VPN Report – Reviews of the top VPNs

Thank you for creating a new and anonymous HN account just to deliver your important message.

Alas, it is confused in many particulars. Normally I wouldn't feel the need to reply to posts such as yours, but today the oppressive heat wave seems to have lifted from Seattle and I happen to have a delicious coffee beverage in hand.

So I'll bite:

> First, written by the creator of a VPN company

Guilty as charged. That I co-founded a VPN company is disclosed quite clearly, both here on HN and on my blog. Let there be no confusion. :-)

> someone obviously biased

It's hard to judge another person's biases from afar. I generally refrain from accusing others of bias when I don't know.

But I definitely understand how you might reach the wrong conclusion here. If it helps, I will reiterate that I am no longer with my old company (I sold it quite some time ago); I no longer have skin in the VPN game.

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Before I dive into your specific points, I want to make a meta-point that seems to have been missed both by you and by other people who responded to my post:

TOPS is, in the right hands, a valuable resource. The person who built TOPS appears to have extremely good intentions and has done an amazing amount of useful work.

The problem isn't TOPS in isolation. The problem is when TOPS gets in the hands of the typical unsavvy potential purchaser of VPN services. It is my belief that the right axes on which to judge VPN services are fundamentally resistant to objective measure. In my experience, unavvy customers armed only with objective information are likely to go astray.

Okay, on to the specifics:

> Questionable/sketchy product marketing & SEO, ethical business practices, etc are all covered in the detailed comparisons Ethics

Let's take a look at the current ethics columns. Today, they break down more-or-less into two buckets.

The first bucket has to do with affiliate marketing and effectively asks three questions of both the VPN provider and its affiliates: is SPAM avoided, is the copy ethical and is disclosure followed properly? Alas, the gradations of unethical behavior run pretty deep in the VPN affiliate world (ask me over beer sometime), and go far beyond copy and disclosure. TOPS is providing useful information here, but capturing the fullness of affiliate behavior would probably require an armada of columns.

The second bucket is for "good faith" behavior and has exactly three columns, including "contradictory logging policies" (do they say 'no logging' but it looks sketchy?), "claims 100% effectiveness" (nobody can!), and "incentivizes social media spam". These are interesting in a shallow sort of way... alas, it's hard to go particularly deep while remaining objective.

Which brings us to the crux of the matter:

> Other items you claim he SHOULD look at go against his methodology and are impossible to independently verify

Yes and, again, this is the point of my post!

I believe that some of the most important attributes of a VPN provider to consider are precisely the ones that cannot be objectively measured. In other words, trust signals are potentially far more important than many of the objective columns on TOPS. Perhaps I argue this unsuccessfully, but there you have it.

At the end of my post, I suggest six trust signals to look for. These are things that, realistically, cannot be captured objectively. These are also things that I recommend to all potential VPN customers. A handful of VPN providers (including the one I co-founded and providers like TunnelBear and VyprVPN) fit the bill.

> The main purpose of jurisdiction is to see which countries are more likely to illegally spy on its citizens and which have a track record of being an "enemy of the internet"

Yup, the US is bad... which has little to do with whether a VPN provider based in the US is fundamentally trustworthy.

There's a bunch of muddled discussion in your paragraph that follows, so I'll just say this: if one of the "bad" countries wants to get at your VPN traffic, do you really think it matters where your VPN provider is located? If the NSA wants your data, they'll probably find a way to get it.

I will provide one specific ding against US-based VPN providers that you didn't mention: they're subject to National Security Letters. NSLs typically come with a gag order, so providers must both comply and cannot say they have done so. That's quite bad; there's a lot of political momentum in the US right now to change this.

> The detailed comparison actually shows whether the service officially tunnels or actively blocks IPv6

This column on TOPS is a bit confusing and in my opinion needs to be fixed, since it's effectively using a binary to handle tripartite state. The three possible states seem to be: IPv6 is blocked, IPv6 is supported, and IPv6 isn't blocked and actually leaks. I suppose the right thing to do is to have two separate columns.

I elided this detail in my post, I think reasonably so. But it's a good point to make for people looking at TOPS.

> runs its own first party DNS server

Which the service I co-founded does, despite TOPS's claim to the contrary. A minor data inaccuracy; given the complexity of maintaining TOPS, I don't count this against them. I say as much in my blog post.

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> I'm wondering if the point of the article was a lead up to the end in an attempt to turn people away from TOPS so your joke of a service

Y'know, it really annoys me when thirsty randos show up on the Internet to cast aspersions. But I'll resist the temptation to go further and just have another nice sip of coffee instead. :-)

https://itday.com/vpn/best-vpn-services/