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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)

#321
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Russia * Kazakhstan * China * Belarus * Iran * Mayanmar - list of countries that are known or suspected to MITM traffic, including SSL

how so they supposedly do it?

One attempt I know of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan_man-in-the-middle_a... There might be others.

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

#322

Note 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…

"all of these companies" are you sure? Did you check the VPN relationships diagram that is within the article? Tesonet is listed and linked.

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

#323

This link displays just the map, freed from it's painfully small frame. https://kumu.io/embed/9ced55e897e74fd807be51990b26b415#vpn-c...

Anyone got this as a regular single image infographic or (better yet) a text-only bulleted outline?

There is an export button. Maybe it does what you want.

Don't use the embed link from above, use this one: https://kumu.io/Windscribe/vpn-relationships

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

#324

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…

Yeah, agreed. Most VPNs just move the trust boundary from your ISP to another opaque network and call it privacy. There’s no way to verify what’s running, who controls it, or what happens to your data once it leaves your machine.

We solve this with vp.net, by making the service verifiable. The code can be reviewed, the builds are reproducible, and each node can prove what software it’s running and where your traffic actually goes [1].

It doesn’t turn a VPN into an anonymity tool, but it makes trust measurable instead of blind. That’s the part the industry should have fixed a long time ago.

[1] https://youtu.be/sz7NAe0G1_Y

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

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Links to" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. ProtonVPN is owned by Proton, which has no legal ownership ties with Tesonet. During Proton's expansion into Eastern Europe, Tesonet initially assisted Proton with HR, payroll, and local regulation, so for a period of time, people working for Proton were employed by Tesonet, since Proton had no local subsidiary that could hire them. These were not "shared employees"…

> so for a period of time, people working for Proton were employed by Tesonet, since Proton had no local subsidiary that could hire them. These were not "shared employees", they worked exclusively for Proton. In 2016, Proton created its own subsidiary, and these people are now employed by Proton. But for this historical reason, the ProtonVPN keystore on Android still lists Tesonet as the organization name, even thoug…

Proton explains this here:

https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/prot...

I suppose you're free not to believe them, but I'm unsure what exactly you believe is happening here and what exactly Proton is lying about. Tesonet secretly owns them and has been running a decades-long misinformation campaign to trick you into thinking they don't? To what end? It's not like Tesonet is some nefarious company we should all be afraid of. What would they gain from lying about this if it were true?

And how can they make such an obvious mistake with their certs and then not make another one for the next decade? It's just not plausible.

At some point, you've gotta use some common sense.

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

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so for a period of time, people working for Proton were employed by Tesonet, since Proton had no local subsidiary that could hire them. These were not "shared employees", they worked exclusively for Proton. In 2016, Proton created its own subsidiary, and these people are now employed by Proton. But for this historical reason, the ProtonVPN keystore on Android still lists Tesonet as the organization name, even thoug…

Proton explains this here: https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/prot... I suppose you're free not to believe them, but I'm unsure what exactly you believe is happening here and what exactly Proton is lying about. Tesonet secretly owns them and has been running a decades-long misinformation campaign to trick you into thinking they don't? To what end? It's not like Tesonet is some nefarious company w…

My comment still applies regardless of any level of “explaining” [1]:

1. Either Nord/Teso are loose with keys (horrible)

Or

2. Proton isn’t being truthful.

I don’t think it’s a conspiracy or anything that it is Tesonet/Nord. Rather, the problem is you cannot trust someone with your privacy if they can’t even manage their own keys.

[1] The explanation is poor at best and doesn’t explain why they worked so hard to try to delete all of the evidence (all of which was archived already). Additionally, nothing can explain away the lack of security with key management across these two orgs.

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

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so for a period of time, people working for Proton were employed by Tesonet, since Proton had no local subsidiary that could hire them. These were not "shared employees", they worked exclusively for Proton. In 2016, Proton created its own subsidiary, and these people are now employed by Proton. But for this historical reason, the ProtonVPN keystore on Android still lists Tesonet as the organization name, even thoug…

Proton explains this here: https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/prot... I suppose you're free not to believe them, but I'm unsure what exactly you believe is happening here and what exactly Proton is lying about. Tesonet secretly owns them and has been running a decades-long misinformation campaign to trick you into thinking they don't? To what end? It's not like Tesonet is some nefarious company w…

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