351–360 of 453 posts
Very interesting. Mullvad seems to be the most extreme and reputable VPN service out there when it comes to privacy. At least it seems that way.
A VPN will hide you from your ISP, but that's about it, isn't it? Does a VPN really provide that much real privacy?
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).
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> 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…
Does that also apply to your car/home/health insurance as well?
If you don't have an accident/get robbed/go to the doctor, are you being exploited by the insurance company?
Edit: BTW, I'm an old guy myself.
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that's me and my audible subscription. i should cancel it, but before that i have to use the credits.
Holy cow, that’s evil. https://help.audible.com/s/article/do-i-keep-my-credits-if-i... Do I keep my credits if I cancel my Audible Premium Plus membership? No. If you end your Audible Premium Plus membership, your credits will be lost with your other membership benefits.
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).
You can also easily pay with better anonymity with the Strike app, https://strike.me , which abstracts bitcoin mainnet and lightning network payments behind USD, so you don't have to worry about actually holding bitcoin or managing tax implications. You just use bitcoin as a globally agnostic payment rail, masked with your local fiat, so the price volatility doesn't affect you. Mullvad even gives you a 10% discount f…
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And what businesses are hoping for are users that are paying without actually using their service. Produce nothing, but get paid every month. Sounds like a crap deal for the users.
> 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…
On some level yes. But recently banks here in Australia were busted for charging dead people.
https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/apra-punish...
Are you going to tell me the dead people are at fault for not taking advantage of services provided?
The point here is the relationship between (business) provider and consumer. It should be fair and balanced. No one is asking a business to provide services for nothing. But when the services aren't being used, the non-consumer shouldn't be charged either.
The only question remaining is - what is a fair way to go about this?
A reasonable time period of non-use before suspension of service seems ok. The business got money for nothing - but can't try to make that into a business plan.
Clearly businesses would rather have more "money for nothing" - so would everyone - but it isn't reasonable.
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A lot of them have been gobbled up by Kape or otherwise proven to keep logs/data when they claim they don't https://restoreprivacy.com/kape-technologies-owns-expressvpn...
Oh man I thought Private Internet Access was still one of the independent VPNs. I feel duped. :/
I feel like it's probably more trustworthy under Kape than a CEO and CTO surrounded by a long history of lies, fraud, and general scumbag behavior.
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So if you wanted to give money to another individual (not a company which offers card payments) and you didn't want to use the internet, is cash the only option?
You call your bank, or go into a branch, and transfer it to their bank account.
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I also like that they let you download the raw wireguard config files so that you can connect without having to use their client. You can just plop them onto your filesystem and use wg-quick to get going. Since I'm also a ProtonMail user and I considered switching to them for VPN as well but their python client doesn't seem to work correctly on my Arch Linux install and it doesn't give me anything useful to debug it…
I've read some articles online, but I still haven't managed to understand the hype around wireguard. It's lighter than OpenVPN, but has more obscure primitives? Doesn't seem like a great trade off...