Note that all of these companies are also under the umbrella of Tesonet, a Lithuanian VC firm also headed by Tomas Okmanas (Tom Okman in TFA). Their flagship investments are Nord Security, Hostinger, Oxylabs, Surfshark, Decodo, Mediatech, and nexos.ai - all closely related business models around proxying.
They don't seem to have Russian ties: "In 2022, CyberCare opened an office in Lviv, Ukraine. Although planning for the move started before the war, according to Dainius Vanagas, CEO of CyberCare, one of the reasons why it was followed through was a desire to help Ukraine rebuild."[0]
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", they worked exclusively for Proton.
In 2016, Proton created its own subsidiary, and these people are now employed by Proton. But for this historical reason, the ProtonVPN keystore on Android still lists Tesonet as the organization name, even though it is fully controlled by Proton.
None of this is "debunking"; these are just the facts. You can make of them what you will, but you should be honest about what actually happened when you talk about it.
I've been part of a European startup that added offices in Asia and the US, and we initially always partnered with local companies to do this. It's mutually beneficial. It allowed us to grow more quickly, and it allowed them to make relatively easy money (and, in our case, to dump some of their shittier employees on us without us knowing).
In Proton's case, they already knew each other because Tesonet had previously offered to provide infrastructure during a DDoS attack against Proton.
So maybe it's a conspiracy, or maybe it's just how things go. You can make up your own mind, but you should provide the facts when you make sinister insinuations.
> 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", they worked exclusively for Proton.
In 2016, Proton created its own subsidiary, and these people are now employed by Proton. But for this historical reason, the ProtonVPN keystore on Android still lists Tesonet as the organization name, even though it is fully controlled by Proton.
So either:
1. Tesonet/Nord are loose with their private keys.
2. Proton isn’t being truthful.
Anyone who understands crypto and key management knows “not your keys, not your _____.”
If those staffers worked for Proton and not Nord, why did they have Nord’s key?
This level of negligence with private key management really can’t be explained away.
I suppose you're free not to believe them, but I'm unsure what exactly you believe is happening here and what exactly Proton is lying about. Tesonet secretly owns them and has been running a decades-long misinformation campaign to trick you into thinking they don't? To what end? It's not like Tesonet is some nefarious company we should all be afraid of. What would they gain from lying about this if it were true?
And how can they make such an obvious mistake with their certs and then not make another one for the next decade? It's just not plausible.
At some point, you've gotta use some common sense.
My comment still applies regardless of any level of “explaining” [1]:
1. Either Nord/Teso are loose with keys (horrible)
Or
2. Proton isn’t being truthful.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy or anything that it is Tesonet/Nord. Rather, the problem is you cannot trust someone with your privacy if they can’t even manage their own keys.
[1] The explanation is poor at best and doesn’t explain why they worked so hard to try to delete all of the evidence (all of which was archived already). Additionally, nothing can explain away the lack of security with key management across these two orgs.
They worked pretty hard as detailed in an archived article changing names and any records they could [1], but you're right - not good enough [2].
As pointed out on this reddit post [3], Proton's appears to contradict itself a number of times.
It's a good thing trust based VPN's are obsolete. After all, trust isn't constant [4] as seen in this article showing how Proton supplied IP addresses to "authorities."
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 your relationship to either company?
I subscribe to Proton's services, so I was originally interested in finding out what actually happened. Now I'm interested in pointing out people's flawed reasoning because I think Proton is doing something valuable, and I don't want these attacks against them to go unanswered.
Since we're now part of this thread, as the attack on Proton was orchestrated initially by a competitor and seemed to use bot accounts on Twitter, how much do they pay you to try to discredit me?
Just kidding, see above. You and I, we are the same. We do it because it is interesting.
The streisend effect. Although, personally I am interested in this topic, as everyone using these VPNs is one ToU change away from being data mined at all time.
what makes your vpn verifiable? can i verify you run specific oss on your servers? secure enclave is just management's idea of implementing crypto. everyone out here knows that it is highly flawed and intel with their management engine bullshit can't be trusted at all.
Re verifiability: the point isn’t trust us, it’s that you don’t have to.
We built it so anyone can independently confirm what’s running.
1. All server and client code is published.
2. Builds are reproducible.
3. Each node provides cryptographic attestations of its runtime and routing identity.
4. Enclaves are used for verifiable isolation.
You can peruse the code yourself to see exactly why the transparency we bring makes legacy “trust based” VPNs obsolete: https://github.com/vpdotnet/vpnetd-sgx
It looks like this boils down to 'check the magic number in the code against the magic number our server gives you. It matches!!!'
Is there some indication the user has that your server isn't simply hard coded to return the right magic number? I don't understand how this provides any assurance of anything.
The SGX certificate is signed by intel and includes a certification of the hash of the code loaded in the secure enclave ("MRENCLAVE").
When the client connects to the server, the server presents a tls certificate that includes an attestation (with OID 1.3.6.1.4.1.311.105.1) which certifies a number of things:
- the TLS certificate's own public key (to make sure the connection is secure)
- The enclave hash
It is signed by Intel with a chain of custody going to intel's CA root. It's not "just a magic number" but "a magic number certified by Intel", of course it's up to you to choose to trust Intel or not, but it goes a much longer way than any other VPN.
I did not sell PIA. I entered into a merger agreement to create a publicly owned privacy company. Without getting into detail, I left the company on principle receiving only 1/3rd of the value for the shares.
Used to love? What changed? PIA hasn't always had the best performance but they are on the list of VPNs who were subpoenaed and had no data to give the court.
my $.02 : I tried them, but found their "we support Wireguard" a bit misleading. They only did so via their app. No way to get a stable configuration for a router (other than run a python script to get one from the app, without any guarantee how long is that config valid for).
I appreciate the engagement, but it’s become clear that this particular user has been repeatedly following my posts to respond negatively - a stalker if you will [1]. I’d prefer to keep the discussion focused on facts, not personalities.
The key point, you don’t have to trust us, and we don’t want you to. Trust code, not people. That’s the foundation of the entire effort.
1. The so-called “takeover” was being organized long before my involvement, as shown by domain registration dates and internal meeting notes. I was a more convenient target than Christel, which might explain why she asked me to buy it from her.
2. False narratives were already being circulated to open source projects before any administrative changes occurred. The subsequent channel topic changes were a reaction to those actions, though I’ve acknowledged those decisions weren’t ideal in hindsight.
On broader context, much of what’s now called “funding FOSS” doesn’t reach active developers. It tends to reward organizers and promoters rather than those writing meaningful code. Supporting individual developers directly remains a better way to sustain real innovation.
Ironically, several of the ex-staff I defended for years against serious allegations (search “OldCoder” if you’re unfamiliar) went on to form Libera, attempted to seize the freenode IRC domain, and created a false narrative about events. It’s disappointing, but not surprising given the leftist politics at play.
If you want to understand the larger trends affecting open source today, I recommend Lunduke’s Journal and similar analyses. Most major FOSS projects are no longer developer run… just look at Mozilla for an example.
I used to work at Tesonet (as software engineer) and I'm not familiar with corporate politics / ownerships but they're lovely people that would 100% walk out if there were some real Russian ties involved.
Lithuania is a really small country and IT has been a huge economic strategy since early 00s as a way to become economically independent specifically because of Russia and it worked out really well.
I have a good friend from Lithuania, who has told me so many amazing/wonderful/superlative things about the country he grew up in and loves very dearly, as well as its people. I can't wait to visit someday. Unfortunately, he only has Russian and American citizenship, so he can't purchase real estate there currently, but luckily most of Lithuania's restrictions have been very common-sense (applying only to people who frequently travel between Russia and Lithuania).
From what I can tell, Tesonet seems like a very patriotic group (as much as a corporation can be personified at all), and genuinely puts resources, both human and financial, towards raising up the local communities.
It's interesting to me that Tesonet has concentrated the most popular VPNs under one roof and is involved in so many companies that could be described as "dual-use" (white hat/black hat) such as residential/mobile proxies, ai-powered scraping, etc. It tells me that Tesonet has a very sharp understanding of gray-hat landscapes. It does seem like their portfolio could be leveraged as a valuable asset to any powerful interest, regardless if they are benevolent or malicious or misguided.
I mentioned Tesonet's stance towards Ukraine because Lithuania has a number of wealthy ex-soviet/Russian citizens and business-owners with differing politics, and wanted to clarify that for any readers who might wonder.
Additionally, I've always been very impressed with Estonia's digital infrastructure and Ukrainian software engineering - not just JetBrains but also other vendors that I've worked with personally. Seems like there are a lot of highly skilled people concentrated in your region.
