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Mozilla VPN

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Re: Mozilla VPN

#461

Post by kfreds »

vpnwire wrote: post #434
kfreds wrote: post #204

Every time the VPN service industry is discussed on HN there is a barrage of comments that use keywords like “honeypot”, “snake oil”, and “shady”. I’m not denying that the industry has problems, but in this thread I’d like to focus on how we can improve it. Please tell me - What makes a VPN provider trustworthy, and how do you _know_? Personally I believe a trustworthy provider is _characterized_ by consistent action…

Thank you for being here and starting this conversation. I've joined several popular VPN services this year in my work on VPN Wire, and Mullvad's signup flow was by far the most enjoyable. Not only because there's no email required (a little disorienting, but very refreshing), but also because, unlike the experience on many of your competitors' sites, I didn't feel pressured to buy/commit every step of the way. User-…

Hi! Thanks for the feedback. That’s great to hear.

Audits are good and definitely have a place. There’s much more that can be done. I agree open source is also an important one.

We’ve tried to identify strong signals of trustworthiness together with a few other services here: https://mullvad.net/blog/2018/10/17/signals-trustworthy-vpns...

A technical solution Mullvad is working on is something we call System Transparency. You can read more about that here: https://mullvad.net/blog/2019/6/3/system-transparency-future...

Re: Mozilla VPN

#462

Post by stormdennis »

signal11 wrote: post #449
stormdennis wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once got on to Microsoft for some phone support, After asking me lots of questions about myself which were necessary before they could answer the specific question I'd already asked, the person on the other end finished up by saying that this was a question I needed to put instead to the vendor who had sold me the product. I can't remember if they asked if there was anything else they could help me with today.

Microsoft Support can be quite good depending upon the product you need help with. I’ve called them for help with a Office 365 issue and they were very helpful. I’ve called them once for an Xbox issue (I wanted to buy an Xbox 360 game and it wasn’t letting me) and the rep didn’t really have a clue. I ended up finding the answer after searching a few Xbox forums.

Actually I'd heard that office 365 support was good and in fairness the incident I was talking about was many years ago.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#463

Post by teddyh »

egd wrote: post #362
r3trohack3r wrote: post #111

Every time someone mentions a VPN provider in my techie social circles, the "A VPN doesn't protect you" crowd piles in, usually with links to something like: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29 I don't understand this argument, but would like to. I run https://everytwoyears.org , a political non-profit focused on ending the warrantless metadata collection of U.S. citizens' communications. From every…

I'm a fan of James Mickens' "Mossad or Not-Mossad" internet threat models ~essay: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

Despite his somewhat annoying style, that article has many good points about the aloofness of security researchers. However, I will disagree on two points which the article contains:

1. Tor is (rightly) used by anyone who has a good reason for remaining anonymous. (See [REALNAMES] for who this can be.) Anyone trying to smear Tor as only used by drug dealers and other unsavory types are themselves suspect of having an agenda of discouraging Tor use for anyone lest they be suspected. This can only lead to an installation of Tor being viewed as a suspicious thing in itself; who would want that?

2. His threat model of Mossad or not-Mossad leaves out one important actor, which we can call the NSA. They, and others like them, unlike Mossad, are not after you personally in that they don't want to do anything to you. Not immediately. Not now. They simply want to get to know you better. They are gathering information. All the information. What you do, what you buy, how you vote, what you think. And they want to do this to everybody, all the time. This might or not bite you in the future. He seems to imply that since nothing immediately bad is happening by using slightly bad security, then it’s OK and we shouldn’t worry about it, since Mossad is not after us. I think that we should have a slightly longer view of what allowing NSA (et al.) to know everything about everybody would mean, and who NSA could some day give this information to, and what those people could do with the information. You have to think a few steps ahead to realize the danger.

[REALNAMES] Who is harmed by a "Real Names" policy? https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Re...

Re: Mozilla VPN

#464

Post by indigo945 »

signal11 wrote: post #449
stormdennis wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once got on to Microsoft for some phone support, After asking me lots of questions about myself which were necessary before they could answer the specific question I'd already asked, the person on the other end finished up by saying that this was a question I needed to put instead to the vendor who had sold me the product. I can't remember if they asked if there was anything else they could help me with today.

Microsoft Support can be quite good depending upon the product you need help with. I’ve called them for help with a Office 365 issue and they were very helpful. I’ve called them once for an Xbox issue (I wanted to buy an Xbox 360 game and it wasn’t letting me) and the rep didn’t really have a clue. I ended up finding the answer after searching a few Xbox forums.

Oddly enough though, even the enterprise product support can be very bad. I've had dealings with Microsoft over issues related to Azure while under EA, and they still took weeks to even look at the issue, which turned out to be a problem on their end.

When it comes to big-brand software and services, it can really pay off to buy via a good reseller or consultancy, who often offer much better support than the company that actually makes the product. Of course, that's not actionable advice when we're discussing which mail provider is best for personal use. (Although I suggest the answer is still "not O365".)

