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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

#171

Post by commandersaki »

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’d probably use a VPN if I need to do something sketchy or egregiously illegal, but self hosted and behind 7 proxies. Or I could just use TOR and exercise a bit of OPSEC.

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

#172

Post by reorder9695 »

stackskipton wrote: post #109
TGower wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also wouldn’t trust VPN provider standing up to the pressure of really angry Western government. If Mullivad gets US FISA warrant followed by threat to destroy their ability gain access to US payments, they are going to flip logging for you on so fast.

I'm not necessarily sure they would, they've built their company based on no logs and privacy and seem fairly ideological, if this occurred their business would likely be permanently crippled. Most of their users use them because of their strong guarantees.

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

#173

Post by immibis »

thisislife2 wrote: post #111
immibis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you lived in a place like Germany or the UK, you could get arrested for posting online that you don't like what Israel is doing in Gaza or that you think Elon Musk is a Nazi (among other things you could get arrested for saying). In this case, routing your traffic through an unknown intermediary makes sense. You said you have to be mindful of what you say and how you say it, in order to comply with the law. In oth…

I do say many critical things about my political leaders and government policies, online. But, like I said, I am more mindful of what I say and how I say it (e.g. I often quote such things from a news source / media). (People in Germany and UK can do so too - just understand the law and quote DW, BBC, DailyMail etc., all of whom have mentioned something about the Gaza genocide or Elon Musk's Nazi like behaviour, at s…

I have faith the courts will interpret the law as written, because that's what they almost always have done so far, and the way they've previously interpreted it. And the law as written says don't be antisemitic. And the law as previously interpreted is that saying anything bad about Israel is antisemitism.

Quoting antisemitic publications for the purpose of agreeing with them is also antisemitism, not sure why you'd think it wouldn't be.

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

#174

Post by robertlagrant »

dmurray wrote: post #159
kfreds wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. That is indeed a distinct fifth reason. Here's a sixth one: for some users it can improve latency, bandwidth and/or even cost. latency/bandwidth: because of weird peering agreements between ISPs / ASes. cost: there are networks where consumers pay per MB for international traffic, but not local traffic. Consumers can sometimes establish a VPN tunnel to the local data center and get an unmetered internatio…

How about a seventh: in solidarity with people who are facing censorship or oppression. Like, if only dissidents and malcontents use a VPN (or TOR or HTTPS or E2E encrypted messaging apps) then if you want to reduce dissent, you can just round up all the VPN users and have them shot. If everyone uses VPNs for normal internet use, that becomes impractical.

If you're willing to shoot people, you can just make VPNs illegal and wait 30 days.

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

#176

Post by _zoltan_ »

John23832 wrote: post #138
_zoltan_ wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wireguard doesn't give you exit nodes, it's just the encrypted L3 stack. Whomever is responsible for your exit nodes actually gives you this functionality. If it's tailscale itself then they use mullvad nodes as exit nodes which I welcome very much.

> Wireguard doesn't give you exit nodes, it's just the encrypted L3 stack. That's why I said tailscale lol. But I understand, I guess I said it in a confusing manner. > If it's tailscale itself then they use mullvad nodes as exit nodes which I welcome very much. You can also set on of your devices as an exit node for your Tailscale network. Kind of cool.

I do this but this means two things: * I am tied to paying the exit node so my identity is known to the provider * I am responsible for the upkeep of said node

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

#177

Post by 1970-01-01 »

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…

Additionally, all these VPNs do it with very pretty graphics. If the OSes went overboard with their Wi-Fi and Ethernet connection graphics, embellishing the connection security[1], VPN services would evaporate.

[1]

UNIVERSAL-->SECURE CONNECTION

https://youtube.com/v/zXyG_HncULU

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

#178

Post by Y_Y »

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…

> I'm one of the deeply silly cofounders of Mullvad

Cool.

Also funny, but it would be nice if you addressed the specific objection. Here are some of the new ads: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/advertising-that-targets-everyon... . Do you think they appeal more to consumers who are seeking "it keeps me vaguely secure", or it helps me watch Venezuelan Netflix and avoid some kinds of targeted advertising personalisation?

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

#179

Post by wink »

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…

You forgot 'connectivity from my home ISP to my favorite online game is temporarily degraded' but yeah ;)

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

#180

Post by mikewarot »

I've always assumed that commercial VPN service providers were intelligence agency fronts. One only has to look back on the CIA's Swiss front company[1] selling encryption equipment for decades[2] to our supposed allies to become sufficiently cynical.

I assume similar Wikipedia entries will appear in the future about some, if not most of today's VPN providers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rubicon

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