> most of Lithuania's restrictions have been very common-sense (applying only to people who frequently travel between Russia and Lithuania).
Common-sense like a complete ban for entering the country for red passport holders.
Lithuania is a wonderful, beautiful country and I understand the need to push the hardliner stance in the EU, but their decisions during the conflict have been strictly political, not in the slightest "common-sense".
I couldn't really get that segue from Lithuania to Estonia. Did you mean to type "Lithuania" in the last paragraph as well?
Here..
> Additionally, I've always been very impressed with Estonia's …
Before that you were talking about Lithuania exclusively.
And then:
> … Estonia's digital infrastructure and Ukrainian software engineering - not just JetBrains …
I think it was founded in CZ and is now HQed in NL. Right?
A typo? Or there's some relation between the two countries and whether JetBrains has some history with these two that is missing here?
(I am not trying to nitpick, really interested in knowing whether there's some angle/twist here, since the post itself is about hidden connections and what not).
> (I am not trying to nitpick, really interested in knowing whether there's some angle/twist here, since the post itself is about hidden connections and what not).
Honestly that shone through even from the first sentence.
I mentioned Estonia because Lithuania/Latvia/Estonia have a bit of shared identity, kind of similar to Sweden/Norway/Finland or USA/Canada.
> I think it was founded in CZ and is now HQed in NL. Right?
Yes I was just wrong. I was convinced it was Ukrainian for some reason.
I agree that the combination of those two points made my post particularly confusing.
JetBrains was russian (as in were most people initially actually worked). They were smart enough (like any business in russia not wanting to be trapped) to have registration outside of the country.
Some part of management were in CZ. Most of the technical team were in three buildings in St.Petersburg.
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.
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.
They're neighboring small countries with similar (centuries' long) histories of tension with Russia, in its various guises. They're often considered en bloc:
You've just pissed off the entire eastern Europe and are still acting like you've any moral with this. It's the Russian state (and their elites) that's been an abuser to neighboring countries and they're still doing it. It has nothing to with race at all, Russians are slavic people as well. We don't really have a problem with them, beyond them supporting their government
> How are all Russians in Lithuania or Estonia responsible for the deeds of the Russian government? Or Russians in England?
It's not about Russian people, you assumed that. There are well known connections between any company doing business in or with Russia who are basically extorted to hand over all information about customers or financials to the government. This is no secret.
If any company is working from or with Russian ties, you can assume the government will have access to that data. Given the sensitive nature of VPN's, antivirus software, deployed software in general, its completely fair to say you don't want to work with people with ties in Russia. I'm the same. You're conflating things, and then throwing in some 'what-about-ism' for good measure. Nothing but an argument will come from this discussion so it's not welcome here. You could try your hand on Twitter.
Calling Tesonet a VC firm isn't really an accurate description of their history. They started as an IT services company (which they still do), then split out internal services into effectively separate companies (e.g. CyberCare was originally built to manage customer support for NordVPN).
Now they have got more money than they know what to do with so are making VC investments.
I have absolutely no idea why Russian ties are supposed to be more worrying than Ukrainian ties.
Ukrainian ties with government and tech in the US have been a serious source of problems; our last President was haunted by business ties with Ukraine; our current President was impeached for refusing to sell weapons quickly enough to Ukraine; we funded neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine in order to bring down its elected government and replace it with a puppet government that immediately set its sights on eradicating the Russian presence from Ukraine; Crowdstrike, a company of Ukrainian origin, was the company whose analysis was taken as gospel for the Democratic Party email leaks, and that report was used to market Russia into the greatest enemy the world has ever known, creating an entirely fictional narrative now referred to as Russiagate; and during this entire process the West and the US have been sending palletloads of cash and weapons to Ukraine to the tune of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, and becoming personally financially entangled with Ukrainian oligarchs.
Why should I be worried if the Russians are eavesdropping on my proxy again? They're not going to send it to anyone who cares about what I'm doing, and they certainly don't care what I'm doing. Ukraine is the most corrupt, poorest country in Europe, completely tied up with US intelligence, and is "run" by a tv actor.
Our last President was haunted by completely unverified claims of business ties with Ukraine. Someone in UKR clearly tried to buy influence via his son, but all the force of Fox News and the GOP together couldn't produce one single sticky-note worth of evidence tying it to any success.
Painting "armed invasion" as "Russian presence" is like calling "stabbing someone in an alley" a "medical procedure".
Russiagate was not a "fictional narrative," as a cursory amount of research will reveal.
> The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee investigation released their report in five volumes between July 2019 and August 2020. The committee concluded that the intelligence community assessment alleging Russian interference was "coherent and well-constructed", and that the assessment was "proper", learning from analysts that there was "no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions".[11][12] The report found that the Russian government had engaged in an "extensive campaign" to sabotage the election in favor of Trump, which included assistance from some of Trump's own advisers.
After seeing the front end and the tiniest bit of backend on CrowdStrike and why they’re in Ukraine… I wouldn’t say any company with offices there makes me feel at ease. It’s not better.
At this point, the VPN industry is so rife with shady dealings, suspicious ownership structures, weird exits, questionable marketing/PR practices/pushes, and rumours that waters have been muddied sufficiently for every provider out there. It might have been by design as well. Who knows.
I now believe that you know your use case and use VPN only for that, and decide whether you really need to pay with parts of your kidneys for a service that claims to be the "uber privacy bulwark of the season" (until proven otherwise, as it happens), and get done with it, and make sure "anonymity and privacy" are not the expectations unless you have gone to great lengths to ensure these two, and if that's the case, you won't be in the market for "list most private VPNs providers" at a search or LLM input box.
If your needs are anonymity, a VPN is not going to solve it— in fact, relying on one might endanger you. Even for privacy, I'd be very careful in trusting a VPN (any VPN).
So if you need a VPN for streaming content from other geographies, just get the one at the best cost that does the job well in your geography, without going through the rabbit hole of cryptographic verification, reputation spiral, etc.
A VPN is always a risk. Still, there is a difference between using Mulvad or PrivateInternetAccess. The difference between risking that the service might do bad things with your data, and having high certainty that it does. And this article gives pretty good indications which category each service belongs to
Yes. Very much so. PIA was purchased by a British-Israeli corporation called Kape Inc. which has been a known bad-actor in the past and is a giant red flag when looking for VPN options. (edited away the brevity)
Not saying that this is what I do, but a VPN is useful for things that are illegal but not serious.
For example, France is spying torrent downloads of copyrighted content but they only look at the domestic consumer ISP IP addresses. They ignore all foreign IPs, so if you're using a VPN it doesn't matter if the VPN keeps all the logs they won't bother.
Of course if you're doing things that will get you personally targeted by the police, like cyber-bullying or CSAM, a VPN won't protect you.
Yeah, agreed. Most VPNs just move the trust boundary from your ISP to another opaque network and call it privacy. There’s no way to verify what’s running, who controls it, or what happens to your data once it leaves your machine.
We solve this with vp.net, by making the service verifiable. The code can be reviewed, the builds are reproducible, and each node can prove what software it’s running and where your traffic actually goes [1].
It doesn’t turn a VPN into an anonymity tool, but it makes trust measurable instead of blind. That’s the part the industry should have fixed a long time ago.
Hey Carl! This is the first I'm hearing of Obscura. After doing a deep dive into your product, it looks to be a very fascinating privacy tool. However, I'm concerned with your operating under US jurisdiction, as detailed by others here:
While I understand potentially not wanting to incorporate in the EU (with Chat Control on the horizon) nor Switzerland (due to their own non-EU-related privacy backslide), why still select the US, which historically other privacy tools have largely avoided? It feels like you're already shooting yourself in the foot, whereas you'd be good in the EU should Chat Control not pass. While it's great that you verifiably can't see a user's internet traffic, you're one US court order away from a forced compromising of the service for a user (or at least, giving up the connecting IP). Historically, EU court orders have been easier and more transparently fought by privacy tools.
Non sequitur, it would be great if you prioritized accepting Monero as payment, like your exit hop Mullvad. Also, how much control do we have over the features Mullvad offers (e.g. DAITA, quantum resistance, DNS filters, IPv6, integration with Mullvad Browser)?
Unfortunately in the world we live in no single jurisdiction is good enough anymore, laws can always change and Chat Control can be re-proposed over and over again.
Luckily, an MPR like Obscura with hops across different jurisdictions (Obscura in US, and Mullvad in EU) give you a much better scenario than just being in one jurisdiction.
> it would be great if you prioritized accepting Monero as payment
Definitely prioritized, one of our engineers is working on it right now.
