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

Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

opentech.fund

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 203 posts

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

#161

Post by akimbostrawman »

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…

>It's deeply silly

Why? In almost all countries ISPs are at the very least legally required to block websites and even surveil there customers. I trust mullvad about 100 times more than any ISP beholden to governments and profit incentive.

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

#162

Post by akimbostrawman »

jorvi wrote: post #142
atkailash wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Mullvad is rather principled on privacy. You can't even make a real account, you can only generate an account number that you can charge, and I assume they do some sort of clever tricks to keep themselves as blind as possible to who uses the account number. Firefox Relay is also just whitelabeled Mullvad, so they have Mozilla's stamp of approval. Of the big VPNs, the only one's that have ever felt shady to me are Nor…

They also allow cash and monero payments over a onion site.

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

#163

Post by akimbostrawman »

tetris11 wrote: post #132
kfreds wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Mu…

I really like the "to plant trees in the shade of which we will never sit" statement. My pessimism only comes from watching trusted giants like Google and Cloudflare turn into critical infrastructure that in turn dictates the web. May you continue to be the beacon of trustworthiness and hope that we all need right now

>trusted giants like Google and Cloudflare

How where they ever even in anyway trusted??? They are literally peoples search results for sale and MITM as a service.

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

#164

Post by crossroadsguy »

ThrowMeAway1618 wrote: post #147
jorvi wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mullvad is rather principled on privacy. You can't even make a real account, you can only generate an account number that you can charge, and I assume they do some sort of clever tricks to keep themselves as blind as possible to who uses the account number. Firefox Relay is also just whitelabeled Mullvad, so they have Mozilla's stamp of approval. Of the big VPNs, the only one's that have ever felt shady to me are Nor…

>Mullvad is rather principled on privacy. You can't even make a real account, you can only generate an account number that you can charge, and I assume they do some sort of clever tricks to keep themselves as blind as possible to who uses the account number. Firefox Relay is also just whitelabeled Mullvad, so they have Mozilla's stamp of approval. Yep. And I use the VPN connection (and/or TOR) to re-up my Mullvad VPN…

> my privacy when posting with a throwaway account here

What's the data/IP/etc retention logging situation of HN? Do they have a page on it?

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

#165

Post by akimbostrawman »

thisislife2 wrote: post #80
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 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).

>more mindful of what I want to talk about

I would call that self censorship. If I want to insult a politician I will do so from a network location that won't get me put in legal trouble.

>I can think like this because I have the privilege of living a democracy

This has less to do with the political system than free speech which is nonexistent or limited even in most western countries that are democracies

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

#166

Post by crossroadsguy »

thisislife2 wrote: post #70
ThatMedicIsASpy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Avoid my ISPs piss poor routing and peering - especially during peak times.

My ISP is smarter - they just block all the torrent and streaming site I visit, and try to push me to upgrade to a plan with many streaming platforms bundled in it. Sucks for them, because I already subscribe to a few of them but still prefer torrent-ing to download videos to watch them offline whenever I want, without unnecessary time limits, in the video / audio quality I want, in the medium I want (TV, computer, m…

I used to do private P2Ping actively. Now I don't. Not enough time - for that, not motivated enough - for that. So I was planning to let go of that VPS of mine where my Seedbox resides. But I am not sure anymore. I do feel I may let it up and running just like many others who did it when I couldn't afford a Seedbox.

Then on the other hand I feel that the real need are from people who come to find those Linux ISOs from public P2Ps and for that I think I will be booted off my VPS in a day or two. So eventually I think this will be better - dust off that old r-pi (or maybe get a new one), get a cheap HDD, get a VPN and let it stay at home and keep seeding.

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

#167

Post by pydry »

chollida1 wrote: post #103
pydry wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of the two im more suspicious that NordVPN is a CIA honeypot in the style of Crypto AG.

Based on what? They seem to be one of the reputable players in the industry.

Sheer level of advertising and marketing.

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

#168

Post by crossroadsguy »

IlikeKitties wrote: post #90
sodality2 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'm looking forward to when VPNs always throw up chaff traffic. Mullvads DAITA (Defense Against AI-guided Traffic Analysis) is going into that direction[0] and Mullvad is one of the better providers. Tor also has some protections against this afaik and the upcoming nym vpn is also doing some traffic obfuscation [1]. But as the saying goes: Correlation Attacks are a bitch. [0] https://mullvad.net/de/vpn/daita [1] ht…

> https://nym.com/

The first line on the landing page says:

"The world’s most private VPN 80% off today!"

Very intresting.

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

#169

Post by kfreds »

roywashere wrote: post #157
kfreds wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure! Regarding tracking concerns, masking your IP address is a necessary but insufficient first step to improving your privacy online. ISPs typically don't allow their users to do that per-device in a UX-friendly way. Protecting against browser fingerprinting is something that Mullvad Browser does quite well, thanks to it being a fork of Tor Browser. As for circumventing geo restrictions, you're absolutely right. We…

I’m surely happy to not live in the UK at the moment. And Indonesia of course. If I would live in one of these countries I’d be using VPN. And maybe in the (not so distant) future this is preferable in the US too. > We're trying to build public opinion against that. Good on you! But to be honest; it seems that it would be in Mullvads interest if the US starts requiring “open encryption” for internet services! Then mo…

Actually, no. Our goal is to make mass surveillance and censorship ineffective, not maximizing profit to our shareholders. If there was a big red button we could push that accomplishes our goal and makes Mullvad obsolete in the process, we'd push it. There's an abundance of problems to solve in the world. It'd be nice if we could figure out how to get rid of some and move on to other problems.

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

#170

Post by commandersaki »

mft_ wrote: post #114
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.)

This is the reality of VPNs, they’re going to end up with a short shelf life because major sites block them. Australians think that VPN will save them with the upcoming age restriction and verification for social media sites in coming months, and I’m quite sure that most VPN providers will be ineffective.
Post reply on HN