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VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

vpnpro.com

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Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#111

Post by dorgo »

emerongi wrote: post #104
Traster wrote: post #91

People should take this list with a serious health warning. Firstly, a lot of this is just 'internet sleuth'ing and innuendo. Plenty of companies want to operate multiple services to be able to use different marketing and differentiation strategies. Secondly, the fact that the site is funded by affiliate links to a coupole of the big VPN services should really ring alarm bells. I trust we all learned from the Mattres…

I know someone making tens of thousands a month from shilling VPNs. They have site where they "review" and "rate" VPNs. The reality is that the customers of those products barely understand them and are buying into the BS of "stay anonymous" and "be private online". It's an easy market, especially considering you don't even need to develop the VPN software, just run instances on some cloud/VPS provider and do a ton o…

> What I've learned from this is that if you Google for some popular product, the first 5 pages are going to be SEO-optimized shilling sites. Just skip to page 10.

Is a less SEO-optimized site less likely to be a scam?

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#112

Post by dantesieg »

mrunseen wrote: post #36
harshreality wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safe? Against what? - Preventing websites from seeing your true IP? (you'll want to disable webrtc as well[1].) Mostly yes. - preventing your ISP from spying on your traffic? (allowing Amazon to spy on your traffic in exchange...) Yes. - Avoiding risk of legal threats if you engage in copyright infringement? Mostly no. They can subpoena Amazon instead of your ISP, and your lightsail/EC2 ip isn't shared. Routing throu…

I live in Turkey and I got myself Wireguard set-up with wireguard+lightsail. I can say I got same trouble as no-VPN. For example I cant view profiles on Twitter when im on VPN. btw Turkey is notorious for blocking sites, Youtube got blocked for months, Wikipedia is still blocked today..

I live in Turkey too and i got an Iceland based vps setup with v2ray, shadowsocks, trojan-gfw and shadowvpn. I can access all sites with no problems.

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#113

Post by jjakque »

krn wrote: post #107
jjakque wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: What's the context of the provided diagram? Is it to imply that the named companies are closely associated with each other? ie/ Tesonet, NordVPN, HolaVPN, ProtonMail/ProtonVPN (and other named company I missed) are proven to have common interest and the common interest involve/include putting customers' privacy in danger?

> Serious question: What's the context of the provided diagram? There are multiple partnerships and ownerships in VPN and data mining industries that are not publicly admitted, unless something goes wrong[1][2]. Although the presence of these relationships alone is not always enough to claim that customers' privacy has been violated, it makes these companies look much less trustworthy in the long run. [1] https://www…

Thanks for your reply.

Just checked out vpnscam.com for the first time, and its content scream in tinfoil hats giving me negative first impression.

It's really a dilemma to me: small providers haven't proven themselves to be trustworthy, while well established ones are connected to another business somewhat. How does one choose a reliable VPN provider?

And same goes with self hosted OpenVPN server, what's to say that the VPS provider will always put customers' interest first?

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#114

Post by a012 »

jjakque wrote: post #113
krn wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Serious question: What's the context of the provided diagram? There are multiple partnerships and ownerships in VPN and data mining industries that are not publicly admitted, unless something goes wrong[1][2]. Although the presence of these relationships alone is not always enough to claim that customers' privacy has been violated, it makes these companies look much less trustworthy in the long run. [1] https://www…

Thanks for your reply. Just checked out vpnscam.com for the first time, and its content scream in tinfoil hats giving me negative first impression. It's really a dilemma to me: small providers haven't proven themselves to be trustworthy, while well established ones are connected to another business somewhat. How does one choose a reliable VPN provider? And same goes with self hosted OpenVPN server, what's to say that…

> How does one choose a reliable VPN provider?

Learn to do it yourself. If privacy is your top priority, you can't trust any available VPN providers out there.

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#115

Post by [deleted] »

dorgo wrote: post #111
emerongi wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone making tens of thousands a month from shilling VPNs. They have site where they "review" and "rate" VPNs. The reality is that the customers of those products barely understand them and are buying into the BS of "stay anonymous" and "be private online". It's an easy market, especially considering you don't even need to develop the VPN software, just run instances on some cloud/VPS provider and do a ton o…

> What I've learned from this is that if you Google for some popular product, the first 5 pages are going to be SEO-optimized shilling sites. Just skip to page 10. Is a less SEO-optimized site less likely to be a scam?

[deleted]

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#116

Post by krn »

jjakque wrote: post #113
krn wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Serious question: What's the context of the provided diagram? There are multiple partnerships and ownerships in VPN and data mining industries that are not publicly admitted, unless something goes wrong[1][2]. Although the presence of these relationships alone is not always enough to claim that customers' privacy has been violated, it makes these companies look much less trustworthy in the long run. [1] https://www…

Thanks for your reply. Just checked out vpnscam.com for the first time, and its content scream in tinfoil hats giving me negative first impression. It's really a dilemma to me: small providers haven't proven themselves to be trustworthy, while well established ones are connected to another business somewhat. How does one choose a reliable VPN provider? And same goes with self hosted OpenVPN server, what's to say that…

> Just checked out vpnscam.com for the first time, and its content scream in tinfoil hats giving me negative first impression.

I think that's because this site is most likely run by some other competing VPN company. They are all trying to win by collecting and publishing everything about each other.

> It's really a dilemma to me: small providers haven't proven themselves to be trustworthy, while well established ones are connected to another business somewhat. How does one choose a reliable VPN provider?

I am personally more inclined to trust VPN providers that don't pay affiliate commissions, don't hide behind offshore companies, don't ask for their costumers' email addresses, state the full names of the people behind the company publicly, and adopt the most advanced open-source solutions early[1].

The other option is self-hosting Algo[2] on OVH or Hetzner.

[1] https://mullvad.net/en/guides/category/wireguard/

[2] https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#117

Post by iforgotpassword »

Traster wrote: post #91

People should take this list with a serious health warning. Firstly, a lot of this is just 'internet sleuth'ing and innuendo. Plenty of companies want to operate multiple services to be able to use different marketing and differentiation strategies. Secondly, the fact that the site is funded by affiliate links to a coupole of the big VPN services should really ring alarm bells. I trust we all learned from the Mattres…

I watch a bunch of tech related YouTube channels and the amount of NordVPN shilling is outrageous. Some fine folks making good content telling their audience that "your ISP is seeing everything you do but if you use a VPN you are safe, it's totally not like the VPN provider is then able to do exactly what the ISP could before!"

Even worse the VPN provider is usually operating from some country with much less regulation regarding privacy. If it were revealed that some ISP here in Germany is sniffing traffic and selling your data, shit would hit the fan, but if your trusty VPN provider from whoknowswhere does this, good luck going after them.

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#119

Post by anxman »

yardstick wrote: post #19

Tinfoil hats aside, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if the NSA and other intelligence agencies around the world operated VPN service providers as a way to spy on users.

This was confirmed in the Snowden leaks. It said it was a VPN popular in Africa and the Middle East but its name was never made public.

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#120

Post by anxman »

mercora wrote: post #103
IshKebab wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think the NSA employs Linux devs so they can deliberately insert flaws. Why would they not? It would be very easy. But every time I mention it people reply "But but many eyes! They'd get caught!"

I want to point out that they could similarly hire someone working at microsoft, or get someone up for a position there, to do this and it would be at least as hard to detect...

Large companies like Microsoft assume that there are advanced persistent threats that are willing to place HUMINT inside of their companies. The companies have dedicated internal teamd focused on detecting them.

For example, Twitter recently fired someone that was leaking information on dissidents to a foreign government.

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