> Also, how much control do we have over the features Mullvad offers (e.g. DAITA, quantum resistance, DNS filters, IPv6, integration with Mullvad Browser)?
We're limited by the Partner API that Mullvad offers right now, but we'll be looking into many of these soon. For example, we're implementing DNS filtering as we speak!
Can you control the geography of the exit node? I really like Private Relay but it doesn't get around geo restrictions because the IP is still in the same country you are.
VPNs will become illegal or backdoored, because privacy is becoming illegal.
This is not really a technology problem, it's a social and legislative one. Many of us are afraid of (other people's) privacy, so we vote for legislators that will make it illegal. The legislators stoke this fear of privacy because they want an excuse to deepen their control of discourse, and their own citizens.
I only ever use a VPN to access region blocked content and the occasional "linux iso" torrent..I tried Mullvad first, but they just don't play the game of cat and mouse with the streaming providers and all their IPs are pretty much blocked. I have about a 95% success rate with NordVPN (except for Amazon Prime video which have some sort of wizardry and always are able to detect VPNs).
It's a shame because Mullvad has a deal with Tailscale where you can sign up for Mullvad through Tailscale and use any of their servers as a Tailscale exit node. It's super slick and nice since Tailscale has really decent apps for nearly everything (even Apple TV, etc) and I already have a decently sized Tailnet of all my devices / ssh accessible things.
It’s not Tesonet, Proton is wholly self-owned and managed. Proton VPN was briefly sharing employees with Tesonet during initial app bringup, and that partnership is long over.
Naturally due to competition and the huge importance of privacy in this space, people still bring this up, but Proton VPN does not and never will sell or share your data with anyone.
It's when your director goes and tells you not to tell anyone but to report to another building to another team for a month or three, and help them with whatever they ask, because you have a very specific set of skills. (In this case, setting up VPN backend infra.)
Hi everybody, this is Andy here. I'm one of the original researchers from CERN behind ProtonMail and ProtonVPN. There's some false info out there about ProtonVPN, and these stories were first fabricated by Private Internet Access, a competitor who has been feeling pressure from ProtonVPN lately.
The stories are false, but we have always been very open with the community, so I would like to provide some background anyways. As many of you know, Proton has many partners (Radware, F5 Networks, Equinix, Radix, Farice, LeaseWeb, Dell, Supermicro, etc). Tesonet Lithuania is indeed a partner within our long list of partners, but it's a huge stretch to claim ProtonVPN is run by Tesonet.
We first met Tesonet back in 2015 when they offered to provide us with internet infrastructure (we received many offers after the infamous 2015 DDoS attacks - we never bought infrastructure from Tesonet). During this period, Google was suppressing ProtonMail in search results, and we were financially suffering. To address this challenge, we needed to hire staff outside of Switzerland where costs are lower. This is how our Skopje, Prague, and Vilnius offices got started.
Prague happened because two of ProtonMail's early hires from CERN were Czech. Skopje and Vilnius happened because we knew local partners there (it would not have been possible to source local candidates, handle HR and payroll, understand local regulations, etc, without outside assistance). We worked with Radix (Macedonia) and Tesonet (Lithuania) to accomplish this. Tesonet in particular was selected since they are one of Lithuania's largest tech companies (and we already knew them).
While our early hires in both Vilnius and Skopje were always working fully for Proton, they were formally employed by our local partners because we did not have a local entity that could employ them. In the early days of Proton, this was not an uncommon arrangement since our team is spread across over 10 countries.
In mid-2016, Google finally halted the suppression of ProtonMail in search results and we experienced strong growth. This gave us the resources to create our own corporate entities in Macedonia and Lithuania, and we engaged Radix and Tesonet to do this. We used the same legal address and nominee directors as our local partners because we still did not have our own office yet. For contractual reasons, these moves took some time. For example, ProtonLabs Skopje, our newest entity, only moved in November 2017.
For historical reasons, some connections to our past local partners remain. Some of the IPs we use in ProtonVPN's global network might be acquired or leased from Radix (we have never, and do not currently use IPs from Tesonet - most IPs are from LeaseWeb or are our own IPs). Similarly, the ProtonVPN Android keystore mistakenly lists Tesonet as the organization name, since our Android developer was at that time formally employed through Tesonet. Due to the way the Android Play store works, this keystore can unfortunately never be changed, but it remains under our sole control.
The entities we use today in Skopje and Vilnius are both subsidiaries of our corporate entities in Switzerland. While we no longer employ team members through third parties (except for in the United States where don't do direct employment), we do continue to share expertise and work on projects together with various partners. For example, our two new Swiss datacenters are being built together with Radix in order to share some of the fixed costs.
Going forward, we will need to continue working with partners around the world as we grow (unless you're Google, you can't do everything yourself). This is not the first time one of our partnerships has been inaccurately portrayed (the other incident is so ridiculous I'm not going to mention it here). The truth however, is less interesting than the conspiracy theories might have you believe.
--------
Further comments on the smear campaign against us:
The false allegations were originally spread by US-based VPN provider, Private Internet Access (PIA), who also happens to be a major competitor. We think it says a lot about them to be engaged in shady marketing tactics.
ProtonVPN/ProtonMail does not, and has never used any IPs or servers from Tesonet (this can be publicly verified)
Proton does not share any employees (or company directors) with Tesonet. This is also a verifiable fact.
Proton has not used Tesonet for HR since 2016.
There is little actual evidence that Tesonet does data-mining (in any case we have never used infrastructure from them).
Proton has many suppliers (Dell, Juniper, Radware, etc). If you dig enough, you can find dirt on all of them and create a false narrative. We do business with other tech companies - this is not a secret or abnormal.
We're not surprised to be attacked given how shady the VPN industry is. If anything, it indicates to us that we are doing something right.
> Due to the way the Android Play store works, this keystore can unfortunately never be changed, but it remains under our sole control.
Out of curiosity, why not release the new version as a separate app under a new package name. I realise that’s not an ideal solution since it would mean starting fresh with installs and reviews, but it could allow you to move forward without being locked into the old key.
I love Proton’s stuff and use all their products — maybe I’m just being paranoid, but even though the explanation makes sense, I still wonder about those old connections. Would be nice to see more official proofs
> it would not have been possible to source local candidates, handle HR and payroll, understand local regulations, etc, without outside assistance
I have no dog in this fight, but I agree with the "smear campaign" that this is 100% bullshit. I work for a fully remote company with employees from all over the world, including Eastern Europe, and we didn't need to partner with any local company, let alone a competitor. Plus even if we need local HR assistance there are plenty of global/local HR services to choose from that focus on HR, no "employee sharing" needed.
I don't know if any other claims are false, but this kind of bullshit obvious to anyone who has been in a similar position undermines everything else they claim. Plus it was never mentioned what these "local partners" get in return, which seems to be the most interesting thing if there's no secret ownership, which is the thing they set out to debunk.
> The false allegations were originally spread by US-based VPN provider, Private Internet Access (PIA)
While such comments may be okay in other forums, please note that the HN guidelines forbid such:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Now read up on how your browser points to a SOCKS5 proxy. For Firefox, I create a separate profile. For chromium based, I use the command line.
You are now virtually located to whatever region you chose for your VM.
I mentioned some scripting. It's simple enough that I have a /bin/sh script to spin up the VM, set up the SSH SOCKS5 proxy, launch the browser, then spin the VM down when the browser exits.
Firefox supports per-container (and as such per-tab) SOCKS proxies, which I find really useful.
So useful, in fact, that I've come full circle and I am now running a userspace Wireguard to SOCKS proxy [1] in order to have that convenience for a VPN which does not have any host I could SSH to.
Tailscale is great, but by itself is the wrong tool for the task of routing traffic over some host only for a single browser tab (but to all destinations for that browser tab), as it seems to be "all or nothing" when it comes to using a remote exit node.
It's probably possible to set up a local SOCKS proxy that knows to use some Tailscale non-exit-node for egress, and to manually allow that traffic within Tailscale and on the remote node, but not out of the box as far as I can tell.
Installing a SOCKS proxy on the remote node, reachable only over Tailscale, would be an alternative, but that doesn't work on an Apple TV.
Major issue I faced in this method is the network egress costs the cloud providers charge. I had to remind myself not to accidentally land on YouTube or some other video streaming sites.
Are there any cloud providers who don’t charge for network egress?
Biggest issue regular user might find with this is that basically all the VPS host' IP ranges are known, and plenty of websites give you a different (worse) experience compared to when using residential addresses, or straight up block you.
Personally I found the hassle to great, compared to using existing VPN services.
Exact same experience here. In the 2010s I ran my own VPN exit node on a dirt cheap VPS so I could access streaming content in my country of birth. Worked great for years, but nowadays so many sites simply block non-residential IP ranges that I gave up ages ago now.
