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We are removing the option to create new subscriptions

mullvad.net

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Re: We are removing the option to create new subscriptions

#311

Post by banana_giraffe »

CSMastermind wrote: post #298
banana_giraffe wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be aware, at least Nord clearly does something different with their client than with the OpenVPN files they provide ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664692 ). When I dug into this, I found similar cases with other major VPN providers, but my notes are sufficiently out of date, they shouldn't be trusted anymore. Sometimes the differences are subtle, sometimes they're rather complex like this case. Personally,…

> ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664692 ) Is there any proof of this? It seems like the original author was wrong and deleted the article.

I have no idea how right the author was about how Nord got ahold of the residential IPs. I was able to recreate the technical results, and noted at the time that the OpenVPN connection to the same Nord endpoint behaved differently (and, indeed, Disney+ blocked it).

Of course, that was a while ago .. long enough I assume my notes no longer reflect the current state of things. It'd be interesting to try and recreate it with the latest stuff, but all of my VPN providers accounts have lapsed by this point.

Re: We are removing the option to create new subscriptions

#312

Post by lovingCranberry »

eszaq wrote: post #294
sdfhdhjdw3 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hadn't heard of Mullvad before reading this Just the only vpn with any integrity left remaining, no biggie.

How about ivpn or perfect privacy?

Perfect-Privacy still has integrity left.

Someone hacked into their Malmoe server a year ago or so, and found that they indeed run everything in RAM disks and aren't logging at all. Happened via the management interface. But please take this information with a grain of salt, as the write up for this exploitation has been vanished from the internet (or I am just unable to find it). *

However, there are still articles about how they've been raided multiple times [1][2][3] in the past, and the police never found any logs.

[1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2010-August/...

[2] https://torrentfreak.com/police-seize-two-perfect-privacy-vp...

[3] https://www.ip-insider.de/hausdurchsuchung-bei-erfurter-vpn-...

* Also, I believe that this kind of pwnage could've happened to every VPN provider. Always use VPN chains with multiple locations and always keep in mind that your VPN could have been compromised. Don't just rely on a single hoster which just shifts the liability from your ISP to another single point of failure. But this is probably still better than LE just having to call comcast. :)

Edit: ovpn.to is probably worth taking a look too. I remember that the admin grows cannabis in his basement (still illegal in Germany) and provides all users with access to warez via Usenet NNTP. Do with that info what you want.

Re: We are removing the option to create new subscriptions

#313

Post by shrimpx »

contravariant wrote: post #283
capableweb wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably there are details linking together payments coming from Paypal and the account number. And obviously there is a link between account number and forwarded port. So following with that, you'd be able to make the connection between the account number and Paypal account, which is definitely not private nor even pretending to protect your privacy.

Maybe but doesn't all of that apply equally to just about any payment method other than sending them cash anonymously?

I think in the case of a one-time payment there’s a record that you paid Mullvad, but there’s no link to an account number.

Re: We are removing the option to create new subscriptions

#314

Post by bigiain »

contravariant wrote: post #283
capableweb wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably there are details linking together payments coming from Paypal and the account number. And obviously there is a link between account number and forwarded port. So following with that, you'd be able to make the connection between the account number and Paypal account, which is definitely not private nor even pretending to protect your privacy.

Maybe but doesn't all of that apply equally to just about any payment method other than sending them cash anonymously?

For a single payment, they can throw away all the metadata once the funds hit their bank account.

They _can't_ do that with recurring subscriptions, since they need something that links to your CC or PayPal details to re-bill it next month/year. They've chosen to not do that any more, possibly as performative privacy, also possibly as having real privacy concerns for their clients, and also also possibly so they can tell law enforcement and courts to stop bothering them when needed. (realistically, it'll be some combination of those three things, and possibly others I've not thought of, that triggered them into this)

Re: We are removing the option to create new subscriptions

#315

Post by wpietri »

tomnipotent wrote: post #291
wpietri wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am amazed that you can't see that approach as exploitative, and that your last line is victim blaming. If a company can't exist without tricking people into paying for something they get no value out of, maybe it shouldn't exist.

