Do you use any analytics tools on your website and how do you drive traffic to it?
Are you planning no-ads campaigns (similar to what simpleanalytics.com does)?
I'm on a privacy-first project and such info would help.
Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise
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Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise
#32What happened if some government agency were to order both Obscura and Mullvad to log a certain user or certain activities? Wouldn't it be possible to combine those logs? If it isn't: would that change if Obscura was ordered to also use a separate Mullvad account for a specific user/IP?
Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise
#33The product page states no logs, and then on that same page there is a claim the VPN IP address means anonymity- except... when I log in to VPN and I'm assigned IP address, now I'm tracked through this IP address? I'd guess there are logs saying something like 'user X requested IP, user X paid so lets give user X a.b.c.d for the duration of session'
Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise
#34Wanna know about something cool? Tor i offers real untraceable anonymity and is 100% free.
It was also developed by the United States Navy and has been criticized for not being as secure as it claims it is. This should come as no surprise since the US military and agencies have a history of demanding backdoors in software, which just means more attack vectors for outsiders to sniff out. I make no claims that commercial VPNs are more secure, but at least they have some level of interest in keeping their pro…
The navy backdoor claims are unsubstantiated FUD unless you can point them out in the freely available and accessible code. Not to mention that they created the tool to also use themselves.
They also haven't had any influence or control in the development of todays tor project that has existed for over 20 years and despite a massive amount of attacks and research there has never been found anything.
That does not mean there aren't serious drawbacks that are more worth pointing out such as why bother with a very complex and noisy backdoor when you can just covertly create enough nodes to do traffic correlation.
Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, Obscura can collect metadata on when you use the service, how much data you send/receive, etc. Even if Mullvad doesn't do it, someone else might. Mullvad is, I expect, now a valuable target because it is the VPN service of choice for so many people concerned with security. Does Mullvad have the budget and expertise to protect itself against determined, highly-resourced attackers? Finally, is it possible for a t…
Mullvad is near the cutting edge on zero trust deployments; allowing user traffic to pass thru, with guaranteed no logging, assumption of compromise guiding system architecture, etc. Nobody can withstand a nation state, not even other nation states, so I feel like they're doing the best that can be reasonably expected of them
> Mullvad is near the cutting edge on zero trust deployments
What is "zero trust deployments"?
Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise
#36Wanna know about something cool? Tor i offers real untraceable anonymity and is 100% free.
There does not exist a system or method to make a signal truly 100% untraceable. What you can do and tor does is severely weakening the odds of the tracing being successful by increasing the amount of work and involved parties thereby improving the odds that the tracing never reaches the actual origin.
Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise
#37Doesn't this just move trust from mullvad to obscura?
The concept is that Obscura knows who you are, but not what you are doing. Mullvad knows what you are doing but not who you are. Your trust is that Obscura and Mullvad will not collude.
Obscura also knows what you do, as it is their client you're using. Though, they've plans to address this shortcoming (reproducible builds / open source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43019473).
Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, two US companies subject to US laws, the FISA court, and government-ordered secret surveillance.
That wasn't the question, though. The answer is yes - this is the same concept as Apple's Private Relay.
No, it isn't similar to Private Relay as its entire premise for 2 hop (versus 3 for Tor) hinges on anonymous authorization (via Privacy Pass) at the exit node.
Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise
#39Wanna know about something cool? Tor i offers real untraceable anonymity and is 100% free.
> real untraceable anonymity and is 100% free. And 50% of the time it works every time... A lot of things simply don't work if you're using tor. You get blocked, you get blacklisted, accounts get terminated, and so on.
I generally agree, but the same thing also happens to Mullvad exit nodes (though not to the same degree.) Imgur is perpetually "over capacity", breaking images across multiple websites. Twitch tells me "your browser is not supported, try Chrome or Firefox" when trying to log in on Firefox. Netflix blocks all regional content, etc. Not to mention the constant Cloudflare captchas. I once had to use Tor because Mullvad was blocked (creating a foreign Steam account)
Google Search comes to mind as the most Tor-hostile website though, and that allows Mullvad just fine.