It's a shame because deploying WireGuard was a simple two command process: git checkout followed by a `docker compose up -d` for me etc on a fresh VPS instance.
Yes, but search for "VPS" instead of "Cloud". "Cloud" is a marketing buzzword used to make people pay 10x-500x more than they have to. Although VPS providers are catching on, and starting to label their VPS services as "cloud" now.
VPS tunnels have their place, but they have one major downside: Your outward-facing IP address will (most likely) be static. And because you are the only one using that VPS, it is easy to link your internet activity across different sites. If you want to use this method to protect your privacy, then you need to frequently discard your VPS and pick a new one.
This, and FoxyProxy for domain-based proxy settings is my go to when connecting to some websites (self-hosted bit bucket/confluence, etc) behind Corp intranet boundaries.
Thanks for the link. How does this work on the server side? It gets packets on 8080 and then what? The article needs to explain the server config, even if it is just how to install ssh-server.
I have tried setting up OpenVPN on my own VPS and I didn't get very far with it. I have also had to use OpenVPN in the day job and I much prefer just using ssh without some extravagant OpenVPN layer.
My experience of failing to configure a VPN of my own (primarily for testing GeoIP) led me to try a few VPNs and the amount of junk adverts and whatnot made me wonder if it was time to fdisk my computer and start over due to the virus-vibes I was getting from a VPN. This was in the days before VPN adverts on lame YouTube channels, so I presume the product has improved since then.
In theory, someone smarter than me can rent a VPS and get OpenVPN on there, or, better still, a remote desktop so that only the screen image goes over the internet from the VPS to the PC, X-Window style but better. This could be further obfuscated by using 443 and one's own special ROT13 'encryption'.
Presumably a skilled person that knows what they are doing could get it all setup in an hour, to write concise instructions that 'civilians' can work through in pretty much the same time.
If you were highly invested in porn, watching Netflix in foreign countries and with even worse stuff to hide, you would think that some investment in getting a proper VPN with your own VPS would be the way to go, but no. Cost isn't the problem if you are deeply into something worth hiding, so why do so few people roll their own VPN?
The reality is that the typical product is marketed with FUD and the goal is to turn you into a 'sleeping giant'. A 'sleeping giant' is a customer that has a standing order or other payment arrangement that is for a service that is not used, and for that to not be noticed on bank statements. Everyone wants you to be a 'sleeping giant', including some 'worthy' charities, dating websites and every software subscription service. They aren't using FUD marketing though.
The commercial VPNs have mastered the art of selling a product that deserves technical knowledge to understand to the masses, so you have got to respect the hustle.
VPS's that you can easily spin up for an hour or two tend to charge $$$$ for egress bandwidth, which makes them an unattractive option for streaming video over.
it's very easy to setup your own VPN on your own server. I'm using AWS Lightsail because of virtually unlimited bandwidth and the locations I like, but any VPS would work well. I used to have my own scripts but I found this lately which is doing this much better than what I was doing https://github.com/angristan/wireguard-install
The only advantage of professional VPN is the ability to use obfuscation, so to bypass VPN restrictions in countries like Egypt or others.
That is brilliant, many thanks for that and the Lightsail suggestion. Now I just need a legitimate use case, which will probably be a locked down origin server with even more security than what I had before with ssh things.
There are very simple options to selfhost a VPN nowadays. For example, Amnezia allows you to just type your server ssh credentials into their mobile app, and it will automatically set up AmneziaWG on your server and add it to the app. You can then create Amnezia or plain WireGuard config files from extra devices right from there.
That sounds like I'm putting a lot of trust in an app. Also giving it control over my server, which I guess is not a big deal if the server is a disposable VPS
I too recently tried to set up OpenVPN on a VPS and it was a huge pain in the @ss, even while following a (very long) tutorial. If I figure out an easier way to do this I'll message you in this thread
OpenVPN is just really complicated, which makes sense because of the context and history. But even me who've done plenty of OpenVPN setups through the years, found Wireguard a lot simpler and easier to both learn and use effectively. So if you haven't tried Wireguard, give it a go, the simplicity is pretty nice.
Note: Wireguard is good because it's simple. It makes point-to-point tunnels, it does that well, and that's all it does. You're on your own for the rest.
Are we allowed to discuss (edit: if it's not too political?) if Kape Technologies has any connections to Israeli security services, given the nature of VPNs and given the amount of data that can be trivially collected, and:
"Being from Israel, Teddy Sagi had connections with the Israeli military intelligence sphere and was able to procure himself a real-life cyber spy [his co-founder] from the famed Unit 8200 (kinda like Israel’s version of the NSA)" [0]
Unit 8200 is the premier software development track in the Israeli military.
Every Israeli tech company likely has multiple developers from Unit 8200 in it. Whether it's building e-commerce shops or making video games.
While 8200 definitely falls under the military intelligence wing, I don't think describing people in it as Cyber Spies is anywhere near accurate. And unless that guy was very high ranking it is a stretch to imply that's an indication that IL military intelligence is involved in the company.
That is not to say that the military isn't involved with the company - that might very well be true, just that someone being from Unit 8200 isn't an indication of it.
People who don't live in countries with mandatory conscription for all don't really understand: everyone is connected to the military but it means nothing.
Judging an Israeli citizen on their IDF ties is like judging a US citizen on the fact that they went to public school.
According to google, 87% of Americans go to a state-funded school, so yes judging an American based on the fact that they could afford to be in the top 13% and go to a public school instead is legitimate. This doesn't seem to match what you're trying to say.
You’re using the British definition of “public school” here, which is a “private school” in the US. US public schools are equivalent to UK state schools, in that both are run by the state.
> everyone is connected to the military but it means nothing.
No, people who live in tiny countries with mandatory conscription don't really understand that it means that their entire country is militarized. It's not surprising that fish can't see water.
> is like judging a US citizen on the fact that they went to public school.
It's exactly like that. If public school in the US trained people to kill and spy, it would be entirely safe to assume that the US was full of killer spies. For example, if you know that US public school taught a view of world history that was distorted in particular ways, and had very little emphasis in foreign languages, it would be safe to assume that Americans have a distorted view of the world, and largely don't speak foreign languages.
It doesn't matter if it's accurate or not, such judgements are made by most people every day. Someone who was professionally formed somewhere has a higher probability of ties to them later on. Being intelligence services this might be even more true.
In today's political climate where people around the world see Israel judging (and sentencing, and carrying out the punishment) every Palestinian as terrorists, I think this wide brush of judging Israelis on their ties with the IDF is probably widely accepted as "only fair". When it comes to Unit 8200 the implications are even stronger.
But I don't get the US public school system reference. You have to start with a baseline and if you see a private Ivy League school on someone's CV and a random public school on someone else's I'm sure you'll probably make the obvious assumption about which one is better, even if sometimes the obvious is wrong.
>Teddy Sagi had connections with the Israeli military intelligence sphere
Does this mean much given that israel has mandatory military service? Unlike in the US where you have to make a conscious choice (eg. patriotism or desperation) to join the CIA/NSA/military, that's not really the case in israel. "has ties to unit 8200" might as well mean "has ties to stanford/MIT/caltech" or "has ties to big tech".
If I was running an intelligence agency and was given my choice of conscripts,
I wouldn't hand my intelligence secrets to people who resented being forced to be there; or to mouthy people I thought might blab about it after the end of their service; or to people with an anti-authority streak or at risk of a Snowden-style attack of conscience about civil liberties.
I would select for people with a deep love of their country; and a sense of loyalty that would extend well beyond the end of their service. The rest I'd send elsewhere - plenty of other units need tech folks, that drone/radio/printer isn't going to fix itself.
On the other hand, if as an aspiring software engineer I was forced to do military service and had the option to do it as part of a military cybersecurity unit, I'd pick that over running around with weapons without blinking an eye.
Unit 8200 is a cyberwarfare and spy unit. They were responsible for the Lebanon pager supply chain terror attack. I definitely want to know if they are involved with any tech I'm using so I can avoid it.
I don't see how that addresses my point that enlistment is mandatory in israel. You can make similar claims about other israeli military units. If anything, given the current war in Gaza whatever the other IDF branches/units are doing are probably worse than hacking a few phones.
Unit 8200 is part of the IDF and contributing to those war crimes. I as a consumer only need to consider my own risk profile, not the politics of an entity that's committing acts I consider to be terrorism.
yes. they are involved in tech that you are using. they are working in apple, google, microsoft, nvidia, intel, amd, arm, qualcomm, cisco, etc that have presence in Israel and even expand it.
