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Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

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Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#51

Post by OutOfHere »

username135 wrote: post #27

Ive been a proton supporter since email. I like theor product suite. I use a vpn for all the reasons listed here, but mostly for obfuscating my traffic (and torrenting).

Their email UI is extremely clunky and unrefined, both on the desktop and on the app. When I delete a message in the app, it just stays there in the folder. When I empty spam in the desktop, its count doesn't update. It's like they don't use their own product.

Also, relying on its VPN for illegal activities is incredibly foolish since they log your IP and probably have your payment info.

Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#52

Post by ThatMedicIsASpy »

some-guy wrote: post #11
fujigawa wrote: post #7

Commercial VPNs will go down as one of the greatest money-making schemes of the last decade. Outside of a few specific use cases their sales often rely on leveraging non-technical users' fear of what they don't fully understand. I have non-technical friends and relatives that have fully bought into this and when I asked why they use a VPN I got non-specific answers like "you need it for security", "to prevent identit…

Mine is simple: avoid my ISP complaining about torrents.

Avoid my ISPs piss poor routing and peering - especially during peak times.

Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#53

Post by nostrademons »

some-guy wrote: post #11
fujigawa wrote: post #7

Commercial VPNs will go down as one of the greatest money-making schemes of the last decade. Outside of a few specific use cases their sales often rely on leveraging non-technical users' fear of what they don't fully understand. I have non-technical friends and relatives that have fully bought into this and when I asked why they use a VPN I got non-specific answers like "you need it for security", "to prevent identit…

Mine is simple: avoid my ISP complaining about torrents.

Mine are:

1) I like Canadian shows in Netflix more than American

2) People in Silicon Valley get charged more on certain travel sites than people in Detroit.

Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#54

Post by busterarm »

5f3cfa1a wrote: post #48
jonny_eh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can operate your own VPN On what infra? Can you trust that one? Doesn't that solution just move the problem down one level?

The answer is always "maybe" until you bring your threat model to the table. I use a VPN to watch IPTV & download torrents without my ISP sending me nasty letters. Mullvad is great for that. I would trust it in conjunction with Tor to protect me from low-level crimes. I wouldn't run trust either it or Tor, alone or in combination, to run a marketplace the DEA would become interested in. If your threat model is obscur…

This.

Between the parent and the other one, it's almost like I specifically pointed out the limited utility of this approach and all of the Well Acktshually posters had to spell it out anyway.

I was responding to someone who said they were technical, so it should be assumed they can work this all out for themselves.

Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#55

Post by adiabatichottub »

aborsy wrote: post #50

Do people here trust their ISPs more than their VPN providers? That’s the question! On the other hand, as far as privacy from the end point is concerned, users can be identified regardless of IP addresses. Visit fingerprint.com, you will get an identifier, then connect to a privacy VPN and change servers once in a while. The website will identify you, tell you are the same user visited last week from such location, a…

I'm more worried about all the sites that require my phone number under the auspices of two-factor authentication. It's probably the most trackable bit of personally-identifying information these days.

Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#56

Post by mzajc »

arewethereyeta wrote: post #34

That's why we sell only the service [1] and point our users to the default app install (Wireguard in our case). Ever since Holla VPN and the entire Brightdata/Luminati clusterf~ VPNs are a risky business for users. Most of them are proxy nodes underneath, they rent you datacenter IPs while they sell your residential internet to third parties. [1] https://www.anonymous-proxies.net/products/

> We offer highly secure, /.../Residential /.../ Proxies.

Where do you get residential proxies? I ask because I'm always reminded of https://sponsor.ajay.app/emails/.

Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#57

Post by idiotsecant »

I don't use a VPN for anything that would get me in the cross hairs of a nation-state. I use it to trade crypto outside my jurisdiction, make sure my ISP doesn't get torrenting complaints, obscure my traffic from wifi networks I don't trust, that sort of thing. None of these things have enough money or power behind them that peeling away the VPN is worth it, so it's good enough.

Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#58

Post by kube-system »

vincnetas wrote: post #41

How realistic is possibility that some VPN providers use clients (computers of person who installed VPN) to just be able to crawl (or rent crawl infra) sites and make it look like regular residential traffic? (This is speculation i heard somewhere) Like reverse VPN :) on one side makes client look like he's accessing internet from VPN exit location, and on the other end allowing for money someone to pretend that he's…

There are a number of "free" VPN providers that have been documented to do this, if you search you should find some articles about it.

Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#59

Post by nostrademons »

vincnetas wrote: post #41

How realistic is possibility that some VPN providers use clients (computers of person who installed VPN) to just be able to crawl (or rent crawl infra) sites and make it look like regular residential traffic? (This is speculation i heard somewhere) Like reverse VPN :) on one side makes client look like he's accessing internet from VPN exit location, and on the other end allowing for money someone to pretend that he's…

This isn’t VPN providers per se - most want to be able to control their own exit nodes.

There are however a fair number of commercial proxies that do exactly that, sometimes via consumer malware. I know several startup founders who have used them as a way to scrape lots of data and not get banned. Usually the interface they provide to the customer is just a normal SaaS “pay us money and give us a list of URLs and we will give you the page content”, and the interface they provide to the end user is a game or marginally useful utility, and nobody but the company realizes they’re doing something dodgy.

Re: Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

#60

Post by john01dav »

davepeck wrote: post #17
fujigawa wrote: post #7

Commercial VPNs will go down as one of the greatest money-making schemes of the last decade. Outside of a few specific use cases their sales often rely on leveraging non-technical users' fear of what they don't fully understand. I have non-technical friends and relatives that have fully bought into this and when I asked why they use a VPN I got non-specific answers like "you need it for security", "to prevent identit…

Long ago, in the era of Firesheep and exploding prevalence of coffee-shop Wi-Fi, consumer VPN services were definitely valuable. But that was long ago. Now, HTTPS is the norm. The only use cases for consumer VPNs today seem to be (1) "pretend I'm in a different geography so I can stream that show I wanted to see" and (2) "torrent with slightly greater impunity". I live in Seattle and Mullvad VPN seems to have bought…

What about (3) "bypass government censorship"? UK and China are examples of where this is desirable. This is different from (1) because it's broader than just streaming shows and is about authoritarian rather than capitalist restrictions.
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