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Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

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Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#161

Post by mmooss »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #118
VladVladikoff wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that is the crux of the issue. However many times when I reported bad actors to Mullvad the attacks were multi day attacks that were ongoing. It would have been trivial for Mullvad to add a filter to check for future packets from that VPN ip to my server IP and flag the associated account. However I believe even this approach is far to manual and invasive. I think there would be a better way using AI to analyze a…

> It would have been trivial for Mullvad to add a filter to check for future packets from that VPN ip to my server IP and flag the associated account. In other words, to break the fundamental premise of their product and identify traffic to a user. > I think there would be a better way using AI to analyze abuse patterns, and automatically flag bad users which match these patterns. Not without, again, creating an enti…

They don't have to tie it back to an individual, only to an account or, if they respond quickly enough, to a set of activities or traffic pattern.

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#162

Post by Technetium »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #92
ziddoap wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the abuse is serious enough, pursue legal avenues. Otherwise, these types of companies shouldn't be unmasking users based on a random persons assertion that someone is bad. That would be an abuse vector itself.

I am not asking them to. I am asking them to do a better job of bad actor detection and banning. Their current stance seems to be “ignore all packets, log nothing”. In my opinion they should be doing some amount of AI based abuse detection. This should be possible without violating user privacy.

AI is not the answer for most things, but it's especially not the answer for this. Basic packet filtering is all there should ever be.

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#163

Post by k1tanaka »

dongcarl wrote: post #75
v3xro wrote: post #52

Just to note here - with Mullvad you can pay via gift card that you can find at various retailers (to get a one-time code that you can use to create an account). Of course they can see your IP address but there is no payment/contact information on the system.

(Carl from Obscura here) Totally! Mullvad is _the_ pioneer in this space, and we look up to them. This is why they were our top pick for being an exit hop provider!

As a long term user of Mullvad, I appreciate when new companies try to innovate on existing ones while acknowledging their value. While I have no interest in changing VPNs right now, I will keep an eye on Obscura. Hope you the best

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#164

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

hirvi74 wrote: post #160
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snowden was right after all.

Probably, but no telling. Do you remember the "Heartbleed" exploit in SSL many years ago? There were allegations that the NSA knew about and used that exploit for many years before the public ever knew about. However, that is not exactly an easy statement to confirm nor deny. Edit: I also wanted to add something I remember from a talk I saw with a person who once worked for the NSA. He was intentionally only talking…

You want to live in a cabin in the woods , I kind of am.

While I was writing this message , I was roaming out side in the street , my street isn't developed, so there is a lot of empty space 2 sides of my house.

I saw a peacock flying & sitting in front of my house. It was so majestic. It's wings when they fly , the sound they produce is such majestic that it touches your mind.

The solution isn't a cabin in the woods , the solution is living in such remote area like I live , seriously I am not that far away from the main town , but still this place is so nice I just realized but development would come , and houses would get built. Then there would be no more peacocks flying in.

I really get what you are feeling. But I believe that getting away from dystopian technology is far more easier by degoogling with grapheneos or getting a dumb phone like me & linux with sandboxing each applications ,I do think that we can get far away , like they would need to find a bug in such things like qemu , pledge , flatpak etc. though I think they might already have found a bug in some version and like you said, are waiting.

The only solution I can find is to read the source code of these sandboxing applications on linux and to never update it / it should be such that doesn't require updates , a completely minimal sandboxing solution.

How can we imagine they use their powers for good , when the president has handed things over to oligarchy who want maximum profits. What benefit do they get from using their power for good ? None. I am sure that they are using the power of both good and evil.

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#165

Post by therein »

alok-g wrote: post #129

Newbie question: It seems like even with VPN, various websites know the time zone the traffic is coming from (perhaps the browser or the OS reveals the time zone settings). Is there a way to mask this?

There are extensions and "undetect browsers" which are just wrappers around launching browsers with extensions, user profiles and sets of arguments so that those things are controlled.

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#166

Post by mvieira38 »

woofcat wrote: post #154
mvieira38 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple of options for acquiring crypto without KYC. One might sell goods and services for crypto (I have done it myself, sold a videogame console P2P through a local libertarian group chat), or buy crypto with cash via P2P or in a country with looser KYC laws, and lastly they could just mine it themselves. Having significant money through mining might seem improbable, but we can't forget the market dynami…

That whole comment is "With a way harder method than going to the ATM". I understand that it's possible to get crypto through obscure methods. However if you're selling a privacy focused solution, ideally you shouldn't have to spend 3-4 weeks to acquire the funds to purchase it.

I agree cash is currently king, but we need a crypto (or even better, Monero) economy if we are going to maintain financial privacy in the long run. In the event of a full transition to a Central Bank Digital Currency, like the EU is discussing and Brazil has already announced, cash will not be private anymore, as any physical bills will be just tokens for the underlying digital currency, which is tracked by the government.

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#167

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

rafram wrote: post #62
kkfx wrote: post #46

The sole meaningful VPN is the one you host yourself to connect personal stuff around the world in a sole network. For privacy I2P etc performances are not enough for normal use, the rest is mere noise. That's IMVHO the substance, not counting the fact that even a secure channel is meaningless if you run proprietary crapware at their end.

You ever tried browsing the web on a data center IP? It doesn’t work very well.

My self hosted hetzner vpn can't view youtube, read reddit and is blocked by 25% of all web sites. Another 25% require me to solve ten-step captchas in order to view their content. No such problems exist with mullvad, but there are other problems with it.

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#168

Post by sdht0 »

ignoramous wrote: post #124
ijustlovemath wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if privacy matters to you, you have the option of buying credit anonymously and applying it to an anonymized account number. And if your threat model includes nation states, you're definitely not buying anything with a credit card. I also think if you're after payment details, there's more lucrative targets, eg Stripe.

OK. I was just wondering about your "zero trust" (aka "no database of user info etc") comment in the face of those and other Swedish laws that apply to Mullvad, is all. What you're now telling me is only if I, as a user, don't give Mullvad my info, they wouldn't have to store that. I mean, that's one way or one way of looking at it, alright.

Another way of looking at it is that Mullvad has gives their users the ability to do that, as compared to so many other "top" VPNs.

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#169

Post by akimbostrawman »

thrwaway1985882 wrote: post #142
akimbostrawman wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The navy backdoor claims are unsubstantiated FUD unless you can point them out in the freely available and accessible code. Not to mention that they created the tool to also use themselves. They also haven't had any influence or control in the development of todays tor project that has existed for over 20 years and despite a massive amount of attacks and research there has never been found anything. That does not mea…

> That does not mean there aren't serious drawbacks that are more worth pointing out such as why bother with a very complex and noisy backdoor when you can just covertly create enough nodes to do traffic correlation. Winner winner chicken dinner. FVEY's annual budget is $1.7bn + $1bn + $122mm (NZ :3) + $4.6bn + $classified billion. You think those guys can't mount a Sybil attack against https://metrics.torproject.org…

to be fair tor project is monitoring new nodes so it would need to be done slowly over time. still its the biggest threat to the network hence everybody should consider running no/low risk guard and middle nodes.

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#170

Post by staticelf »

switch007 wrote: post #149
staticelf wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter if you use Windows / Mac because it will ping their services before you jump on the VPN and it will know the before IP and the IP after. :)

Well, the 'after IP' is an IP shared with tends or hundreds of thousands of other people. But yes the use case for a VPN is pretty narrow. E.g. not wanting your ISP to mess with your traffic and decreasing chances of detection of torrenting

Well your computer usually gives away more clues than just the ip so it's pretty easy to fingerprint you online.
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