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Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

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Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#231

Post by 0points »

dang wrote: post #38
0points wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I specifically put the OP in the second-chance pool ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 ), which is why it got re-upped ( https://hnrankings.info/45469376/ ). Rather an odd way to suppress discussion, no?

We do see your comments, you know?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45476243

etc etc etc etc.

As you yourself put it there, you are happy to have moderation abuse pointed out but when I do, you just ban me.

Such a wasted potential and time to move on.

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#232

Post by fragmede »

mdavid626 wrote: post #224
jibcage wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not Tesonet, Proton is wholly self-owned and managed. Proton VPN was briefly sharing employees with Tesonet during initial app bringup, and that partnership is long over. Naturally due to competition and the huge importance of privacy in this space, people still bring this up, but Proton VPN does not and never will sell or share your data with anyone. Source: I am a Proton VPN employee.

What the hell is employee sharing?

It's when your director goes and tells you not to tell anyone but to report to another building to another team for a month or three, and help them with whatever they ask, because you have a very specific set of skills. (In this case, setting up VPN backend infra.)

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#233

Post by konart »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #196
nerdsniper wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a good friend from Lithuania, who has told me so many amazing/wonderful/superlative things about the country he grew up in and loves very dearly, as well as its people. I can't wait to visit someday. Unfortunately, he only has Russian and American citizenship, so he can't purchase real estate there currently, but luckily most of Lithuania's restrictions have been very common-sense (applying only to people who…

I couldn't really get that segue from Lithuania to Estonia. Did you mean to type "Lithuania" in the last paragraph as well? Here.. > Additionally, I've always been very impressed with Estonia's … Before that you were talking about Lithuania exclusively. And then: > … Estonia's digital infrastructure and Ukrainian software engineering - not just JetBrains … I think it was founded in CZ and is now HQed in NL. Right? A…

JetBrains was russian (as in were most people initially actually worked). They were smart enough (like any business in russia not wanting to be trapped) to have registration outside of the country.

Some part of management were in CZ. Most of the technical team were in three buildings in St.Petersburg.

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#234

Post by LMYahooTFY »

jojobas wrote: post #208
Illniyar wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unit 8200 is the premier software development track in the Israeli military. Every Israeli tech company likely has multiple developers from Unit 8200 in it. Whether it's building e-commerce shops or making video games. While 8200 definitely falls under the military intelligence wing, I don't think describing people in it as Cyber Spies is anywhere near accurate. And unless that guy was very high ranking it is a stret…

Makes perfect cover though? "He was only a conscript changing printer cartridges"

Cover to do what? Insert malicious code and hope no one else notices? Or coerce everyone in the company to look the other way?

If an intelligence agency wants to compromise a service, they have much more discreet, powerful, and deniable ways to accomplish this.

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#235

Post by cess11 »

Ms-J wrote: post #167

Can anyone give info on who owns Trust.Zone VPN? The company saves all credentials and doesn't allow the user to generate anything, such as Wireguard private keys. The service is very likely logging everything, and already admits to logging bandwidth, which is severe enough. Wouldn't be surprised if this was a honeypot for logging Russian internet users, as it appears to cater to Eastern users.

They hide who they are. If you look at their privacy policy:

https://trust.zone/privacy

Then you'll notice that it does not tell you what entity they are or where it is incorporated.

Elsewhere they claim to be incorporated as Trusted Solutions Ltd in Mahé in the Seychelles.

https://trust.zone/tr/post/trust.zone-vpn-reviewed-by-the-to...

And this review claims they are an LLC.

https://thebestvpn.com/reviews/trust-zone/

But when I search for this name in the local registry I get no results.

https://www.registry.gov.sc/BizRegistration/WebSearchBusines...

The Seychelles kind of belong to the 'non-aligned' group of countries, and maintains decent relations with Russia, India, China and so on. They also advocate for a diminished US presence in the Indian Ocean. On the other hand, they're a member of the british Commonwealth and only got independence in 1976.

Trust.Zone sure looks fishy but I can't tell from this whether they are surveillance for the UK, traffic to hide in for russian authorities and cyber crime groups or something else entirely. I'd avoid them unless I was already into grey or directly criminal activities and already had layers of protection and indirection in place.

