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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

#121

Post by cyanydeez »

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…

ok, but lets be honest: would they really tell you they're using it to make sure the government doesn't know they're a furry?

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

#122

Post by heavyset_go »

TGower wrote: post #46
zoeysmithe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my feeling too. I also don't think these people realize how none of these groups can refuse a subpoena so the scenario of "the government coming after me," doesn't get addressed either. Worse, some of these are tied to foreign nation state intelligence, who are now analyzing your data when before they couldn't because they didnt have a relationship with your ISP. Domestically, I wouldnt be surprised if all of…

Many major VPN providers claim to keep no logs, and some have had third party audits supporting that claim. Subpeonas don't do anything if the company doesn't keep logs.

Third party auditors aren't going to be allowed into Room 641A.

Courts can order providers to keep logs on certain users. Wiretapping laws also allow for it. And all of that goes out the window if the government decides there's a threat to national security.

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

#123

Post by kfreds »

davepeck wrote: post #17
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…

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…

The way I see it there's four use cases:

- protecting your privacy from your local ISP, WiFi, school, government etc

- protecting your privacy from some forms of online tracking

- circumventing censorship

- circumventing geographical restrictions

If you combine masking of your IP address with a web browser that protects you from various types of browser-based fingerprinting, you are more in control of your privacy online. You get to decide, to a greater extent, who you share very personal information with. That doesn't seem very silly.

(disclosure: I'm one of the deeply silly cofounders of Mullvad)

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

#124

Post by Refreeze5224 »

aborsy wrote: post #50

Do people here trust their ISPs more than their VPN providers? That’s the question! On the other hand, as far as privacy from the end point is concerned, users can be identified regardless of IP addresses. Visit fingerprint.com, you will get an identifier, then connect to a privacy VPN and change servers once in a while. The website will identify you, tell you are the same user visited last week from such location, a…

I absolutely trust VPNs like Mullvad and iVPN more than my ISP. It's a major reason I use a VPN.

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

#125

Post by dongcarl »

kfreds wrote: post #123
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…

The way I see it there's four use cases: - protecting your privacy from your local ISP, WiFi, school, government etc - protecting your privacy from some forms of online tracking - circumventing censorship - circumventing geographical restrictions If you combine masking of your IP address with a web browser that protects you from various types of browser-based fingerprinting, you are more in control of your privacy on…

Yup, when you're not using a VPN, even with encrypted DNS and HTTPS, you're still sending hostnames (e.g. wikileaks.org) over plaintext in TLS SNI for every HTTPS connection. I believe most firewall appliances now even prefer to use SNI for deep-packet-inspection since it's so reliable.

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

#126

Post by ranger_danger »

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

what constitutes just the right amount of advertising to make it not shady to you?

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

#127

Post by kelnos »

arewethereyeta wrote: post #72
timpera wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source that shows that popular VPN providers such as Mullvad or NordVPN actually sell your residential internet to third parties? That's a bold claim, but pretty scary if true.

yes, search for NordVPN vs Luminatti (guys behind Holla VPN) scandal: "nordvpn luminati lawsuit patent". Basically Luminatti, now known as bright data, reached out to NordVPN in order to utilise their user's internet as residential proxy nodes. NordVPN thought otherwise and created their own network instead (Oxylabs if I'm not mistaken). They are still in patent wars I believe. I don't know anything bad about Mullvad…

> I don't know anything bad about Mullvad!

Is it even possible for them to do something like this for people who just use the OpenVPN/Wireguard configs and don't install an app?

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

#128

Post by kfreds »

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

We have a few partners who use our infrastructure (e.g. Mozilla), but we're not trying to dominate as a white-label solution. In fact, we've said no to a few well-known brands who wanted to white-label our infrastructure.

As for our long term goals, take a look at our owner's directive: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/ownership-and-future-mullvad-vpn

We want to make online mass surveillance and censorship ineffective. Mullvad is political action through entrepreneurship. We're reinvesting a lot of our profit into open-source software and hardware projects that benefit both Mullvad and the wider community.

I really don't want us to "corner the entire market" because that would make us a single point of failure. I would like to think that our hard work help push the market to keep improving.

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

#129

Post by kfreds »

Refreeze5224 wrote: post #124
aborsy wrote: post #50

Do people here trust their ISPs more than their VPN providers? That’s the question! On the other hand, as far as privacy from the end point is concerned, users can be identified regardless of IP addresses. Visit fingerprint.com, you will get an identifier, then connect to a privacy VPN and change servers once in a while. The website will identify you, tell you are the same user visited last week from such location, a…

I absolutely trust VPNs like Mullvad and iVPN more than my ISP. It's a major reason I use a VPN.

Thank you!

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

#130

Post by chneu »

tashian wrote: post #23

The notion of "zero trust" shouldn't just mean corporations not having to inherently trust users and networks. It should also mean users not having to inherently trust corporations. VPN providers all run the same two or three VPN protocols, all with similar security guarantees and privacy limitations. I've been playing with MASQUE relays over the last year. Apple's iCloud Private Relay is a MASQUE relay (two, actuall…

I have no idea why people, especially in the United States, trust companies so much. I bump elbows with a lot of different crowds(rural, urban, conservative, liberal, etc) so I have a pretty decent sample size and without fail most people trust companies waaaay too much. Then they're shocked when a company lets them down because the company could make more money.

Stop trusting companies. They only care about 3 month profits.

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