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ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

reuters.com

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Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#31

Post by BRedSox »

elagost wrote: post #6
Raed667 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you want a VPN to unlock location based content?

Then either do without (because, come on, nobody's gonna die if they can't watch reality TV), buy it on disc, or pirate it? Netflix is blocking IP ranges so hard that residential space is getting caught in the blast radius. It's a cat and mouse game that you'll only win by refusing to play. https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-intensifies-vpn-ban-and-tar...

I use a VPN to watch my local sports team - whose owner is currently in a contract dispute resulting in the team not being played on local tv.

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#32

Post by Pick-A-Hill2019 »

It [ExpressVPN] said it had not known of the federal investigation or the details of Gericke's work in UAE

Seriously?

So either he lied or they are lying. I'm not an expert in American employment laws but would have assumed that one of the conditions of employment would be disclosing/reporting being under a federal investigation.

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#33

Post by good8675309 »

jimmygrapes wrote: post #28
good8675309 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private server? So all of your traffic comes from the same ip? That defeats the purpose of the VPN.

The use cases for a single IP not associated with your person are numerous: avoidance of ISP retribution for your use of certain network connections (ie torrenting), avoidance of direct targeted attack, avoidance of geofencing, avoidance of censorship by IP location, as a few examples. All the better if the private static IP can be changed on demand and adjusted for location.

Does the IP on the instance change on a regular interval? Or do you have to request it? I use VPNs to protect against tracking. If the IP is mostly static then using it as a defense against tracking is useless.

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#34

Post by s_dev »

johnklos wrote: post #30

For any company, ask why they'd actually care about doing the right thing. Is it reputation? Integrity? Is the reasoning purely financial? Then ask whether the company operates in a way that suggests they'd do the profitable thing over the right thing if they think they might get away with it. Does that picture look realistic? As an example, look at Apple. Leaving the tangential discussion about scanning iCloud photo…

Just look at Proton Mail removing the "We don't log IPs" claim from their website last week after it emerged they are forced to log IPs .

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#35

Post by garyrob »

elagost wrote: post #2

It's been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it's a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook. If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. If you want a VPN for any other reason that "normal people" think they want a VPN…

Honest question: it's still a consensus that they do have value in situations such as airport Wi-Fi, correct?

Separately from that, I still do wonder whether, if you subscribe to a VPN that has well-examined security practices and whose reputation depends on such practices, whether it still may have value over relying on the security over a local ISP which may not have as much expertise or reputation investment with respect to security.

I'm not arguing, just trying to understand the issue better.

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#37

Post by hammock »

elagost wrote: post #2

It's been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it's a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook. If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. If you want a VPN for any other reason that "normal people" think they want a VPN…

>If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser.

Isn't using Tor browser trusting a group of unknown people as well (nodes)? I hear all the time theories that Tor is a giant honeypot

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#38

Post by fnord77 »

elagost wrote: post #2

It's been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it's a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook. If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. If you want a VPN for any other reason that "normal people" think they want a VPN…

Tor is practically unusable in 2021. Tor is blocked or is very difficult to use for a growing number of sites. Google is the big one (whether one should use google at all is a different story).

Plus ISPs can detect tor use by its customers just from packet patterns. I don't want to be flagged as a tor user by either my ISP or the sites I visit.

The only other option is to set up your own ISP either in a colo rack or on a cloud VM. That's going to cost $50-$100 month plus your time fiddling with it and any network overages

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#39

Post by [deleted] »

johnklos wrote: post #30

For any company, ask why they'd actually care about doing the right thing. Is it reputation? Integrity? Is the reasoning purely financial? Then ask whether the company operates in a way that suggests they'd do the profitable thing over the right thing if they think they might get away with it. Does that picture look realistic? As an example, look at Apple. Leaving the tangential discussion about scanning iCloud photo…

[deleted]

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#40

Post by Semaphor »

nitrohorse wrote: post #25
elagost wrote: post #2

It's been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it's a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook. If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. If you want a VPN for any other reason that "normal people" think they want a VPN…

https://www.doineedavpn.com enumerates legitimate use cases well I think. > This site was conceived and built by IVPN to challenge aggressive marketing practices in the VPN industry.

> Hide geographic location

> VPNs do not effectively solve this issue. Most modern browsers can detect the geographic location of a device based on data from GPS, available Wi-Fi networks and GSM/CDMA cell IDs and will submit this information to websites requesting it.

Did I miss something? Even the ad-tech browser will ask the user before sharing that?

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