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Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

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Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#111

Post by thisislife2 »

immibis wrote: post #85
thisislife2 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do trust my ISP more than any foreign VPN service providers because I have the option to take my ISP to court if they violate my rights. I stopped caring about anonymity on political subjects when I realised not being anonymous made me more civil online, and more mindful of what I want to talk about. (Ofcourse, I can think like this because I have the privilege of living a democracy).

If you lived in a place like Germany or the UK, you could get arrested for posting online that you don't like what Israel is doing in Gaza or that you think Elon Musk is a Nazi (among other things you could get arrested for saying). In this case, routing your traffic through an unknown intermediary makes sense. You said you have to be mindful of what you say and how you say it, in order to comply with the law. In oth…

I do say many critical things about my political leaders and government policies, online. But, like I said, I am more mindful of what I say and how I say it (e.g. I often quote such things from a news source / media). (People in Germany and UK can do so too - just understand the law and quote DW, BBC, DailyMail etc., all of whom have mentioned something about the Gaza genocide or Elon Musk's Nazi like behaviour, at some point). If the government wants to come after you, they will. You have to have faith in your democracy and the courts. If you are losing faith in your democratic setup, be prepared to mobilise people with some political party (or start one) and fight for your rights - it will have more lasting political impact than any anonymous post you make online.

Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#112

Post by michaelt »

fujigawa wrote: post #7

Commercial VPNs will go down as one of the greatest money-making schemes of the last decade. Outside of a few specific use cases their sales often rely on leveraging non-technical users' fear of what they don't fully understand. I have non-technical friends and relatives that have fully bought into this and when I asked why they use a VPN I got non-specific answers like "you need it for security", "to prevent identit…

> when I asked why they use a VPN I got non-specific answers like "you need it for security", "to prevent identity theft"

I always assumed that was like head shops selling water pipes for "tobacco smoking"

A fig leaf, to keep their business respectable and the credit card processors off their backs.

Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#113

Post by consumer451 »

atkailash wrote: post #110
davepeck wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long ago, in the era of Firesheep and exploding prevalence of coffee-shop Wi-Fi, consumer VPN services were definitely valuable. But that was long ago. Now, HTTPS is the norm. The only use cases for consumer VPNs today seem to be (1) "pretend I'm in a different geography so I can stream that show I wanted to see" and (2) "torrent with slightly greater impunity". I live in Seattle and Mullvad VPN seems to have bought…

Times Square at one point was practically half full of Mullvad ads. I already distrusted it but the sheer amount of money they spent to do that made it shadier to me

Might I ask, what made you distrust them prior to that?

Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#114

Post by mft_ »

tetris11 wrote: post #15

MullvadVPN seem to be pretty decent at the moment, but it looks like they're laying down a worldwide VPN infrastructure of sorts that other VPN companies can rent (similar to phone networks) This makes me feel a little uneasy of their unstated longterm goals (corner the entire market), but I do think they are the most trustworthy out there right now

I'm a happy Mullvad customer for years now, except a lot of their IPs seem to have been flagged (presumably due to scraping or similar) meaning that some sites are close to unusable when behind the VPN. Reddit is a prime example.

(I read somewhere a while back that they don't refresh their IPs (unlike some other VPNs?) but I have no special insight into this.)

Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#115

Post by mr_mitm »

hiatus wrote: post #98
elondaits wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about a malicious DNS (on a public spoofed or hacked WiFi) that forwards you to a lookalike domain? Unfortunately many times public WiFi doesn’t work with Google’s or Cloudflare’s DNS servers (I think the Deutsche Bahn’s WiFi was such a case, if I remember correctly, but I know I came across a few on the last few years while traveling). I don’t think there’s anything protecting against that when you’re using a b…

HSTS solves this to some extent. If you've visited the domain in the past (or the site operator submitted to the HSTS preload list), a different certificate presented would be flagged by your browser.

Not a different certificate, but one signed by an untrusted authority. HSTS won't let you bypass it.

There used to be a Firefox addon that could warn you if the actual certificate changed, but it died with manifest addons.

Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#116

Post by oceanplexian »

fujigawa wrote: post #7

Commercial VPNs will go down as one of the greatest money-making schemes of the last decade. Outside of a few specific use cases their sales often rely on leveraging non-technical users' fear of what they don't fully understand. I have non-technical friends and relatives that have fully bought into this and when I asked why they use a VPN I got non-specific answers like "you need it for security", "to prevent identit…

> I have non-technical friends and relatives that have fully bought into this and when I asked why they use a VPN I got non-specific answers

If you think they sell millions of subscriptions to "prevent identity theft" I have a bridge to sell you.

Your friends and relatives aren't going to tell you that they are using it for p0rn, online dating, to buy taboo things online, etc. That's the main use case for VPN software and that's why people are buying it. Doesn't matter if it works the perception that it works is more than enough.

Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#117

Post by dongcarl »

I'm surprised no one has mentioned iCloud Relay-style Multi-Party Relays yet: https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/11/17/where-are-...

It greatly improves on the existing VPN trust model by separating the "who" (connecting IP, potential payment info, etc.), from the "what" (IP traffic). You no longer have a trust a single entity not being malicious or compromised.

Disclaimer: I run obscura.net, which does exactly this with Mullvad (our partner) as the Exit Hop.

Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#119

Post by heavyset_go »

sodality2 wrote: post #67
jofla_net wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember that, Schneier talked about it on his blog. It was actually tor (the threat came from tor), and harvard 'found' him by constantly logging what connections were going to known tor entries from on campus. As it turns out he was one or possibly the only one using tor that morning from harvard. Bruce outlines it that he certainly could have stayed tight-lipped (all evidence was circumstantial) but, nevertheles…

Network traffic analysis/DPI strikes again. I wonder how many people think that their VPN usage obscures their identity, when the flow of traffic at certain times gives X% probability that this person visited the site based on the timing/size/speed/length of each TCP stream, increasing in confidence every repeated visit. Hell, how often will someone download a file of exactly 7060378032 bytes? It may not be damning e…

It's not even that complicated, the list of Tor entry nodes is public, all they had to do is look in their logs for connections to those IP addresses coming from their network.
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