> can't see that approach as exploitative You're getting all-you-can-eat from the business for a fixed price in exchange for predictable revenue as opposed to pay-as-you-go. That you think that's exploitative just tells me you don't understand the business model. You want to have your cake and eat it, too.

Ah yes, the old "people who disagree with me must be ignorant" routine. Not a good sign, but I'll take one more swing at it.

An all-you-can-eat restaurant where customers don't eat anything and you still keep charging them until they notice months or years later is indeed exploitative.

For something like an apartment, there's reasonable justification for long-term contracts and continuing to charge people without regard to use, in that it's an expensive good that has exactly one user at a time and where it can take a while to find a new tenant.

But that entirely vanishes with most internet-based subscriptions. If I stop watching Netflix, they stop experiencing marginal costs for me. If I get excited about a NYT subscription but then stop reading, it's the same deal. Nobody went out and bought another server just because I signed up. I could cancel at any time and they'd have to let me go. If they keep charging me when I'm not getting any value, then it's not a mutually beneficial relationship; they're just exploiting me. And indeed, maybe they were exploiting me from the get-go if their intent was to just get my money in without regard for whether I was going to get anything out of it.

People who take money without providing value are at best economic parasites, but quite a lot of them are just scammers, grifters, and frauds. Which is exactly why a law would be especially valuable here, so that their time and attention were devoted to some socially positive activity.

Re: We are removing the option to create new subscriptions

#316

Post by bigiain »

tomnipotent wrote: post #300
wpietri wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anybody who offers a month-to-month subscription, I'm not asking for anything other than them not taking money they're not earning. You have a point with, say, annual subscriptions. But for services where there's no cost to the vendor for an unused subscription, maybe that's ok, as there an annual subscription could much more easily be a dark pattern. I also think pushing the risk of "the customer doesn't actuall…

Absolutely there's cost to the business even if you don't use the service. There's marketing, salary, healthcare, leases, and any other number of expenses. Gym's pay rent regardless of you showing up. Netflix still has pay for content you don't watch. The entire point of a subscription model is that a business can offer a steeply discounted price vs. pay-as-you-go in exchange for predictable, recurring revenue. That'…

> Gym's pay rent regardless of you showing up.

In my opinion, that's the industry (at least here in .au) that are the poster-child worst example of dark patterns in manipulative subscription charging.

They are infamous here for doing fucked up things in an attempt to make it as difficult as possible to cancel your subscription. I had one friend who moved overseas, discovered his gym was still billing him monthly even though he'd emailed to cancel explaining they didn't have any locations in his new country of residence, and they tried to claim the only way to cancel his subscription was in-person at the location he signed up at. He had to lawyer up when he cancelled the credit card (and told them he'd done so), and they threatened to send his account to a collection agency. (On single lawyer letter got him a refund of all charges since the date of his original email saying he was cancelling, so they _knew_ they were legally in the wrong and wouldn't have a leg to stand on it of ever got to court.)

Re: We are removing the option to create new subscriptions

#317

Post by derefr »

ranger_danger wrote: post #309
devmunchies wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can mail them cash with account info and they'll set you up If I wanted to self-host a VPN, I would still need to pay for a cloud provider. Is there an equivalent cash (snail mail) offering for hosting?

>I would still need to pay for a cloud provider. both google and oracle offer small, perpetually free VM instances.

...in exchange for knowing who you are. (If they couldn't de-dup you via some kind of identity verification, they wouldn't be able to offer a free promo, as some asshole could then just come and generate a million free accounts and lash them together to run a botnet/crypto-mining-farm/etc on.)

I believe the GP's question is "is there any public-web hosting platform that I can use entirely anonymously; where they allow me to sign up using a VPN; and where I don't ever have to pass them anything / sign in through anything / link anything that could be linked back to my identity?"

And I believe the answer to that question is "no."