Talking about the breath of which Israel has compromised our technology is actually helping to make my point. They're operating a comprehensive surveillance network and have the ability to literally plant explosives in our consumer devices.
Linux is not operated by NSA and is open for inspection. Can you say the same about VPN services in question?
It would be naive to think Huawei is isn’t influenced by CCP, specially if it is found, by presumably someone from PLA intelligence unit by your suggestion.
this is not a helpful argument. this isn't about not using Israeli OSS software but services that feed data into the surveillance grid of quasi rogue state.
> Does this mean much given that israel has mandatory military service?
Yes. Mandatory military service is still military service. It's still following government orders at an impressionable age in a culture that deliberately inculcates a mentality of following orders even when they go against your every human instinct. It still means working for an organisation that knows its job is killing people, even if you're not the one pulling the trigger yourself. And Israeli military intelligence specifically has a long history of keeping supposedly retired civilians on as sleeper agents who infiltrate supposedly neutral companies.
(Does that mean this guy specifically is definitely one of them? Of course not. But to anyone with reason to be using a VPN at all it's probably too much of a risk)
but it goes both ways. no one can question what Jew haters are doing for fear of anti-anti-semitism. If no one is a "Jew hater" then you allow real antisemitism to foster unabated.
You can setup a private VPN with Digital Ocean and a PiHole droplet. I guess it's a little bit less likely to be a honeypot. It also seems cheaper than any public VPN offering.
In Germany (and probably in the UK too), you now have to be very careful about what you write online. There is actually a section 188 that makes insulting, defaming, or slandering people in political life a criminal offense. You can now face heavy fines for minor insults (“idiot”) or even have your home searched. A VPN can be useful here.
If anyone wants some background info on the "idiot" comment:
A Bavarian man captioned an image of Robert Habeck (the vice chancellor of Germany at the time) with "Schwachkopf Professional" - "Professional Idiot". It was styled after the Schwarzkopf ad campaign. For this, Habeck filed a criminal complaint "to stop hate crime" against the man and the man's apartment was searched by the police and a tablet confiscated. Oh, and he was arrested over it as well. [0]
(The man was also accused of posting some nazi imagery earlier in the year, but the order to search his house seems to be related only to the insult. [1])
Imagine if you could be arrested for calling your (vice) president an idiot.
> Imagine if you could be arrested for calling your (vice) president an idiot.
You must not set foot in the USA, India, China, et cetera, then.
Imagine you say? Getting arrested might be the least of your worries in today's world if you decide to call a president (or the immediate underling) an idiot in many countries :D
This is actually not uncommon in most of the world. American 1A is actually an extremely novel concept most other countries still haven't caught up on.
American 1A is as strong as it's proving to be right now and increasingly proving to be stronger and stronger by the day, since January this year!
Many other countries have protections like that, "on paper" (!!!) - but the point is in how it is used or misused, or rather completely ignored - directly or indirectly, like in the USA currently and many other countries in the world.
The UK, where the government has literally smashed printing presses in the newspaper age when magazines were thought to be publishing embarrassing news about the Crown? Where the government's legal authority to do so is still intact? That UK?
The original use for a VPN - getting access to private resources - is still very much in play.
I don't just mean being able to access some private web interface you have on a private server in your at home, I mean connecting a satellite office to the main corporate office.
But for all of these consumer marketed VPNs, I think your list has 90%+ covered...
Interesting that we use the same word to describe both technologies, but semantically and technically they are very different.
Perhaps we use the same word to describe them because initially they did use the same technologies, but they have branched out ever since? Maybe IPSec would be a common tech used. But the algorithms are not the same anymore since they serve different purposes (Personal privacy vs corporate/sysadmin security)
In the corporate world VPNs were usually a lower level abstraction security mechanism or a redundant security mechanism to either complement application layer_security, or to hot-patch modern security unto legacy LAN systems. VPN encryption is usually provided by the local router. Common algorithms are IPSec/IKev2.
In the personal privacy world, we are talking about a proxy that hides identification such as IP addresses, and pools connections to provide privacy. The actual encryption is not the main security mechanism even, as it only covers the transit between consumer to proxy, leaving (a potentially longer transit) between the proxy to the actual destination.
In terms of purpose and architecture it's closer to bitcoin tumblers, or Tor or Freenet, or money laundering placement. The fact that they call it VPNs seems to me more of a marketing scheme or political play to avoid association with all of the above, than an actual technical or academical description. If someone were to analyse these technologies, I'm sure a neutral or critical approach would avoid uncritically calling them VPNs in the same way that research is published not about Viagra, but on Sildenafil.
> Interesting that we use the same word to describe both technologies, but semantically and technically they are very different.
That's where my head was at. When i hear my colleagues talk about a VPN, i'm thinking about an IPSEC tunnel and an afternoon of swearing at ios on some outdated ASA. When I hear regular people talking about a VPN, my mind immediately goes to "oh, so you want to watch rick and morty on netflix and don't know anybody hosting a jellyfin/plex server".
When do we coin a new term? Or do we? Does "vpn" turn into a word like "truck" where it's only the context that tells you if we're talking about a 2 axle pickup truck in a home depot parking lot or something pulling a 40ft container unit?
How do authoritarian regimes differentiate business and consumer network traffic, for the purpose of inspection and decryption, censorship of specific content, or blocking of specific protocols? This also overlaps with net neutrality and dump pipes vs. content-centric metering.
Company VPN most likely goes to set IP address associated with a business. And this is most likely a rather static thing. So tracking data going there is most likely legitimate. And well on other side they can make whatever comes out from business IP a problem for business.
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.
You don't need fully broken encryption to gain useful information. Knowing how much data is transferred, to which servers, and when (especially with details like how various endpoints will inadvertently chunk up HTTPS requests based on the details about the content or how interactive sessions will have certain back-and-forth transmit patterns) is sufficent to generate a traffic "fingerprint" which you can correlate to other users, to automated traces crawling those same servers, and otherwise get a very good sense of what a user is up to online even above and beyond just knowing which IP is being queried.
Toss that into any sort of "anomaly detection" or other such nonsense, and it's easy to create rare edge cases at an ISP level.
It's somewhat analogous to how you can sometimes "reverse" hashes like SHA256. E.g., suppose the thing you're hashing is an IPV4 address. There are only 4 billion of those, so a pre-image attack just iterating through all of them and checking the forward direction of the hash is extremely effective. TLS makes that a little more complicated since the content itself is actually hidden, but time and space side-channels give you a lot of stochastic information. You might not be able to deduce somebody's bank password, but you can probably figure out where in the bank's login flow they are and approximately what they did once they logged in.
It may have been fixed since, but I saw a decent talk about this (defcon, IIRC) using Tinder as an example.
Using timing, amounts of data, and what was being connected to, you could recreate what someone was looking at and swiping direction. (left/right sent different amounts of data)
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.
They may not need the contents, seeing you're connecting to a netflix IP and having a lot of data transfer may be a good reason to throttle, for example.
I imagine so. I understand that Opera GX, for example, provides a specialized version to Russian IPs that locks down the search engines that can be used.
Australian ISPs are legally required to retain metadata for two years.
That's one of the best reasons to use a VPN if you're in Australia. Give up as little as possible.
I have found, however, lots of sites block or Captcha-restrict IP addresses that are (somehow determined as) non-residential, and Netflix restricts its content as well.
I use VPNs when I'm trying to ferret out the scope of an outage. I have VPN servers on local ISP which moves me around different routing. I use a commercial service to move me further out and to other countries.
It's probably more that a lot of people have been convinced that they need a VPN, but they don't. There are use cases, like I trust Mullvad more than I trust some random hotels WiFi. When traveling it can provide a slightly higher base layer of trust.
If you live in a country that restricts your internet access, which to be fair is most these days, a VPN can help. Most of us just don't care about those restrictions or they are more easily circumvented using a 3rd. party DNS. Also if you're in country like Iran or Russia, you really need to trust your VPN provider and strange corporate structures and staff sharing really isn't helping in that respect.
For the average person, no you don't need a VPN. You might need one for a few days or week per year, if you travel and need to access your bank or corporate infrastructure (in that case your employer most likely have their own VPN). VPNs are a niche business, but online influencers have convinced a lot of people that they need a VPN for everything, which simply isn't the case for the vast majority of us.
> I trust Mullvad more than I trust some random hotels WiFi
For what exactly? All sites are HTTPS now anyway, so the only thing you're leaking is the hostnames / IPs you visit. I don't exactly see how the whole "hotel WIFI" thing is relevant at all, except as a dishonest marketing strategy by VPN salesmen
One others seem to have missed 3. ad blocking on your phone away from home. Almost all VPNs have a block ads / known malicious traffic function. This can be done with just a DNS but often mobile carriers will block using your own DNS.
