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FreePN: Open-source peer-to-peer VPN service

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Re: FreePN: Open-source peer-to-peer VPN service

#91

Post by detaro »

BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 wrote: post #89
viraptor wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main page copy seems misleading bordering on malicious: > No bandwidth caps. No throttling. Stream all day, and download away. Yes, no caps on the tunneled connection. But it will happily use up your home connection data caps with both your own and other people's traffic. Then once you run an exit for long enough, your home network will get tor-like treatment from many CAPTCHAs and you'll be blocked from anything…

> your home network will get tor-like treatment from many CAPTCHAs and you'll be blocked from anything on cloudflare That will happen if you use any VPN,so that's expected.

The point is that it'll happen for your non-VPN traffic, because you are a VPN server for others.

Re: FreePN: Open-source peer-to-peer VPN service

#93

Post by noodlesoups »

dhaavi wrote: post #75
dhaavi wrote: post #73

If anyone of the FreePN guys is still lurking around: What is your business model? I understand that you don't need servers, because your users supply that part, but who pays for development, support, and all that stuff?

Someone else asked the same question, following up there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24798097

So they're injecting their own ads into sites?

Re: FreePN: Open-source peer-to-peer VPN service

#94

Post by qeternity »

oefrha wrote: post #14
ignoramous wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lantern [0] and Pisphon.ca do so, too, since it is an effective anti-censorship deterrent. Also, industry leaders like NordVPN and ExpressVPN may engage in P2P routing especially to unblock services like Netflix and Disney+ [1]. HolaVPN unapologetically does this too [2]. All of this is discounting the new-age dVPNs like Orchid (not quite the Tor replacement that was promised [3]) and Mysterium [4]. [0] https://archi…

Routing traffic for specific domains with known legal content is questionable practice, but at least it’s safe from the specific concern here (until someone finds an exploit, maybe a bad domain parser or something). Routing arbitrary traffic is plain risky, it is entirely conceivable to be arrested for it, or at least be searched, whether you can explain it away later or not. “Other providers are doing it too” hardly…

All it takes is for someone to make a threat of violence in the comments section of a known service, or to post links to abusive material.

Re: FreePN: Open-source peer-to-peer VPN service

#95

Post by dspillett »

eightails wrote: post #9

They tried to promote the launch of this service on a bunch of linux-related subreddits 6 months ago, and I wasn't much of a fan of the concept or the way they advertised it, in skipping over the p2p nature of the system. Their answer to the question of 'what happens when a bad actor has their illegal activity routed through my connection' seemed illogical. They claimed that as more people signed up, the proportion o…

> They claimed that as more people signed up, the proportion of bad actors would decrease

I can see the reasoning here: bad actors will be the first to jump on such a service. They actively search for new services that they might be able to use to pipe their traffic through. Awareness amongst the wider population will grow more slowly, as they aren't for the most part actively looking for it, so as that awareness spreads the ratio of good-to-bad will likely improve.

Though the absolute number of bad actors I expect is enough for me to dismiss ever knowingly installing something like this on any device I own (or allowing it on any network I have some responsibility for), no matter what the good/bad ratio is like.

Re: FreePN: Open-source peer-to-peer VPN service

#96

Post by dspillett »

bscphil wrote: post #49
oefrha wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't imagine many of the owners of those IPs know what they're being used for. They don’t. For instance, Luminati, possibly the best known player in this market, uses HolaVPN users as exit nodes.[1] [1] https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/hk-en/security/news/cybercr...

This is said way too often, but in this case I think it's justified - I really don't understand how this is legal. Doesn't using a non-consenting person's computer and network resources for your own purposes meet the definition of "hacking" in most jurisdictions?

It probably isn't legal. But who is going to pay for the fight to stop it? Mom & pop who have had their home connection used? A class action that no one but the lawyers really win anything from? The fact that most of the projects involved are in jurisdictions that make the legal process more complicated and more expensive, or jurisdictions that simply don't care as long as it is affecting other countries and not them (coughChinacoughRussiacoughcough*)?

What the market will bare doesn't just apply to product pricing.

And someone clicking through a EULA might be an argument for them having invited the use of their resources by a very similar argument to that many used to justify using other people's WiFi back when that was gloriously insecure most of the time ("but the AP broadcast its existence, effectively inviting me to join, and happily gave me an IP address to work with, how could I not believe I was welcome to use it?").

Re: FreePN: Open-source peer-to-peer VPN service

#97

Post by bearburger »

_znkz wrote: post #43

This is all very unexpected actually! (No one from FreeVPN made the post here!) We've been doing some early market testing in a few Linux communities on Reddit, but full disclosure, the product is currently in an early-alpha stage (it’s only available on Ubuntu and Gentoo Linux currently, and very much under construction). We have big ambitions for the project, but it is still very early days. Love hearing the feedba…

Hello, Ian

"Every user is exit node" concept in addition to legal question raises more practical questions. What are you going to do if majority for your users (and when you call something "free" the chance increases) will be from countries like China, Russia, Iran and other where government controls and blocks a lot of the websites and services? And I'm talking not about surveillance but about actual block of the IP subnets like Russia did to AWS, DO and GC when they tried to block Telegram.

Also on the website you declare

> No bandwidth caps. No throttling. Stream all day, and download away. Unlike other VPNs, FreePN will never bottleneck your connection.

Sorry but this is simple lie. If we will take Turkmenistan (their internet censorship is better than China's one if you wonder why I take this unknown country) max bandwidth you can get as average citizen is about 2mbps. And there will be users (exit nodes) from TM for sure so for external users there will be bottleneck.

Re: FreePN: Open-source peer-to-peer VPN service

#98

Post by bearburger »

ian-bateman wrote: post #64
coddle-hark wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- How are you planning on monetising this? - What happens if someone downloads CP through my home connection? - How do you plan to block ads with both Chrome and Firefox moving to DNS over HTTPS?

Hi coddle-hark - - Right now we're still undecided / exploring different ways of monetizing the product! (something similar to Adblock-Plus though is our leading idea). - We're working on a way to disallow users from acting as exits for certain kinds of traffic - so you'll be able to categorically block certain kinds of sites through the UI in the near future. - Even with DoH on by default in the browser, we can stil…

> We're working on a way to disallow users from acting as exits for certain kinds of traffic - so you'll be able to categorically block certain kinds of sites through the UI in the near future

To block something you should know that it exists. Do you have full and actual list of CP resources? I doubt. So what is the point of ability to block something if you even don't know that it exists before it is too late. The only way to deal with it are whitelists but who will use "VPN" if only certain websites will be accessible?

Re: FreePN: Open-source peer-to-peer VPN service

#99

Post by lwn »

anderspitman wrote: post #33
core-questions wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SEO companies are big customers of products like this. Scraping Google at scale requires a huge budget for proxies and IP blocks, and I believe they apply ML to detect people abusing their service.

I actually don't think I would need to make a ridiculous amount of requests. The project is a pinning service where people submit a video URL so they can do things like manage lists of the videos they watch (think goodreads for web videos). I need to scrape the video description and tags for each submitted URL. It would be nice to just do it from the user's browser, but the same origin policy won't allow that. A brow…

This sounds like your would be better of using Youtube's API https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/getting-started
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