(Well, okay, if you're fine with a static website, you could pin your data using FileCoin, and then set a domain up as a DNSLink pointer to [an IPFS gateway for] the relevant IPFS URN. That's how https://docs.ipfs.io works. But that's not quite what "web hosting" means to most people.)

Re: We are removing the option to create new subscriptions

#318

Post by ryanbrunner »

wpietri wrote: post #290
tomnipotent wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And what businesses are hoping for are users that are paying without actually using their service All of them, from the local gym to Dropbox to Spotify. Subscription businesses can't make money if every consumer costs more to service than the revenue they generate. There's even an official accounting term for it, breakage. > Produce nothing, but get paid every month Failure to consume and get value from a subscript…

I am amazed that you can't see that approach as exploitative, and that your last line is victim blaming. If a company can't exist without tricking people into paying for something they get no value out of, maybe it shouldn't exist.

> If a company can't exist without tricking people into paying for something they get no value out of, maybe it shouldn't exist.

Sure, but this doesn't describe all subscription businesses, plenty of companies have healthy margins even with active users.

No one is saying there aren't subscription businesses that abuse subscription pricing to get recurring revenue from what should be one-time revenue, leave customers locked into something they're not getting value out of, etc. but that's not a truism of subscriptions (even the traditionally shady ones like gyms!)

Re: We are removing the option to create new subscriptions

#319

Post by wpietri »

tomnipotent wrote: post #300
wpietri wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anybody who offers a month-to-month subscription, I'm not asking for anything other than them not taking money they're not earning. You have a point with, say, annual subscriptions. But for services where there's no cost to the vendor for an unused subscription, maybe that's ok, as there an annual subscription could much more easily be a dark pattern. I also think pushing the risk of "the customer doesn't actuall…

Absolutely there's cost to the business even if you don't use the service. There's marketing, salary, healthcare, leases, and any other number of expenses. Gym's pay rent regardless of you showing up. Netflix still has pay for content you don't watch. The entire point of a subscription model is that a business can offer a steeply discounted price vs. pay-as-you-go in exchange for predictable, recurring revenue. That'…

Sorry, I thought you'd understand I was talking about marginal cost. Yes, I understand that software companies have non-marginal expenses. And yes, gyms pay rent, but I clearly said I was talking about "service/software subscriptions".

I also disagree that's the point of subscription models. If I'm on a month-to-month subscription, there's no legal guarantee the revenue is predictable more than 30 days out. That would be just as true if auto-suspend were required for non-use.

Re: We are removing the option to create new subscriptions

#320

Post by tomnipotent »

wpietri wrote: post #315
tomnipotent wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can't see that approach as exploitative You're getting all-you-can-eat from the business for a fixed price in exchange for predictable revenue as opposed to pay-as-you-go. That you think that's exploitative just tells me you don't understand the business model. You want to have your cake and eat it, too.

Ah yes, the old "people who disagree with me must be ignorant" routine. Not a good sign, but I'll take one more swing at it. An all-you-can-eat restaurant where customers don't eat anything and you still keep charging them until they notice months or years later is indeed exploitative. For something like an apartment, there's reasonable justification for long-term contracts and continuing to charge people without reg…

If you eat a buffet and only have one plate, you don't get to complain and ask for a refund.

> keep charging them until they notice months or years later is indeed exploitative.

When is it the customer's fault for not cancelling? You're working very hard to avoid responsibility for the business contract you entered into.

> they stop experiencing marginal costs for me.

Which are a small part of the overall cost structure. So what?

> Nobody went out and bought another server just because I signed up

Absolutely they do. The business is managing its finances under the assumption of subscribers and LTV, and making investments accordingly based on those assumptions and forecasts.

> they're just exploiting me

For charging you for something you signed up for but were too lazy to manage properly?

> just get my money in without regard for whether I was going to get anything out of it

There you go passing the buck again. It's your responsibility to use the thing you signed up for.

> People who take money without providing value are at best economic parasites

You mean the money you're giving them as part of consensual business agreement?

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