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#236

Post by cess11 »

justapassenger wrote: post #8

Is there any other real world usecases for VPN nowadays other than: 1. Getting access to geolocked data 2. Torrenting "Linux ISOs" ?

I work from home and use a VPN service to get a bunch of IP:s I can easily switch between.

Recently a SaaS supplier blocked my IP because I was logging in programmatically every thirty seconds to collect data on batch processing in a customer project, basically two HTTP requests to get an access key and then the data, and I was lazy so I just put those in a script and dumped the second response to a log file and put that in a scheduler. Turned out that another customer of the SaaS supplier somehow could see the traffic on my customer's SaaS instance and panicked because in their mind it was obviously the russians attacking or something, and when they brought this to the supplier they also panicked.

So to keep doing this I had to move over to checking whether the previous access key was still valid and reuse it if so, as well as moving my 'location' to another country. Apparently this is fine but logging in two times a minute is not. It also happens that I need to do research on network services and cloud environments, where having the ability to just hit a couple of terminal incantations to switch 'where' I am helps out quite a bit sometimes.

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#237

Post by sofixa »

idatum wrote: post #195
codazoda wrote: post #124

If you’re worried about your VPN provider but you can trust your VPS provider, try an SSH Tunnel. https://joeldare.com/ssh-tunnels-my-vpn-alternative-for-priv...

This is the way: SOCKS5 via SSH You do need some minimal technical understanding and some scripting. Pick any cloud provider that can give you a VM with SSH access. Read up on doing this on your local device or another device on your LAN: ssh -NT -g -D 10001 -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o ConnectTimeout=5 -i your_ssh_private_key your_cloud_login@any_cloud_provider_ip Change 10001 to whatever. Now read up on how y…

Has anyone benchmarked this against running e.g. Wireguard and how it is, performance wise? I'd expect Wireguard to be faster, but don't really know.

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#238

Post by miroljub »

wraptile wrote: post #139
nerdsniper wrote: post #91

Note that all of these companies are also under the umbrella of Tesonet, a Lithuanian VC firm also headed by Tomas Okmanas (Tom Okman in TFA). Their flagship investments are Nord Security, Hostinger, Oxylabs, Surfshark, Decodo, Mediatech, and nexos.ai - all closely related business models around proxying. They don't seem to have Russian ties: "In 2022, CyberCare opened an office in Lviv, Ukraine. Although planning fo…

I used to work at Tesonet (as software engineer) and I'm not familiar with corporate politics / ownerships but they're lovely people that would 100% walk out if there were some real Russian ties involved. Lithuania is a really small country and IT has been a huge economic strategy since early 00s as a way to become economically independent specifically because of Russia and it worked out really well.

[flagged]

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#239

Post by Ekaros »

walterbell wrote: post #201
baby_souffle wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interesting that we use the same word to describe both technologies, but semantically and technically they are very different. That's where my head was at. When i hear my colleagues talk about a VPN, i'm thinking about an IPSEC tunnel and an afternoon of swearing at ios on some outdated ASA. When I hear regular people talking about a VPN, my mind immediately goes to "oh, so you want to watch rick and morty on netfl…

How do authoritarian regimes differentiate business and consumer network traffic, for the purpose of inspection and decryption, censorship of specific content, or blocking of specific protocols? This also overlaps with net neutrality and dump pipes vs. content-centric metering.

Company VPN most likely goes to set IP address associated with a business. And this is most likely a rather static thing. So tracking data going there is most likely legitimate. And well on other side they can make whatever comes out from business IP a problem for business.

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#240

Post by bilekas »

miroljub wrote: post #238
wraptile wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at Tesonet (as software engineer) and I'm not familiar with corporate politics / ownerships but they're lovely people that would 100% walk out if there were some real Russian ties involved. Lithuania is a really small country and IT has been a huge economic strategy since early 00s as a way to become economically independent specifically because of Russia and it worked out really well.

[flagged]

> Now please repeat the sentence, but use Jews, Muslims, or PoC instead of Russians.

Why? OP decided to use Russians, as they're free to do so. No need to bring your objections to personal feelings here.

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