3. When you know/suspect your ISP is more shady than the VPN you're using. This applies particularly when you're doing something your government doesn't like.
VPNs don't increase privacy, they just change who has the opportunity to spy on your traffic. Sometimes, it's much better if it's some foreign random ISP instead of your local government, who can send law enforcement agents where you live.
3. Hosting websites with DDNS (though the abuse from that caused Mullvad and IVPN to drop port forwarding)
4. Though it hurts anonymity, and is relatively rare: I2P or Hyphanet, because some websites block known P2P nodes[1]. Important if your bank or work is being a jerk about it.
5. As ThatMedicIsASpy notes, ISP issues: some routers soil the bed from P2P, some ISP's throttle P2P traffic regardless of legality, etc.
2. Because you normally visit example.com using an incognito window, your browser hasn't cached the redirect to SSL, or the address bar suggestion, and you haven't bookmarked the site.
3. You key in example.com, the browser connects over http, and the evil wifi MITMs your unencrypted connection - removing the redirect to SSL and messing with the page however the evildoer wants.
Obviously a VPN provider can also do this, but you might hope they're less likely to.
Will Chromium generate a "Your connection is not private" warning in this scenario, that the user has to click through to proceed?
And the user would have to type example.com in the browser bar; https://example.com would also trigger a warning, correct?
"Obviously a VPN provider can also do this, but you might hope they're less likely to."
So you have identified some marginal privacy issue, and have identified that a VPN doesn't solve it, but rather that it moves the risk to a third party actor you subjectively feel is better. Well I feel that, subjectively, introducing a third party generally decreases security.
I believe that not all privacy and security considerations can or should be solved technically, but rather we have extra-technical mechanisms like law and social norms that provide some protection on the edge cases. For example, an employee cannot lookup information for personal reasons on a system they are entrusted to in a professional capacity. I'm no expert, but you probably have first laws that prohibit that, second corporate policy that prohibits that, and thirdly social pressure that prohibits that to some extent. Are they perfect? Not necessarily which is why for the most part we rely on technical encryption and security mechanisms.
But at some point these examples become so contrived and the medicine becomes the poison, so you enter into territory that is pretty standard in other industries, what's to stop a waiter from spitting into a cup? There's no spit filter in place of McDonalds, there's other mechanisms protecting us.
On a similar note, logic and debate is not the only way to convey this phenomenon, so here's some more artistic retort to privacy schizophrenia.
Using a VPN means you have to trust one company instead of every wifi you connect to, and also makes that an entity that's an expert at privacy instead of working off a half-forgotten router in the back.
How is any of this "medicine becoming the poison" or "schizophrenic"?
It does if you do DNS over TLS or HTTPS, although I guess that information would still be knowable to your DNS provider if they terminate your TLS behind the scenes
Not quite. In order to make TLS certs work on a per-site basis, requests sent over HTTPS also include a virtual host indicator in cleartext that shows the hostname of the site you’re trying to connect to, so if the IP on the other end is hosting multiple domains it can find the right cert. For this reason some people feel that DNS over TLS is pretty pointless as a privacy measure.
It's still not perfect since you're still leaking information about the privacy set implied by the outer ClientHello, but this possibly isn't much worse than the destination IP address you're leaking anyway.
SNI relies on the client specifying the host name in the unencrypted ClientHello message that initiates a TLS handshake. Encrypted Client Hello involves extra configuration that most websites don't implement.
Or that dude in the black hoodie in the corner who always seems to be camped at whatever cafe you and your cow orkers are using as your startup "office"?
Additionally, if ConsumerVPNs provide encryption, don't they provide encryption from the stretch between the consumer to the proxy? The stretch between the proxy to the destination would not have additional encryption, and there is no reason to believe that the second transit would be shorter.
Protection from IP tracking, especially if your ISP doesn't do CGNAT. Of course there's a trade-off here between
a) your ISP (who knows your billing information) knowing which sites you visit, and any site you visit can correlate internet activity back to your household
b) your VPN provider knowing all the sites you visit
But a VPN, commercial or self-hosed, also won't stop fingerprinting. It changes your apparent IP address, but the rest of the characteristics of your device and browser stay the same.
Way too many services in Mexico only work from Mexican IPs, from paying your electricity or internet bills to topping up highway toll accounts and even ordering food from a supermarket
3. Avoiding government-mandated record keeping by ISPs in a country like the UK, where all ISPs have to keep a year of your browsing history and it can be accessed warrant free by 17 different agencies(including DEFRA, the agriculture agency).
And yes, I'm aware that you're most likely trading one surveilence for another - but honestly at this point I'd much rather trust my paid VPN provider with my browsing data than my ISP and ultimately the government.
Given that most of the web has TLS and you can easily do DNS over TLS - that's very very high level metadata, where I personally just don't see much ROI vs to giving that metadata to random company with no regulations whatsoever.
> but honestly at this point I'd much rather trust my paid VPN provider with my browsing data than my ISP and ultimately the government.
Your ISP will need to comply with local laws and regulations, and you'll have some recourse if broken. A third-party VPN operating in an overseas jurisdiction could be doing anything with your data.
Unless it's selling the data back to my own government, I'd rather a foreign commercial VPN provider have that information rather than my own domestic ISP or my own domestic government.
My government can do parallel construction, can send teams of armed gunmen to my house, and otherwise find far more methods to persecute me than the intelligence services of Russia or China can.
Being innocent of any kind of crime does not necessarily remove one from the crosshairs of law enforcement organizations, particularly the FBI, who have an extensive, well-documented history of violating citizens' constitutional rights, conducting partisan witch hunts against political opponents, being a lawless menace to civil rights activists, anti-war activists, gay rights activists, both pro-abortion and anti-abortion activists, and is probably busy right now planning on being a menace to trans inclusivity activists.
There is no such thing as a friendly government, but I'd much rather have my data in the hands of a government 10,000 miles away than in the hands of my own government. My own government hunts, injures, stalks, harasses, socially ostracizes, and even kills my fellow citizens far more than any foreign government ever has.
>but there are still metadata that can be collected.
That logic is questionable given how poorly "spying on public wifi users" scales. You either need to put a bunch of eavesdropping radios in a bunch of public places or somehow convince a bunch of small businesses to use your "free wifi" solution. Even if you do have access, it's hard to monetize the data, given that nearly every device does MAC randomization (so you can't track across different SSIDs) and iOS/windows rotates mac addresses for open/public networks. OTOH setting up metadata capture on a commercial VPN service is pretty straightforward, because you control all the servers.
Doesn't pretty much every Starbucks location in the United States use a nationwide provider?
Despite the randomized Mac address, you can still fingerprint devices using all the usual tricks when they connect to the authentication and authorization page before you allow them to access the broader internet.
If the receipt had a passcode on it, you've got a link between all of your browser fingerprint, radio fingerprint and payment detail fingerprint and possibly customer loyalty provided at time of payment.
>Despite the randomized Mac address, you can still fingerprint devices using all the usual tricks when they connect to the authentication and authorization page before you allow them to access the broader internet.
Fingerprinting is overrated given that every iPhone 17 is identical to any other iPhone 17. If you leave system settings at stock, which most people do, there's very little to fingerprint.
>Doesn't pretty much every Starbucks location in the United States use a nationwide provider?
True, although mobile data is cheap and plentiful enough that I rarely bother using wifi at cafes or fast food places. The only time I use public wifi is if I'm staying long term, which basically only encompasses trains, airports, and hotels. Those are diverse enough that it's tough to build a complete profile.
>If the receipt had a passcode on it, you've got a link between all of your browser fingerprint, radio fingerprint and payment detail fingerprint and possibly customer loyalty provided at time of payment.
I don't think I ever saw a place that was that guarded about their wifi. The closest I've seen is hotels requiring your room/last name, which would allow them to identify you, but at the same time I'm not sure how much information they can glean, other than that I'm logging into gmail or airbnb. Persistent monitoring that ISPs can do is far more useful.
> Those are diverse enough that it's tough to build a complete profile.
Debatable; i promise you that somebody out there is willing to buy the info and will attempt to combine it with $otherInfo such that it becomes valuable enough for somebody else to buy. Lots of adtech/survalence-tech operates with thin margins at _massive scale_.
> I don't think I ever saw a place that was that guarded about their wifi.
It's rare; i'd run into it only a few times a year. Typically PoS systems and WiFi are not integrated. I also haven't really been paying attention since LTE is good now :).
