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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)

#251

Post by immibis »

praveen9920 wrote: post #216
idatum wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Major issue I faced in this method is the network egress costs the cloud providers charge. I had to remind myself not to accidentally land on YouTube or some other video streaming sites. Are there any cloud providers who don’t charge for network egress?

Yes, but search for "VPS" instead of "Cloud". "Cloud" is a marketing buzzword used to make people pay 10x-500x more than they have to. Although VPS providers are catching on, and starting to label their VPS services as "cloud" now.

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

#252

Post by immibis »

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #245
sciencejerk wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too recently tried to set up OpenVPN on a VPS and it was a huge pain in the @ss, even while following a (very long) tutorial. If I figure out an easier way to do this I'll message you in this thread

OpenVPN is just really complicated, which makes sense because of the context and history. But even me who've done plenty of OpenVPN setups through the years, found Wireguard a lot simpler and easier to both learn and use effectively. So if you haven't tried Wireguard, give it a go, the simplicity is pretty nice.

Note: Wireguard is good because it's simple. It makes point-to-point tunnels, it does that well, and that's all it does. You're on your own for the rest.

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

#253

Post by immibis »

octo888 wrote: post #19

Are we allowed to discuss (edit: if it's not too political?) if Kape Technologies has any connections to Israeli security services, given the nature of VPNs and given the amount of data that can be trivially collected, and: "Being from Israel, Teddy Sagi had connections with the Israeli military intelligence sphere and was able to procure himself a real-life cyber spy [his co-founder] from the famed Unit 8200 (kinda…

[flagged]

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

#254

Post by MezzoDelCammin »

causality0 wrote: post #184
getcrunk wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Btw I used to love pia, I think I’ll check your new one out!

Used to love? What changed? PIA hasn't always had the best performance but they are on the list of VPNs who were subpoenaed and had no data to give the court.

my $.02 : I tried them, but found their "we support Wireguard" a bit misleading. They only did so via their app. No way to get a stable configuration for a router (other than run a python script to get one from the app, without any guarantee how long is that config valid for).

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

#255

Post by immibis »

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?

The post is not about Israel but the comment is about Israel. Comments and posts about Israel are typically flagged to death very quickly.

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

#256

Post by crossroadsguy »

konart wrote: post #233
crossroadsguy wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow. Didn’t know. As an Android developer I find it specially interesting. Not for any nefarious reasons, for I so far believe that JetBrains is one of those companies that has been a net positive on tech ecosystem in general (touchwood!) — be their dev tools or the Kotlin itself. I also follow these people and tools, partly out of professional needs/curiosities.

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

#257

Post by MezzoDelCammin »

octo888 wrote: post #10
bilegeek wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OOC what's your current favored provider? AirVPN? Proton?

I tried Airvpn but the MacOS client is beyond trash. And the website just gives 2005 amateur PHP coder vibes. Not just the design. The session expiry is seems very long - I hadn't visited for a few days and I'm still logged in. I'd be surprised if it wasn't infinite.

AirVPNs main proposition isn't "we have a nice app / UX". It's "we give you the most configs / options". AFAIK they're currently one of very few that allow you to configure both port forwards and give you a stable config (keys) to run your own wireguard instance

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

#258

Post by vaylian »

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...

VPS tunnels have their place, but they have one major downside: Your outward-facing IP address will (most likely) be static. And because you are the only one using that VPS, it is easy to link your internet activity across different sites. If you want to use this method to protect your privacy, then you need to frequently discard your VPS and pick a new one.

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

#259

Post by wongarsu »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #198

At this point, the VPN industry is so rife with shady dealings, suspicious ownership structures, weird exits, questionable marketing/PR practices/pushes, and rumours that waters have been muddied sufficiently for every provider out there. It might have been by design as well. Who knows. I now believe that you know your use case and use VPN only for that, and decide whether you really need to pay with parts of your ki…

A VPN is always a risk. Still, there is a difference between using Mulvad or PrivateInternetAccess. The difference between risking that the service might do bad things with your data, and having high certainty that it does. And this article gives pretty good indications which category each service belongs to
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