Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know an awful lot of detail about the inner workings of two separate private companies though.
LOL, now I'm part of the conspiracy. This is all public knowledge.
Then you could provide sources, please?
Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
291–300 of 456 posts
Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#292Note 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…
Don't forget ProtonVPN links to Tesonet, which they're trying hard to "debunk" (though no clue why, I have nothing against Tesonet). They only shared employees and accidentally signed apps with the same certificates, but are "totally unrelated". Their PR people are already on this thread. If they didn't try so hard to fight it, people might care less.
The streisend effect. Although, personally I am interested in this topic, as everyone using these VPNs is one ToU change away from being data mined at all time.
Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For Firefox, I create a separate profile. Firefox supports per-container (and as such per-tab) SOCKS proxies, which I find really useful. So useful, in fact, that I've come full circle and I am now running a userspace Wireguard to SOCKS proxy [1] in order to have that convenience for a VPN which does not have any host I could SSH to. [1] https://github.com/whyvl/wireproxy
If you're using Tailscale you can install it on your Apple TV (if you also happen to have one of those devices). Now you can use your home connection as a proxy through wireguard when traveling.
Tailscale is great, but by itself is the wrong tool for the task of routing traffic over some host only for a single browser tab (but to all destinations for that browser tab), as it seems to be "all or nothing" when it comes to using a remote exit node.
It's probably possible to set up a local SOCKS proxy that knows to use some Tailscale non-exit-node for egress, and to manually allow that traffic within Tailscale and on the remote node, but not out of the box as far as I can tell.
Installing a SOCKS proxy on the remote node, reachable only over Tailscale, would be an alternative, but that doesn't work on an Apple TV.
Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
LOL, now I'm part of the conspiracy. This is all public knowledge.
Then you could provide sources, please?
Here you go:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/protonvpn...
Here's the Handelsregisterauszug for Proton, which shows ownership: https://www.zefix.admin.ch/en/search/entity/list/firm/118926...
Proton's peering relationships: https://bgp.tools/as/62371#asinfo
I'm not sure what exactly you're looking for.
Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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You've just pissed off the entire eastern Europe and are still acting like you've any moral with this. It's the Russian state (and their elites) that's been an abuser to neighboring countries and they're still doing it. It has nothing to with race at all, Russians are slavic people as well. We don't really have a problem with them, beyond them supporting their government
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Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
3. Avoiding government-mandated record keeping by ISPs in a country like the UK, where all ISPs have to keep a year of your browsing history and it can be accessed warrant free by 17 different agencies(including DEFRA, the agriculture agency). And yes, I'm aware that you're most likely trading one surveilence for another - but honestly at this point I'd much rather trust my paid VPN provider with my browsing data tha…
Given that most of the web has TLS and you can easily do DNS over TLS - that's very very high level metadata, where I personally just don't see much ROI vs to giving that metadata to random company with no regulations whatsoever.
Many TLS deployments still leak the hostname in plain text as part of SNI
Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who don't live in countries with mandatory conscription for all don't really understand: everyone is connected to the military but it means nothing. Judging an Israeli citizen on their IDF ties is like judging a US citizen on the fact that they went to public school.
According to google, 87% of Americans go to a state-funded school, so yes judging an American based on the fact that they could afford to be in the top 13% and go to a public school instead is legitimate. This doesn't seem to match what you're trying to say.
You’re using the British definition of “public school” here, which is a “private school” in the US. US public schools are equivalent to UK state schools, in that both are run by the state.
Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are very simple options to selfhost a VPN nowadays. For example, Amnezia allows you to just type your server ssh credentials into their mobile app, and it will automatically set up AmneziaWG on your server and add it to the app. You can then create Amnezia or plain WireGuard config files from extra devices right from there.
That sounds like I'm putting a lot of trust in an app. Also giving it control over my server, which I guess is not a big deal if the server is a disposable VPS
It's all open source though, so you can verify the scripts it's using, which are all here
https://github.com/amnezia-vpn/amnezia-client/tree/dev/clien...
But even without that, there are solutions like wg-easy that let you spin up a WireGuard server with a single Docker container
Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
Protection from IP tracking, especially if your ISP doesn't do CGNAT. Of course there's a trade-off here between a) your ISP (who knows your billing information) knowing which sites you visit, and any site you visit can correlate internet activity back to your household b) your VPN provider knowing all the sites you visit
CGNAT won't save you in a world where everything is fingerprinted to within an inch of it's life.
But a VPN, commercial or self-hosed, also won't stop fingerprinting. It changes your apparent IP address, but the rest of the characteristics of your device and browser stay the same.
Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not quite. In order to make TLS certs work on a per-site basis, requests sent over HTTPS also include a virtual host indicator in cleartext that shows the hostname of the site you’re trying to connect to, so if the IP on the other end is hosting multiple domains it can find the right cert. For this reason some people feel that DNS over TLS is pretty pointless as a privacy measure.
I think this is only true if SNI is disabled. Otherwise you really only get the IP of SRC and DEST.
SNI relies on the client specifying the host name in the unencrypted ClientHello message that initiates a TLS handshake. Encrypted Client Hello involves extra configuration that most websites don't implement.