Just because something is called with the same name, doesn't mean it's the same thing. Especially if the naming is done on a product by a company that wants to sell the product, and especially if the name is not a protected trademark.
Express VPN, NordVPN and Surfshark belong to another category of software than the VPNs used by companies.
Some differences are:
1- One is used by consumers, the other is used by businesses.
2- One protects communications to a client-controlled Local area network. The other protects communications with third party services.
3- One provides encryption, the other provides anonymization.
I work from home and use a VPN service to get a bunch of IP:s I can easily switch between.
Recently a SaaS supplier blocked my IP because I was logging in programmatically every thirty seconds to collect data on batch processing in a customer project, basically two HTTP requests to get an access key and then the data, and I was lazy so I just put those in a script and dumped the second response to a log file and put that in a scheduler. Turned out that another customer of the SaaS supplier somehow could see the traffic on my customer's SaaS instance and panicked because in their mind it was obviously the russians attacking or something, and when they brought this to the supplier they also panicked.
So to keep doing this I had to move over to checking whether the previous access key was still valid and reuse it if so, as well as moving my 'location' to another country. Apparently this is fine but logging in two times a minute is not. It also happens that I need to do research on network services and cloud environments, where having the ability to just hit a couple of terminal incantations to switch 'where' I am helps out quite a bit sometimes.
It was surprising in a way I don't hesitate to call bad, but this supplier is an enterprise style organisation so of course they've only ranted at me and don't plan to alter their infrastructure.
My vpn bypasses the paywall on the public xfinitywifi hotspots making internet essentially free because I would likely being paying for Mullvad regardless.
Can anyone give info on who owns Trust.Zone VPN? The company saves all credentials and doesn't allow the user to generate anything, such as Wireguard private keys. The service is very likely logging everything, and already admits to logging bandwidth, which is severe enough.
Wouldn't be surprised if this was a honeypot for logging Russian internet users, as it appears to cater to Eastern users.
The Seychelles kind of belong to the 'non-aligned' group of countries, and maintains decent relations with Russia, India, China and so on. They also advocate for a diminished US presence in the Indian Ocean. On the other hand, they're a member of the british Commonwealth and only got independence in 1976.
Trust.Zone sure looks fishy but I can't tell from this whether they are surveillance for the UK, traffic to hide in for russian authorities and cyber crime groups or something else entirely. I'd avoid them unless I was already into grey or directly criminal activities and already had layers of protection and indirection in place.
What in particular concerns me is the lack of any type of registration seemingly anywhere. I don't mind if a privacy focused VPN said they don't register at all in any country and stated the reasons as to why, but this company seems to have lied.
"The Seychelles kind of belong to the 'non-aligned' group of countries, and maintains decent relations with Russia, India, China and so on. They also advocate for a diminished US presence in the Indian Ocean. On the other hand, they're a member of the british Commonwealth and only got independence in 1976."
Seychelles is a great place to register for a privacy focused service but I agree with you that being a member state of the British commonwealth is concerning. Could you possibly recommend any place that would be better to register such as service?
"Trust.Zone sure looks fishy but I can't tell from this whether they are surveillance for the UK, traffic to hide in for russian authorities and cyber crime groups or something else entirely. I'd avoid them unless I was already into grey or directly criminal activities and already had layers of protection and indirection in place."
It gives the worst vibes possible for a supposed security service.
Trust.Zone offers a free trial which I signed up for to test with a disposable VM. This is where I learned how they keep user credentials and other major privacy issues, such as the logging I mentioned in my last comment. The support also sent a very questionable reply to a ticket where they wanted to do screen sharing and run an arbitrary script on my server to "diagnose" the issue.
> ExpressVPN was founded in 2009 by Peter Burchhardt and Dan Pomerantzwe who later sold it to British-Israeli security software company Kape Technologies
You will have to be a lot more specific than "wasn't as good as", to get a response that is helpful to you. What are you looking for in a VPN provider?
I wanted to watch some football world cup highlights video from a japanese TV channel site, which didnt work with Proton, but did with Nord, so I have been with them since then.
This was during the 2022 WC though, so maybe Proton is better nowadays.
That's actually interesting. My yearly Proton subscription ended several months ago and I tried both NordVPN and ExpressVPN before switching back to Proton. The other two options had limited server locations and I wasn't a fan of the software/setup. There's also a weird shady vibe with how they do their advertising compared to Proton, can't quite put my finger on it though. Proton's software also seems to be more intuitive (although a bit clunky).
Fast/low latency is to some extent diagrammatically opposed to high quality privacy. The fastest route is always you to source. The more hops/mixers/proxies/things you add the worse the experience gets
I’m not a big expert on the VPN tech side, but it always seemed to me that the most logical option for those that actually understand about VPN is Proton, or am I missing something here?
Im a happy Proton user myself but if someone wanted the absolute most secure and private and reputable VPN I would point them to Mullvad. The main reason I use Proton is because I use the other apps in their suite as well and I get the VPN in the package deal. The threat model is good enough for my use cases
I am also a relatively happy proton user (now, but wasn't always this way). I second this. Based off the site, it looks like Mullvad passed a real world test too, Proton has not. I haven't tried Mullvad in a couple of years, but they were always reliable and fast. The only issue I had with Mullvad was getting connected to enough peers when torrenting, especially on older torrents where the pool of users is small. Proton's port forwarding feature did noticeably help with that. I do enjoy being able to pay a discounted yearly subscription price with Proton and their user interface is nice. There are some minor problems with split-tunneling in Proton though, sometimes it doesn't work and I haven't figured out why.
Company who's blog post this is ain't bad either if you're looking for a non-ecosystem VPN. Proton is trying to be Nord and create an ecosystem of products that store all your most private data, all under the umbrella of 1 company which defeats the whole point of a VPN who should have no data on you (not even an email).
I feel like it's Nord who's trying to be Proton but worse, no? Nord had just the VPN until recently, unlike Proton which was already trying to build an ecosystem (although they did speed up the new product drops significantly in the past few years). And unlike Nord, at least Proton actually has proper zero-access encryption and stuff, and they seem to know what they're talking about rather than just relying on influencer marketing.
Proton used to have mail, they they launched a VPN. Then cloud storage, then password manager, then docs + calendar, then wallet, now also AI and MFA app. They're following literally in Nord's footsteps, all Nord needs to do is launch a mail service and the circle is complete.
Proton is doing influencer marketing now too btw. Parallels are uncanny. All this while claiming to fight Google/big tech, but essentially offering the same products that store the same personal data.
Glad to see more zero trust confidential computing happening....but keep in mind its still vulnerable to attacks like Battering RAM which can fully breaks cutting-edge Intel SGX and AMD SEV-SNP confidential computing processor security technologies.
Battering RAM has been demonstrated to work well against Intel's "Scalable SGX" which is also known as SGX 2, and uses static encryption key to allow SGX to use more of the system's memory.
For example at VP.NET we're using SGX 1, which uses AES-CTR for memory encryption which is not susceptible to memory reply attack, and comes with a limit of 512MB of ram. It's a lot of pain working with a very small memory allocation (especially nowadays where most machines come with 128GB+). batteringram.eu calls that "Client SGX" with a checkmark on "Read", but reading the actual paper it only mentions being able to know which areas of memory were written to (see 7.1).
There might be applications where memory access pattern gives detail on the underlying work performed, but this is likely coarse (encryption is likely per page) and unlikely to yield to anything useful.
This said we are also exploring other TEEs including Intel TDX, and having a wider array of options will give us the ability to instantly disable any technology for which we know security has been compromised.
Intel TDX unfortunately suffers from the exact same vulnerability as Scalable SGX. The underlying root cause is the lack of randomized encryption; using a static-adversary encryption scheme (XTS) rather than a dynamic-adversary one. The result is that plaintext-ciphertext mappings are unchanged at a fixed memory address.
While the choice of scheme might initially seem puzzling, it is due to a randomized encryption scheme requiring counters for each memory block, which has a prohibitive on-chip memory cost when scaling to hundreds of GBs of memory.
A long time ago, I have difficulty removing payment card information from ExpressVPN.
Managed to contact support to remove it but they merely zeroed out (it shows 0 for the visible fields) the card details rather than truly removing payment information.
Can someone explain to me why should I use a VPN when Tor is out there?
It just seems to me odd that one would pipe their communications through a private company, that operates over a jurisdiction when said jurisdiction can compel the company in actions that may compromise my anonymity.
From my perspective, its like shifting my trust from my ISP (an entity with way more oversight) to a pvt ltd.
Isn't Tor as safe as it can get when surfing the web?
