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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

#41

Post by selykg »

elagost wrote: post #18
lemoncookiechip wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's far from a waste of money. They help with things such as skipping geoblocking, able to deceive ISPs that send mail warning users about pirated content, can in some cases help with gaming ping, allow users to trick sites that rely on IP logging and many other applications besides cybersecurity and privacy. The main issue is that they all seem to advertise themselves as these privacy and cybersecurity services fir…

Browser fingerprinting works much better than checking IPs. With multiple devices being behind the same IP, it's necessary to distinguish between users. I'm not saying VPNs are worthless - I'm on one right now for work. Commercial VPNs, for most people who purchase them, are completely worthless. And I very much doubt that tunneling your connection through a VPN can improve ping.

> And I very much doubt that tunneling your connection through a VPN can improve ping.

Yea... as someone who used to play a lot of online games, this was always a surefire way to increase ping time lol. "Crap, my VPN is still on... brb"

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

#42

Post by adamdusty »

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…

I have never in my life met anyone that has an iPhone or a Mac because Apple is processing everything on the device itself. People have iPhone and macs for 2 reasons. iMessage and because Apple is a premium brand that even that richest of richest people use. The money Apple would lose if they started mining your data like Facebook would be indistinguishable from random noise.

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

#43

Post by reedjosh »

good8675309 wrote: post #22
jmarbach wrote: post #13

You can use https://satoshivpn.com if you want to be anonymous. You get access to your own private server, and user registration is not even possible.

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

> IP Refresh

> Does the service limit your usage of a single IP address?

From the linked page listed as a yes in the features list.

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

#44

Post by elagost »

hammock wrote: post #37
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

Diversification. Theoretically most of the nodes are owned by different people, and every connection will randomize your node list route between them, making it difficult to track, unless most of the nodes were owned by one organization. With VPNs, all of your connections are through servers owned by one company, identified by an account ID.

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

#45

Post by dkersten »

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.

What about Tor over VPN, so that your ISP can't see that you're using Tor? That is, the VPN hides your usage of Tor from your ISP and Tor hides your browsing from the VPN (and since many VPN services even advertise Tor support, its not like it would be suspicious, plus you can pay for many VPN's with cryptocurrency while I definitely can't hide my identity or location from my ISP).

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

#46

Post by dtech »

elagost wrote: post #18
lemoncookiechip wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's far from a waste of money. They help with things such as skipping geoblocking, able to deceive ISPs that send mail warning users about pirated content, can in some cases help with gaming ping, allow users to trick sites that rely on IP logging and many other applications besides cybersecurity and privacy. The main issue is that they all seem to advertise themselves as these privacy and cybersecurity services fir…

Browser fingerprinting works much better than checking IPs. With multiple devices being behind the same IP, it's necessary to distinguish between users. I'm not saying VPNs are worthless - I'm on one right now for work. Commercial VPNs, for most people who purchase them, are completely worthless. And I very much doubt that tunneling your connection through a VPN can improve ping.

> And I very much doubt that tunneling your connection through a VPN can improve ping.

Surprisingly this can be the case as long as the combined link to VPN + target is better than the direct link to target. Keep in mind that the target might be geo distributed.

Like driving, going over 2 highways might be fasted than going over a direct dirt road, or a longer road might be faster because the direct road is congested.

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

#47

Post by acchow »

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 want a VPN for any other reason that "normal people" think they want a VPN

As far as I can see, normal people are asking for VPNs to access Netflix catalogs of other countries.

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

#48

Post by deelowe »

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…

What assurances do we have that most tor end points aren't compromised as well?

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

#49

Post by badsoftware »

adamdusty wrote: post #42
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…

I have never in my life met anyone that has an iPhone or a Mac because Apple is processing everything on the device itself. People have iPhone and macs for 2 reasons. iMessage and because Apple is a premium brand that even that richest of richest people use. The money Apple would lose if they started mining your data like Facebook would be indistinguishable from random noise.

I am in the Apple ecosystem primarily for privacy reasons. We exist.

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

#50

Post by withinboredom »

Semaphor wrote: post #40
nitrohorse wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I block the Mozilla positioning trackers. They were getting over a million request per month from my household. It’s just a regular API call from any website and doesn’t need any browser permissions.
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