201–210 of 381 posts
It's not just PIA. Nord VPN, ProtonVPN, etc all have ties to or owned by shady companies. It you want real anonymity, use tor. If you want to change your internet access location, lease a VPS, and set up OpenVPN/Wireguard on it.
This article and articles like this miscast Kape in an incorrect light. To be clear, in the past the company was known as CrossRider and provided a developer SDK that could be used to integrate with browsers. Unfortunately, CrossRider didn't do enough to prevent malware (like platforms these days and their fake news) and the platform was used by some bad people for bad purposes. When the new management team of CrossR…
>The merger between Kape and PIA affords PIA the resources needed to bring privacy to the mainstream. You were one of the most, if not the most successful VPN provider for years. Did you really need more resources? For what? The main benefit of PIA is the expectation for extra privacy. No matter how you look at it, selling to Kape is a strong signal that's not a priority. Similar, for hiring Karpeles to do your secur…
Wait... What?!! I just had to look this up[0]. How did I miss this news?
Now... I'm all for second chances in general, but there need to be limits, and my understanding of the MtGox case, is that on top of being responsible for terrible security practices, Karpales lied about the intrusions.
I was actually kinda on the fence before, even when my previously reliable connection stopped working yesterday (probably a coincidence) this makes me not really trust PIA's decision making, which is a real shame. I found the service very solid.
[0] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2018/04/why-i-hir...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for taking time to explain your position. I can appreciate the need for resources and why you think this deal is the right thing to do for your company. I've trusted you company enough to use it for years and buy a multi-year subscription. Unfortunately, given the track record of Kape, I can't trust the bundle of Kape+PIA the way I trusted PIA alone. Maybe in the following years this trust will be accumulat…
If you think a platform is responsible for what their developers do with it, then I understand. However, Kape was never directly involved in adware other than providing SDKs that let developers create positive and negative things. To say Kape was involved in adware would be akin to saying the Wright Bros killed millions of people - because they made planes which people used to kill people (which is simply untrue). Ev…
I have in my email a post from longtime senior employee Yonatan Pesses to a LinkedIn group (then named "Downloadable Software Distribution & Monetization") for people working in the pay-per-install space. It is dated Dec 5, 2014, and it reads:
"Crossrider is offering an amazing monetization solution for your MAC traffic! Very easy implementation, with high user value!
Yonatan Pesses Crossrider"
I'd say that is pretty clearly more than just an SDK.
I also gather Pesses has recently left Kape: http://archive.is/QYtxD
For anyone displaced from their VPN by this... Not mine, but another HN user made a tool to automatically create a VPN instance on your choice of cloud provider. https://github.com/trailofbits/algo
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think a platform is responsible for what their developers do with it, then I understand. However, Kape was never directly involved in adware other than providing SDKs that let developers create positive and negative things. To say Kape was involved in adware would be akin to saying the Wright Bros killed millions of people - because they made planes which people used to kill people (which is simply untrue). Ev…
I didn't do any development on CrossRider so my understanding is pretty limited here, but it looks like it was just an SDK to build cross-browser extensions which a bunch of developers used to place ads, and then CrossRider caught all the blame for it. To me this sounds like if people used Ionic or React Native to make spammy crappy apps and then people blamed those frameworks respectively. It wouldn't make any sense…
Also when I google CrossRider I find tons of mentions on malware tracking sites, including Microsoft's, but nothing else really. On the other hand if I would google React I do not think the majority of the results would be from anti-virus and anti-malware.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The merger between Kape and PIA affords PIA the resources needed to bring privacy to the mainstream. You were one of the most, if not the most successful VPN provider for years. Did you really need more resources? For what? The main benefit of PIA is the expectation for extra privacy. No matter how you look at it, selling to Kape is a strong signal that's not a priority. Similar, for hiring Karpeles to do your secur…
> Similar, for hiring Karpeles to do your security (like he hasnt lost us enough already). Wait... What?!! I just had to look this up[0]. How did I miss this news? Now... I'm all for second chances in general, but there need to be limits, and my understanding of the MtGox case, is that on top of being responsible for terrible security practices, Karpales lied about the intrusions. I was actually kinda on the fence be…
This article and articles like this miscast Kape in an incorrect light. To be clear, in the past the company was known as CrossRider and provided a developer SDK that could be used to integrate with browsers. Unfortunately, CrossRider didn't do enough to prevent malware (like platforms these days and their fake news) and the platform was used by some bad people for bad purposes. When the new management team of CrossR…
As a VPN provider, your reputation and the trust of your customers is vital; in the spirit of transparency I would like to know:
- Change in customer churn since announcement - Change in new customer signup
I really hope you and your team forecasted potential backlash as part of the merger with Kape and have a plan of action to recover.
Just a general question about VPN services in general. When they advertise that they have hundreds of servers in a dozen or so countries, is it even possible to think that they are able to secure all of that themselves? Surely some State actor with enough know-how is going to be able to hack into some of the servers, right?
> When they advertise that they have hundreds of servers in a dozen or so countries... ... they're often lying. In particular, servers in exotic locations are almost always the result of "creative" routing, and are physically located in a more standard country. https://restoreprivacy.com/vpn-server-locations/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you need to trust the VPS provider. But many people already trust Amazon with their credit card number, their home address, which books they read when, and which passages they highlight in them, to say nothing of all the other websites they use that Amazon hosts; trusting Amazon instead of Comcast is probably purely an improvement for them. Tor is not operated by the US government; it's founded by them and partl…
The VPN that I connect directly to, I pay with a credit card. They know who I am, so why bother trying to hide. All other VPNs in my chains, I pay with Bitcoin that's been mixed multiple times. I have a bunch of Whonix instances that I use for mixing and storing Bitcoin. They all hit Tor through nested VPN chains. Each one has an Electrum wallet. It gets its Bitcoin from another Whonix instance through a mixing servi…