Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 175 posts

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#151

Post by babypuncher »

elagost wrote: post #2

It's been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it's a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook. If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. If you want a VPN for any other reason that "normal people" think they want a VPN…

I'm convinced that you can get most of the privacy "benefits" of a VPN with an encrypted DNS, which a pihole can be configured to provide for your whole home network.

Your ISP could still figure out which sites you are visiting by what IP addresses your traffic gets pointed to, but I'd be willing to wager that the bulk of their data collection for the purpose of advertising comes from logging DNS requests, since it is far easier to do and captures 99.99% of their customers habits.

This won't do anything to protect your IP from being sniffed out by media companies when seeding copyrighted torrents, but that has never been a major concern in my house. This is probably also meaningless if you are being targeted for surveillance.

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#152

Post by atok1 »

Well, I would complain too if I worked there!

A modern VPN outside of the workplace is used for anonymity.

I'm not sure what some people are saying when they state a VPN isn't useful for this case. Either they are very misinformed, or working for an entity that undermines human rights for a living, ex. NSA.

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#153

Post by nyuszika7h »

elagost wrote: post #6
Raed667 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you want a VPN to unlock location based content?

Then either do without (because, come on, nobody's gonna die if they can't watch reality TV), buy it on disc, or pirate it? Netflix is blocking IP ranges so hard that residential space is getting caught in the blast radius. It's a cat and mouse game that you'll only win by refusing to play. https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-intensifies-vpn-ban-and-tar...

What do you think the pirates who rip the content use to get it? There's not always going to be a local user to rip every single title.

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#154

Post by julietdg »

badsoftware wrote: post #49
adamdusty wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never in my life met anyone that has an iPhone or a Mac because Apple is processing everything on the device itself. People have iPhone and macs for 2 reasons. iMessage and because Apple is a premium brand that even that richest of richest people use. The money Apple would lose if they started mining your data like Facebook would be indistinguishable from random noise.

I am in the Apple ecosystem primarily for privacy reasons. We exist.

Privacy online or anywhere is an absolute psyops. Everything is logged recorded and stored. Every website visited, every email opened or sent, every text message sent or received. No matter who the company is.

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#155

Post by SahAssar »

drak0n1c wrote: post #106
cowpig wrote: post #19

Making someone with a history of doing exactly the thing that a company purportedly stands against the CTO seems like an absolutely baffling choice... unless the company is doing that thing (enabling surveillance). If I were to use a VPN service, this news would certainly disqualify ExpressVPN from my list of possible options. I imagine that if I were working for a company like that out of belief in the mission that…

In the field of legal representation oftentimes the best defense lawyers that specialize in defending against federal probes and investigations have years of prosecutorial experience leading those government teams. That idea of insider knowledge turned to the client's benefit might be utilized here - but yes it is a bit less comforting in contexts where the legal duty to client does not apply.

If that was the case I would expect it to be disclosed. The reason there is a reaction from customers and employees is that they were not forthright with this info.

Besides that, I think Kape is highly suspect, and the whole VPN space is filled with marketing of false promises and FUD.

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#156

Post by mhitza »

peterangular wrote: post #115
danlugo92 wrote: post #75

Get a VPS, they are actually cheaper than VPNs (if you only need one country location). You will have one single IP and you won't share IP with hundreds of other people thus being flagged. I have never been blocked from a site when using my VPS, including sites that otherwise block VPNs, I think they don't care for whatever reason. Doesn't mean they can't know, they will, but they seem to not care? Some websites migh…

Popular VPS hosts like Digital Ocean, Linode, etc are all going to smack you down if you do anything remotely fishy on their networks. They have to have a pretty good idea of what's happening with their VPS systems, and I've seen them (DO/Linode) smack down everything from specific VPN connections to web scraping. If you're going to use a VPS for anything remotely sketch you probably don't want to go with a reputable…

> specific VPN connections to web scraping

What strange ToS clause would those fall under? Skimmed the DO ToS and found nothing, while they also have a separate page promoting the deployment of your own VPN

https://www.digitalocean.com/solutions/vpn/

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#157

Post by willcipriano »

bcook wrote: post #134
saurik wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, a lot of users really can't trust their ISP: your "ISP" might be coffee shop, or someone renting on AirBNB, or your friend (as you are at their home or office). If you are in any of these circumstances, I would probably first recommend "tether off your phone or something", but if you are finding yourself needing or merely wanting to use someone else's internet connection (maybe for speed or because you don…

>At some point, the people in the apartment next door to me figured out my wi-fi password That seems implausible.

I've used this personally: https://www.whatsmyip.org/lib/fios-wep-key-calculator/

WEP can be broken with: https://www.aircrack-ng.org/

WPS can be defeated with: https://tools.kali.org/wireless-attacks/reaver

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#158

Post by schoen »

dannyw wrote: post #87
elagost wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. Use a proxy, or set up your own Proxy/VPN on a VPS? Then you also have a VPS - you can host your own website there, use it to download stuff and rsync it back to your local machine, deploy nextcloud, etc., all for less than the cost of ExpressVPN. And bonus points, you can use unlimited devices.

90% of the average population doesnt know the first thing about command lines.

Geoblocking, and a practical way around it, could be a great motivation for them to change that!

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#159

Post by can16358p »

elagost wrote: post #2

It's been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it's a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook. If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. If you want a VPN for any other reason that "normal people" think they want a VPN…

The main reason that I use (and many around here) VPNs is to access sites blocked by the government. And these blocked sites even included Wikipedia until recently.

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#160

Post by vjust »

A lot of people in the Cybersecurity industry are solely motivated by money. This is an egregious case. In milder cases, I've seen US SAS Cybersecurity providers being casual about customer protection, only caring if it starts hitting their reputation. Protecting people's privacy is much lower on their list of priorities. Human rights activists , and other vulnerable people of human-rights-abusing - they're not even on the horizon.

He must've made a nice packet of money. Must have taken care of his retirement - the company's even promoting him. Some citizen's family is now at risk, or already imprisoned without a legal process. This must've come as a shock to the Human Rights community. VPN usage is universal there. And this is the tip of the iceberg - surely we know how fine of a dragnet the FBI has. Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, UAE, there's a long list of nations that'd like to snoop on their own people wherever they may be living. Like someone said, Tor is the way to go (tails).

Post reply on HN