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Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
301–310 of 456 posts
Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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> How are all Russians in Lithuania or Estonia responsible for the deeds of the Russian government? Or Russians in England?
It's not about Russian people, you assumed that. There are well known connections between any company doing business in or with Russia who are basically extorted to hand over all information about customers or financials to the government. This is no secret.
If any company is working from or with Russian ties, you can assume the government will have access to that data. Given the sensitive nature of VPN's, antivirus software, deployed software in general, its completely fair to say you don't want to work with people with ties in Russia. I'm the same. You're conflating things, and then throwing in some 'what-about-ism' for good measure. Nothing but an argument will come from this discussion so it's not welcome here. You could try your hand on Twitter.
Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did not sell PIA. I entered into a merger agreement to create a publicly owned privacy company. Without getting into detail, I left the company on principle receiving only 1/3rd of the value for the shares.
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It might help your goal of a PSA if you source your claims, so this doesn't become inflammatory.
Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
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It might help your goal of a PSA if you source your claims, so this doesn't become inflammatory.
Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#305Note 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.
Proton are pretty shady. The Radware ties, the blocking of two journalists, etc. etc.
Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#306Is 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…
> another customer of the SaaS supplier somehow could see the traffic on my customer's SaaS instance
Is this common?
Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been part of a European startup that added offices in Asia and the US, and we initially always partnered with local companies to do this. It's mutually beneficial. It allowed us to grow more quickly, and it allowed them to make relatively easy money (and, in our case, to dump some of their shittier employees on us without us knowing). In Proton's case, they already knew each other because Tesonet had previously…
You know an awful lot of detail about the inner workings of two separate private companies though.
Is it really that shocking that someone on HN would have worked at as many as 2 private companies?
Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did not sell PIA. I entered into a merger agreement to create a publicly owned privacy company. Without getting into detail, I left the company on principle receiving only 1/3rd of the value for the shares.
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I appreciate the engagement, but it’s become clear that this particular user has been repeatedly following my posts to respond negatively - a stalker if you will [1]. I’d prefer to keep the discussion focused on facts, not personalities.
The key point, you don’t have to trust us, and we don’t want you to. Trust code, not people. That’s the foundation of the entire effort.
As for the Freenode situation, the popular narrative has been repeatedly misrepresented. The core claims were debunked and the receipts are here: http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/lee-side.pd....
To clarify a few historical points:
1. The so-called “takeover” was being organized long before my involvement, as shown by domain registration dates and internal meeting notes. I was a more convenient target than Christel, which might explain why she asked me to buy it from her.
2. False narratives were already being circulated to open source projects before any administrative changes occurred. The subsequent channel topic changes were a reaction to those actions, though I’ve acknowledged those decisions weren’t ideal in hindsight.
On broader context, much of what’s now called “funding FOSS” doesn’t reach active developers. It tends to reward organizers and promoters rather than those writing meaningful code. Supporting individual developers directly remains a better way to sustain real innovation.
Ironically, several of the ex-staff I defended for years against serious allegations (search “OldCoder” if you’re unfamiliar) went on to form Libera, attempted to seize the freenode IRC domain, and created a false narrative about events. It’s disappointing, but not surprising given the leftist politics at play.
If you want to understand the larger trends affecting open source today, I recommend Lunduke’s Journal and similar analyses. Most major FOSS projects are no longer developer run… just look at Mozilla for an example.
Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#309We should really be moving towards a world of Multi-Party Relays rather than Single-Party VPN operators: https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/11/17/where-are-... With Multi-Party Relays you no longer have a trust a single entity not being malicious or compromised. Disclaimer: I run obscura.net, which does exactly this with Mullvad (our partner) as the Exit Hop.
Does obscura work in China? Doe you have a free tier option for me to test?
Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Here's the Handelsregisterauszug for Proton, which shows ownership
It doesn‘t. It’s a joint-stock corporation and while the shareholders are registered, the register is not public.