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

VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

vpnpro.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 236 posts

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#221

Post by amaccuish »

broth wrote: post #203
ru999gol wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your ISP could still see the servers you connect to and how much data is transferred, they don't need to look in any packets to know you browse YouTube or PornHub, and when, and for how long. But its also about hiding your identity from the sites you visit (dependent on how well your browser protects your privacy).

Your ISP is only going to see the IPs of the VPN nodes, times you connect, and the bandwidth used but not what sites you are browsing.

Their reply was in response to "Why would I need a VPN for browsing if all my traffic is https and I use HTTPS DNS?"

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#222

Post by homero »

novok wrote: post #205
homero wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VPNs are the best data mining solution out there. You're literally giving them all traffic plus using their DNS. TLS helps a lot now but DNS hurts.

And that is different from your ISP how? The distribution is less international?

There's nuances. ISP is whole household, VPN is device. ISP has a business, VPN might be interested in selling data especially the many free ones. You can VPN over ISP but can't hide VPN on VPN.

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#223

Post by novaleaf »

hellofunk wrote: post #188
typenil wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used PIA for a long time, but at some point it seemed like every single site I visited triggered that Cloudflare protection page that forces you to fill out Google Recaptcha before proceeding. Hopefully that's not the case now.

I haven't seen a Cloudflare page in ages and I use them often. I honestly cannot recall the last time when browsing the web I saw a Cloudflare page, with any ISP or VPN.

i also never see cloudflare problems.

however some sites refuse to do business with you if you are on a vpn (craigslist, BoA, etc) probably due to abuse from the same IP

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#224

Post by novaleaf »

hellofunk wrote: post #187
novaleaf wrote: post #167

Private Internet Access (PIA) doesn't seem to be mentioned in the article nor HN posts. I think that must be good then. I've been a happy PIA customer for about 5 years. They probably arn't the fastest (I get aprox 3.5mbit/sec on them) but so far none of the mud slung against them sticks. There's a lot of shady shit in the VPN industry, so glad they are above it.

I get exactly double the bandwidth with them that you do, so I suspect there are other factors.

might be my location. i'm using the seattle and sometimes vancouver nodes. Without PIA I get about 10mbit.

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#225

Post by ASalazarMX »

johnnycab wrote: post #122
emerongi wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone making tens of thousands a month from shilling VPNs. They have site where they "review" and "rate" VPNs. The reality is that the customers of those products barely understand them and are buying into the BS of "stay anonymous" and "be private online". It's an easy market, especially considering you don't even need to develop the VPN software, just run instances on some cloud/VPS provider and do a ton o…

>Just skip to page 10. I thought that was the running joke: Q: Where's the best place to hide a body? A: Page ten of Google. But, joking aside, you can install greasemonkey/tampermonkey and get the googlemonkeyr script to manage your search results to be a bit more effective. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/31607-googlemonkeyr-fix-ju...

Get out, that script is huge. I could install small convenience scripts that I can audit, but this monster is 3K+ lines. Too risky.

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#226

Post by klingonopera »

mirimir wrote: post #97

None of these are seriously privacy-centric VPNs. I was very pleased to not see any of my old favorites (AirVPN, IVPN, Mullvad and PIA). Although it's not easy to find them on their site, I believe that the https://cure53.de/ vulnerability assessments are more interesting. Google "vpn site:cure53.de".

AirVPN user since 2015 here, and happy since.

Glad I chose one of the better ones, their mission list, that they have a status page, that their servers are named after stars and my subjective opinion, that "AirVPN" is actually a bad name (a transparent privacy tunnel?), all pointed me towards believing there are actual nerds behind that one, and in this topic, I consider that very important...

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#227

Post by mirimir »

klingonopera wrote: post #226
mirimir wrote: post #97

None of these are seriously privacy-centric VPNs. I was very pleased to not see any of my old favorites (AirVPN, IVPN, Mullvad and PIA). Although it's not easy to find them on their site, I believe that the https://cure53.de/ vulnerability assessments are more interesting. Google "vpn site:cure53.de".

AirVPN user since 2015 here, and happy since. Glad I chose one of the better ones, their mission list, that they have a status page, that their servers are named after stars and my subjective opinion, that "AirVPN" is actually a bad name (a transparent privacy tunnel?), all pointed me towards believing there are actual nerds behind that one, and in this topic, I consider that very important...

They started as a collective, somewhat like Autistici/Inventati and Riseup, in France. And moved to Italy after the French police took one of their servers.

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#228

Post by krageon »

vbezhenar wrote: post #190
emerongi wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone making tens of thousands a month from shilling VPNs. They have site where they "review" and "rate" VPNs. The reality is that the customers of those products barely understand them and are buying into the BS of "stay anonymous" and "be private online". It's an easy market, especially considering you don't even need to develop the VPN software, just run instances on some cloud/VPS provider and do a ton o…

Is it really easy market? I thought about running a VPN service, but how do I deal with abuses? People would use VPN for all kinds of things including bad ones. And investigators will come at me.

They will come at you, and you will help them or go to prison. That is the be-all end-all of running a VPN. If that bothers you, don't run one.

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#229

Post by krageon »

thehashrocket wrote: post #160
andrepd wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find myself just searching what I want + "reddit", to avoid the seo crap.

Can you trust reddit, though? There's plenty of social media campaigns out there that have people plugging stuff on reddit to promote some company or agenda.

Reddit is very useful for niche results that are normally functionally impossible to find any information on at all. If that is not the case, it's not really the shilling that's the biggest trouble, it is that people on Reddit have just become a cross-slice of regular society now. That means that when they answer questions about anything that even remotely requires domain knowledge, you can be entirely certain that they will be wrong in ways that you do not expect.

Re: VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies

#230

Post by Traster »

mushufasa wrote: post #140
Traster wrote: post #91

People should take this list with a serious health warning. Firstly, a lot of this is just 'internet sleuth'ing and innuendo. Plenty of companies want to operate multiple services to be able to use different marketing and differentiation strategies. Secondly, the fact that the site is funded by affiliate links to a coupole of the big VPN services should really ring alarm bells. I trust we all learned from the Mattres…

The article you cited, to support your claim that NordVPN is owned by a data harvesting company, says the opposite. It says that Tesornet only provided general business consulting to Nord, and that Nord users have nothing to worry about. It seems there are a lot of back and forth allegations about this topic on the internet. I don't know the truth. That article doesn't really demonstrate anything, though, and your to…

Yeah, the article I cited concedes all the facts, but tries to play it off. I thought it would be funny to cite that website specifically because it's another website sponsored by NordVPN and is literally doing exactly what I claim - playing down the exact behaviour that the original article is playing up about their competitors.

All I'm saying is that if you're predisposed to buy into the concerns this website is pushing about NordVPN's competitors, then you should absolutely have the exact same worries about NordVPN themselves.

Post reply on HN