Re: Mozilla VPN

#465

Post by Jaruzel »

DCKing wrote: post #459
mattowen_uk wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are asking for, is a resurrection of Netscape Communicator[1], which had along with the browser, an email client, calendar, editor, chat etc. It was fairly popular in some corporates for a while, until Lotus/IBM and MS stepped up their collaboration game. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Communicator

Sort of. Netscape Communicator critically never included server infrastructure and was completely focused on e.g. connecting to your ISP's email servers. Although a great 'client' experience is absolutely crucial for Firefox Premium's success and would be a modern resurrection of Netscape Communicator in that sense, what I mostly need is convenient 'servers' from a company that I can trust and a business model I can…

Agreed, in this day and age we mostly don't have or use the ISP services that come with our connections.

Would you then use a Mozilla run mail service similar to gmail complete with calendaring and document storage, all built into a suite of client apps ?

I think for a certain demographic this could turn into a good Google competitor if done right.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#466

Post by gargron »

lilyball wrote: post #173
typon wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only Mozilla can make me pay for Google services like Email/Calendar etc. I think I subconsciously trust the brand more than most internet companies out there.

How about FastMail? They have a stellar email service. They also offer contacts and calendars, though I don't personally use those (I use iCloud for that).

Paying customer of Fastmail for 6 years. It's great.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#467

Post by slightwinder »

mattowen_uk wrote: post #428
DCKing wrote: post #141

Come on Mozilla, hurry up! I want to give you money for goods and services (I also donate monthly [1]), but I'm not that interested in a VPN (I can and do also pay Mullvad). Give me that real internet stuff - email, calendar, file sync, chat(?) - give me Firefox Premium. Bundle in the Lockwise password manager. I'd pay good money to see a company fill the void of paid, privacy first essential internet services and I…

What you are asking for, is a resurrection of Netscape Communicator[1], which had along with the browser, an email client, calendar, editor, chat etc. It was fairly popular in some corporates for a while, until Lotus/IBM and MS stepped up their collaboration game. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Communicator

Doesn't need to be a move back to Mozilla Suit (today named Seamonkey). They can offer web-services for this (just cooperate with an existing Provider like fastmail), but with trusted privacy features and embedded in the browser with first class-quality-extensions.

Or they push thunderbird, the mail-client they brought into the world to just ignore it for such a long time. A trustable privacy-first mail-client with brainless configuration and maybe some useful modern PIM-features would sell well enough to satisfy a price. I mean there are already services doing that, mozilla couild cooperate with them or just push their own weight in the ring.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#468

Post by slightwinder »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #240
DCKing wrote: post #141

Come on Mozilla, hurry up! I want to give you money for goods and services (I also donate monthly [1]), but I'm not that interested in a VPN (I can and do also pay Mullvad). Give me that real internet stuff - email, calendar, file sync, chat(?) - give me Firefox Premium. Bundle in the Lockwise password manager. I'd pay good money to see a company fill the void of paid, privacy first essential internet services and I…

I'd pay at least $10/month or $99/year for Firefox Accounts, just as they stand today, because they give me at least that much value. Integrate full 2FA into Lockwise, so that I have 2FA that'll never die with a broken phone, and I'd pay more. Add a secure calendar I can use with friends and family, and I'd pay more. (I'd hesitate to say email, just because running that is a can of worms I wouldn't wish on my worst e…

> just as they stand today,

Yeah, no. The least they should do is enhace the size for syncing extension-data. It's today limited to 100kb per extension, which destroys syncing for most useful extensions like ublock, greasemonkey or some mature manager for bookmarks and notes. Giving any paying user some GB as global storeage and remove the per-extenions-limitation would push productivity immense.

Re: Mozilla VPN

#469

Post by slightwinder »

godelski wrote: post #400
lub wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> chat This already exists: https://chat.mozilla.org/ You can use it with your Firefox account.

I've been hanging for about 20 minutes. What is this?

Mozillas own instance of a matrix-setup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)

Re: Mozilla VPN

#470

Post by nnt38 »

krn wrote: post #412
DCKing wrote: post #141

Come on Mozilla, hurry up! I want to give you money for goods and services (I also donate monthly [1]), but I'm not that interested in a VPN (I can and do also pay Mullvad). Give me that real internet stuff - email, calendar, file sync, chat(?) - give me Firefox Premium. Bundle in the Lockwise password manager. I'd pay good money to see a company fill the void of paid, privacy first essential internet services and I…

There are many VPN services that begin just by reselling white-label VPN solutions, such as provided by NordVPN[1], because it's much cheaper and easier than building your own globally distributed high-capacity and low-latency network. I hope that Mozilla didn't go down this route, as many suspect ProtonVPN did[2], which Mozilla has partnered in the past with[3]. In fact, given that partnership I wouldn't be surprise…

FYI Mozilla VPN will just be rebranded Mullvad, ProtonVPN is outdated.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2019/12/3/mullvad-partnerships-p...

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