somebody walks through them saying, "It's okay, I'm totally legitimate!" that person is probably still going down in the crossfire. Enter from the direction where the attacks aren't coming from and your odds w…

Thanks, good response.

What I'm getting is that you consider the "attack" an immediate mortal threat and the granularity of tools and techniques for discerning enemy/friendly identity and behaviour are lacking. The principle ethical stance is really self-preservation.

> "It's okay, I'm totally legitimate!" that person is probably still going down in the crossfire.

Nice analogy. I may have to steal that :)

Given that we can't rely on identity [1], can we improve analysis and response to behaviour?

[1] I see in an earlier response you talk a bit about fingerprinting, and of course anyone serious about privacy will modulate OS and browser FPs without malicious intent.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#174

Post by InCityDreams »

V1ndaar wrote: post #78
nuclx wrote: post #72

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…

For me one big use case: avoiding stupid geoblocks on motorsport streams. Often streams are available in countries where the licence has not been sold on Youtube or the websites of the sport itself (sometimes for free, sometimes as a subscription). For example Formula 1 has F1TV that you can only sign up for in some countries (where they didn't sell out to Sky essentially). Like, I don't even mind paying for a servic…

Sent a link (yt, less than a couple of minutes long) to two friends (in different, and not my, countries). Both blocked. One friend changed location via vpn and watched the video. The other, no vpn, didn't see the video AND said they wouldn't ever use a vpn as they have 'nothing to hide'.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#175

Post by mekster »

seanw444 wrote: post #41

Thank you, Mullvad team! This is quite literally the only feature I've been wanting. Everything else works well. Bandwidth? Excellent. Apps? Excellent. WireGuard? Excellent. No form of KYC required, period? Excellent. Payment options? Excellent. I hope I don't live to see you turn into every other shady VPN service.

Wish the name was easier to remember. It opens opportunity for typo domain/app squatters to take people elsewhere. I had to double check the spell from reliable sources.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#177

Post by brightball »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #173
brightball wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short answer: I think companies will act to solve the problems they're experiencing. I added some of my own experience here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31252676 If an army is attacking your border and somebody walks through them saying, "It's okay, I'm totally legitimate!" that person is probably still going down in the crossfire. Enter from the direction where the attacks aren't coming from and your odds w…

Thanks, good response. What I'm getting is that you consider the "attack" an immediate mortal threat and the granularity of tools and techniques for discerning enemy/friendly identity and behaviour are lacking. The principle ethical stance is really self-preservation. > "It's okay, I'm totally legitimate!" that person is probably still going down in the crossfire. Nice analogy. I may have to steal that :) Given that…

Again, also very situational.

For example, at the site where I worked we needed much stricter protection but we didn't want to bother the established users of the site...so we setup trust scores and implemented stricter controls on a sliding scale. The higher your trust score, the less strict we would be with our policies.

As a brand new user, your score was a flat 0. You could boost it by verifying a credit card, phone number and address (without using a VPN/Tor). Successful transactions rewarded your score. Transactions with established users are more valuable than transactions with other new users, etc.

All the security was virtually invisible to the established users and it worked like a charm.

Regarding the fingerprinting, at the time that we were doing this anti-fingerprinting technology barely existed. We had some other tricks in the bag too to fingerprint based on behavior. It was a lot of fun working on that stuff though. Very much a cat and mouse game.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#178

Post by 0daystock »

kfreds wrote: post #118
andreisbc wrote: post #67

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

Thank you for the compliment! We are indeed for real, but I don't expect this comment will convince you. I'd love to know what we could do that would change your mind. 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)

Paradoxically, the most trustworthy thing you could do as a VPN provider is explain why most people don't need and won't actually benefit from a VPN. Outside of a few limited use cases (accessing location-restricted content, connecting to legacy services) and with almost-ubiquitous end-to-end TLS encryption deployed on the Internet, there's really not a lot of good reasons to use a VPN (and many good reasons not to). Reasoning about this in a transparent and objective way is something I've never seen VPN providers do, and for this reason I struggle with trusting them.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#179

Post by handsclean »

tomxor wrote: post #54
seanw444 wrote: post #41

Thank you, Mullvad team! This is quite literally the only feature I've been wanting. Everything else works well. Bandwidth? Excellent. Apps? Excellent. WireGuard? Excellent. No form of KYC required, period? Excellent. Payment options? Excellent. I hope I don't live to see you turn into every other shady VPN service.

I really like mullvad's service too (wiregaurd)... My only issue is that is seems to have become increasingly difficult to access many websites through their servers. I suppose this is inevitable to some degree with any VPN service, it's part of the deal for more privacy, you have to share an IP with potential sources of abuse. But it seems to have gotten really bad recently to the point that I end up server hoping t…

The way I see it, websites like that are saying they’ll only do it without a condom. You want it real bad, so it’s tempting to try to bargain about it, or maybe just take it off for now - it’s just a little while, what’re the chances it goes wrong? - but we all know that the smart move is to keep it on or back out entirely. Reasonable partners, of which there are many, understand and cooperate. And ones that don’t aren’t the type of partner you want anyway.

Re: Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments

#180

Post by 0daystock »

ziddoap wrote: post #80
nuclx wrote: post #72

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…

> 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…

> 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.

That's not the only deciding factor though, is it? Mullvad (not singling them out, but just for sake of illustration) is in many ways is more attractive to bad actors because it centralizes users seeking privacy. On top of that, you're adding additional software and network complexity which equals attack surface. There's more to consider than what appears at face value when considering whether a VPN is appropriate.

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