161–170 of 276 posts
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I was under the impression that VPN services were very profitable on their own, without selling data. Is this really a price thing, or is it a shady greed thing?
$3 a month per person is not a business model...
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I hear there's a dirty secret that more and more companies are doing this to make things like Netflix that block VPNs "just work" though their services. Not sure how true this is or how widespread, though.
I ran into a situation where I left a VPN on my phone on and the Target app (US store Target) would pop up an alert "true". I assume someone was detecting if you were using a VPN and testing and it somehow made it into production. I emailed them and never heard back. Granted ... I get why a retailer with financial activity going on might want to know if a VPN was used to possibly apply extra scrutiny to the purchase.
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Perfect Privacy. VPN chaining, setting so your IP address always changes to be the one closest to the server, no logs (audited), stored in ramdisk, unlimited connections and bandwidth because they don't even know who's connecting. Cons: it can be slow and have issues with disconnects sometimes.
Perfect privacy was at least in the past run by austrian neonazis: https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2012-09/neona...
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This has been brought up before, Netflix does not work with a VPN on. It knows you’re using a VPN and blocks you (asks you to disable it.) Yes this is true even with NordVPN, which I bought specifically to be able to watch Netflix on when expressVPN didn’t work.
If Netflix can see that your traffic is coming out of an AWS datacenter, then yeah they'll block it. If Nord VPN is really bouncing your traffic out of some other residential customer's connection, that would be a lot harder to detect. And a lot more ethically questionable if the other user doesn't realize they're doing it.
I dunno if SSL encrypts the entire HTTP payload or not but could you even figure out the URL’s being requested using a tool like wireshark?
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Is offering a service somehow a problem? Especially the most prominent method of VPN connections for a long time? Most routers and other clients that aren’t updated very frequently still only support OVPN. They also offer WG connections if OVPN bothers you so much.
I'm not bothered by OVPN, on the contrary!
NordVPN are far too aggressive about youtube marketing to not be sketchy imo. Open source client doesn't really help because whatever sketchy shit they're up to is probably mostly on the server side anyway. I wonder what their total youtube sponsor spot expenditure has been. It must be a ridiculous amount of money.
LTT had a segment about VPN on their WAN show. They ran the numbers and figured out that you can basically print money by running a VPN service without doing anything sketchy. They even had the software up and running. However they decided to pull the plug for ethical reasons because they would basically have to protect their customers doing criminal things. Piracy they reckoned was a gray area but there's a lot of w…
NordVPN are far too aggressive about youtube marketing to not be sketchy imo. Open source client doesn't really help because whatever sketchy shit they're up to is probably mostly on the server side anyway. I wonder what their total youtube sponsor spot expenditure has been. It must be a ridiculous amount of money.
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I hear there's a dirty secret that more and more companies are doing this to make things like Netflix that block VPNs "just work" though their services. Not sure how true this is or how widespread, though.
This has been brought up before, Netflix does not work with a VPN on. It knows you’re using a VPN and blocks you (asks you to disable it.) Yes this is true even with NordVPN, which I bought specifically to be able to watch Netflix on when expressVPN didn’t work.
Reminder that it looks like NordVPN does shady stuff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29285988 Allegedly, they are using their customers as botnets to resell traffic from residential IPs, mostly for scraping, through their other business "Oxylabs".
They, and ALL VPN PROVIDERS, sell your DNS data, as well. That's the real business model.
NordVPN are far too aggressive about youtube marketing to not be sketchy imo. Open source client doesn't really help because whatever sketchy shit they're up to is probably mostly on the server side anyway. I wonder what their total youtube sponsor spot expenditure has been. It must be a ridiculous amount of money.
I don't think its sketchy, it's just that the VPN business has extremely large revenues compared to costs of the service, which means A LOT of money remains for marketing. They can spend exorbitant amounts on youtube ads and affiliate review sites. It's a bit of a unique market in this way, people are willing to pay $5-$10 per month for something that costs $1.