From my understanding, they have different purposes. VPNs aren’t really about safety or anonymity, Tor is the way to go for those. VPNs are for if you don’t want your ISP specifically to see your traffic for some reason, or if you want your traffic to appear like it’s coming from a different geographical location with minimal latency hit.
Edit: I should say, VPNs as a technology have far more applications than this, e.g. for accessing a secure intranet, but these are just the reasons you’d theoretically want to use a VPN service like Nord/Mullvad/etc.
VPNs are for when you want to obfuscate your traffic from your ISP, not the government. By passing your traffic through a private company _somewhere else_ to another private entity that has some vested interest in not reselling your data, you can prevent it from being easily mapped back to you.
Also VPN is generally much faster and higher bandwidth than TOR.
Using a VPN for regular users is like jumping from one fire pit to another. The real way to escape censorship and privacy leaks is to increase your cognition, avoid blindly following KOLs, think independently when choosing tools
Despite all the shenanigans related to their corporate structure, does someone really trust in those services in terms of real privacy?
It's hard to believe that for USD 10/month you can have a high-trust VPN so that your ISP will never know who you are, and you can surf the internet untraceable from the IP perspective.
I mean, that kind of infrastructure costs money, and the mechanics to make it happen must be very expensive, and it is hard to believe that this is very commoditized.
It sometimes sounds like someone is selling a 2-cent pizza in Zürich: If you're paying that, maybe you're not ready to know what is inside.
TL;DR: you shouldn't assume your data or activity is in any way anonymous when using these services. These VPNs are useful for changing your region for streaming and not much else. Otherwise, the traffic being routed through these VPNs is basically much more likely to involve "questionable" activity than ordinary traffic - and when you send your traffic through it, you are basically highlighting it as such - and all of this is well-known and of extreme interest to anyone interested in snooping on or analyzing such "questionable" activity.
By mailing cash, if you like. They don't care if they know who you are or not. They don't ask for your email address, you just log in with a randomly-assigned account number and a password.
This is the way (or Tailscale). Easier to move around between datacenters to find one with an ASN/IP that isn't blocked by the apps/websites you use. If you do want a more off-the-shelf solution, Mullvad is probably the best choice. All of the consumer VPNs (including Mullvad) get blocked by various services - I get degraded/intermittent connection to Google Maps on them. GCC countries block most of the well-known VPNs as well, if you ever travel to the Arabian/Persian Gulf region. My private datacenter VPN gets blocked only very, very rarely.
I tried Airvpn but the MacOS client is beyond trash.
And the website just gives 2005 amateur PHP coder vibes. Not just the design. The session expiry is seems very long - I hadn't visited for a few days and I'm still logged in. I'd be surprised if it wasn't infinite.
AirVPNs main proposition isn't "we have a nice app / UX". It's "we give you the most configs / options". AFAIK they're currently one of very few that allow you to configure both port forwards and give you a stable config (keys) to run your own wireguard instance
And I find there's a good correlation between the quality of the apps and the overall quality of the company. No surprise that the Mullvad VPN app is excellent
For multiple reasons it's better and safer to avoid using official provider client in the first place, regardless of provider, and connect with a good wireguard/openvpn/whatever client.
Not universally true. The Mullvad client has lots of additional features to enhance privacy. Killswitch, split tunnelling (you might otherwise disconnect the VPN to use a certain app, so it can overall improve privacy), Shadowsocks, Lockdown mode etc
It's extremely high quality on MacOS in my experience. It's never crashed for example whereas Airvpn's crashes daily. It connects almost instantly. I don't think I've ever seen it give an error
And I was on Proton for 3y, until the CEO were backing Trump and Vance on Reddit and other places. Their port forwarding was also painful as well, but it worked.
Cancelled. PIA does the port forwarding nicely and stabily. No jank scripts to run every 60 seconds.
Now evidently PIA is a bunch of scum capitalists. But in reality, who isn't?
Mullvad? But they killed port forwarding for "abuse".
> Given Proton’s outstanding track record and reputation thus far as a free, open-source, crowdfunded organization, owned by a non-profit and based in Switzerland (a country known for its neutrality), this topic is worth a deep dive.
Either it was someone paid to write this, or if author really believes this, they are not someone I trust.
Maybe the organization is non-profit (which I do not believe is practically true), it does not explain them sharing so much with Tesonet.
The Proton CEO is not "backing Trump and Vance." He wrote something positive about a narrow policy Trump supported that's favorable to little tech over big tech. That's it. It's certainly possible that someone you detest can still occasionally support a particular policy you think is good.
Reddit too, I wished they offered residential or dedicated and/or unlisted ips. But most of the time you just have to cycle through different ips to unblock.
Some vpn services offer dedicated residential IP addresses, meaning you get an IP from just a regular private ISP in some other country. It's admittedly a bit shady though, and more expensive ofc but that will unblock everything
Been saying it for YEARS: 95% of VPNs sell your data. It's where they make their money. It's absolutely insane the push-back I get when I say this online. I get downvoted to hell and back.
Source: I bought this data from VPN companies... Hell, you can inject ads and surveys if you want!
I'm much more skeptical of this. I know linus tech tips is not exactly an expert organization, but I believe the discussions they've had about almost starting a VPN and backing out for ethical reasons, and they made it clear that the core VPN product would have huge profit margins. You can always do greedy things to make more money, but for a paid VPN I'd need some solid evidence to believe that data sales are a huge line item or especially that they're the main source of money.
If you're including the swaths of free VPNs then that makes your number a lot harder to use.
Fun fact: I once interviewed for a company offering a free VPN, which was actually using other users as endpoints for the VPN. Some kind of P2P VPN if you will.
How did they make money? Easy: there were also selling a botnet! So if you used their "free VPN", you could be part of a botnet for DDOS or to create fake reviews/upvotes from thousands of "legit" IP addresses.
I'm more interested in this part - how does that work? Do you just reach out to them directly and ask "hey, let me buy your user data"? Or is there some sort of service they offer?
Yes, I've heard of bad VPN companies that sell your data. I would like to learn more about how it is done exactly.
In your later comment you said "DNS is very useful, and unencrypted. OpenDNS makes its money on this same info." Is the VPN company only openly selling DNS info or are they selling more, such as connection logs?
How did you approach the VPN provider to ask to buy this info?
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them have like a Crypto AG thing going on and have the capability to use paying customers as exit nodes as a way to launder consent-manufacturing bot bullshit through legitimate-looking residential and mobile connections.
They sell metadata. DNS queries, locations, apps using data, device info. Usually anonymized, but both unscrupulous and "better" providers do have access to your account and payment info.
If HTTPS were for privacy it would be called HTTPP. Security features tend to make things less Private, like how opening apps on a Mac makes it phone home for OCSP check.
> Hell, you can inject ads and surveys if you want!
So am I right in saying that the data that's encrypted by VPNS is only in transit? It then sits on a server in plain text, ready to be queried by third parties for money.
People seem to use VPNs to avoid IP based issues, like Netflix or ip bans/associations, not sure anyone would use it for actual privacy -- at best its obsfucation.
> 95% of VPNs sell your data. It's where they make their money. It's absolutely insane the push-back I get when I say this online.
People love to stick to what they irrationally believe in. I would give you push back as well by saying 95% is a very conservative number. I would say 98-99%
But hey, they say they don't sell my data isn't it?
How does this work? They harvest your DNS! They inject surveys into your YouTube packets. They tabulate just how much traffic goes to which specific games on Twitch. How? The provider is the endpoint, not you.
It's not the whole picture, but it's enough to sell to marketers.
This is what happens EVERY time I say this! Look again! It happened, I have 1 upvote... It's almost as if the VPN companies don't want you to believe this is true!
Story time! I have been cashed out of three startups. $600 total, across them all. It's the people in the Valley who've struck out over and over who know the truth, not the successes.
One of those startups was about tracking the games played on Twitch, and selling that info to Esports entities, marketing firms, etc. The company did not succeed because, honestly, it's not hard data to scrape yourself. BUT, we tried. And where did we get our data? VPN providers. Major VPN providers. We don't care about your personal data. We care about whether you watched a Twitch stream of GTA or Madden.
And for a time, yes, we could buy injected surveys. Packets, literally injected into your streams of data. This was expensive, iffy, and controversial, but it was on the rate cards.
DNS is very useful, and unencrypted. OpenDNS makes its money on this same info. Stop putting your heads in the sand. Ya'll have seriously lost the path.
They don't seem to have Russian ties: "In 2022, CyberCare opened an office in Lviv, Ukraine. Although planning for the move started before the war, according to Dainius Vanagas, CEO of CyberCare, one of the reasons why it was followed through was a desire to help Ukraine rebuild."[0]
They also donated money to help arm Ukraine.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesonet
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