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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)

#351
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A ton of ISPs use deep packet inspection for various kinds of filtering (and other shenanigans). When they get it wrong it manifests to the user as certain websites or access patterns being inaccessible and the ISPs customer support agreeing that you should have access and being able to do fuck all to fix it. A VPN in the middle usually solves the issue.

Wait, I think an ISP cannot inspect the content of packets that are encrypted, say, with HTTPs. In order to inspect TLS encrypted packets you need access to the end-device, controlling the end-router is not sufficient since you would not have access to the device certificates. If you can prove that an ISP can inspect packets, it would be major news.

Are you confusing DPI with MITM or something?

DPI does not require any decryption of payload. Even cheap consumer devices can perform DPI on encrypted traffic. ISPs absolutely use DPI as a part of standard practice, and have been for decades. It is a basic network traffic management tool.

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

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>You're devoting a lot of emotional energy You're on the Internet. How are you surprised that someone is repeatedly responding in a thread about a very obscure topic, especially when people are posting conspiracy theories? It's interesting to have these discussions. But it is funny that people's conspiratorial thinking now makes me a part of the conspiracy merely for pointing out easily verifiable facts. >What is you…

How is thinking that a company might be doing PR work in a hacker news tread a conspiracy theory?

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

#353

Strange that this is a blog post by windscribe which follows many of the same practices as the VPN providers they criticize here. Were VPNs ever really providing privacy? The underlying business model is selling user data.

I'm curious to learn more about Windscribe. Do you have any more info you can share about their practices?

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

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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"…

Did they sign things with the wrong keys?

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

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Proton discloses shareholder information here: https://proton.me/support/who-owns-protonmail But I guess they could be lying.

Them providing information isn't the same as publicly verifiable information.

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

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You're devoting a lot of emotional energy You're on the Internet. How are you surprised that someone is repeatedly responding in a thread about a very obscure topic, especially when people are posting conspiracy theories? It's interesting to have these discussions. But it is funny that people's conspiratorial thinking now makes me a part of the conspiracy merely for pointing out easily verifiable facts. >What is you…

How is thinking that a company might be doing PR work in a hacker news tread a conspiracy theory?

It isn't, it's common sense and common practice.

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

#359

Is there any other real world usecases for VPN nowadays other than: 1. Getting access to geolocked data 2. Torrenting "Linux ISOs" ?

Access sites the government has blocked in your state/country

I would put that in the "geolocked data" category

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

#360
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Didn’t know. As an Android developer I find it specially interesting. Not for any nefarious reasons, for I so far believe that JetBrains is one of those companies that has been a net positive on tech ecosystem in general (touchwood!) — be their dev tools or the Kotlin itself. I also follow these people and tools, partly out of professional needs/curiosities.

FYI Kotlin language is named after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotlin_Island

Aha. I see that it was also called "Kotling". I guess they missed this opportunity, or maybe KotLang, in which case people would have started calling it just Kot.

Also the place seems to have quite a few rebellions under its belt.

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