261–270 of 453 posts
These services will likely not be around in 5 years if things continue as they do today. I work with clients who ban any ASN that hosts these kinds of services. Not sure what Mullvad can do to not become a new Tor or North Korea. At many companies they already are. I am not for it. Just the way the lands lie right now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think saying subscriptions are a dark pattern is going a bit far. In the case where you're offering an ongoing service that requires a cost to service, a subscription model is completely appropriate and in the best interest of both the subscriber and the issuer. For sure there's some abuse of the model where you're selling something that should be a one-time item, but that's not the case here, and Mullvad is provid…
I'd be willing to say that subscriptions are a dark pattern when they don't automatically stop if you stop using them. A fundamental part of healthy business relationships is value for value. E.g., you give me money, I give you a sandwich, you take the sandwich, eat it, and are happy with it. If you keep paying me for sandwiches but I don't give them to you, that's not healthy. Ditto if I put them on the counter but…
I will admit that I know absolutely nothing of the Swedish legal system.
This decision makes me like them even more.
I was so worried they were winding down or something. I really love Mullvad and would hate to have to find a new VPN. This decision makes me like them even more.
Wow. Hadn't heard of Mullvad before reading this, figured I'd give it a try. That is hands down the BEST onboarding experience for an app (let alone a VPN) I've had in I don't know how long. Took me maybe 2 minutes to go from no account to a working VPN connection. I love that everything is anonymous (down to the account credentials just being a randomly generated token).
How did you pay?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Private from your current ISP, sure, but not from Mullvad being private from your local ISP is what 99% of people care about because they use VPNs to send copyright infringement claims to /dev/null and watch netflix, not to smuggle nuclear secrets to Iran. It's privacy in a practical sense that's useful to people. If I go from an untrustworthy ISP to a trustworthy one I've gained privacy, there's no need to be overl…
I'm not really trying to be pedantic for giggles.. perhaps I just think it's sad that 99% of ISPs are considered your privacy enemy and on top of that I don't consider VPNs a scalable solution to the problem at large so I'm more entertaining the "why is this the de facto solution" question in the "does it scale to society" solution space. It starts to look more like a social problem/solution than a technology problem…
I was so worried they were winding down or something. I really love Mullvad and would hate to have to find a new VPN. This decision makes me like them even more.
They took payment in BTC back when it was several orders of magnitude less valuable. They can probably run the company indefinitely off their crypto savings.
Given the relative volatility I'd be surprised if they have any meaningful long term holding of cryptocurrency.
I, personally, care a large amount about convenience. I don't want to think about bills at all. I've been a Mullvad subscriber for years on a PayPal recurring payment. It works so well that I don't even think about it. I just use it. Having to think about paying a bill every month is really a pain to me. I get the privacy ideals, but the tradeoffs are not ridiculous. I should be able to make a decision about how priv…
> "Having to think about paying a bill every month" Others can correct me, but I believe each payment just adds a month of time to your balance. So a number of months can be added at once.