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.
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.
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.
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).
They're neighboring small countries with similar (centuries' long) histories of tension with Russia, in its various guises. They're often considered en bloc:
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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"?
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. 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. 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.
My vpn bypasses the paywall on the public xfinitywifi hotspots making internet essentially free because I would likely being paying for Mullvad regardless.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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]
They also donated money to help arm Ukraine.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesonet
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.
Back when I was running PIA, they threatened me a significant amount just for pointing these facts out.
Now that I launched a verifiable VPN, they are once again sending legal threats [1].
[1] https://vp.net/l/en-US/blog/Verified-Privacy-vs-Trust
The same PIA which is now part of Kape Technologies which under its former name of Crossrider was known for malware?
https://cyberinsider.com/private-internet-access-kape-crossr...
So did you sell pia? Why won’t you sell your next venture ?
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.
Btw I used to love pia, I think I’ll check your new one out!
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.
Why?
"Without getting into detail"
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.
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).
They're neighboring small countries with similar (centuries' long) histories of tension with Russia, in its various guises. They're often considered en bloc:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_states
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.
We should really be moving towards a world of Multi-Party Relays rather than Single-Party VPN operators: https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/11/17/where-are-...
With Multi-Party Relays you no longer have a trust a single entity not being malicious or compromised.
Disclaimer: I run obscura.net, which does exactly this with Mullvad (our partner) as the Exit Hop.
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.
Yes, you can with Obscura. That limitation of Private Relay is just an arbitrary limitation made by Apple.
This link displays just the map, freed from it's painfully small frame.
https://kumu.io/embed/9ced55e897e74fd807be51990b26b415#vpn-c...
Anyone got this as a regular single image infographic or (better yet) a text-only bulleted outline?
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]
?
[0] https://windscribe.com/blog/what-is-kape-technologies/
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.
Makes perfect cover though? "He was only a conscript changing printer cartridges"
>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.
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 definitely want to know if they are involved with any tech I'm using so I can avoid it
Are you going to stop using Linux because the NSA is a major code contributor?
Huawei is too, and they were founded by a guy from the PLA.
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.
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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.
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> 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)
Kape was Crossrider which was linked to malware (per link)
https://cyberinsider.com/private-internet-access-kape-crossr...
I think VPNs are one of the clearest cases of tech/politics intersection, it's not just OT for tech but also for hacker culture.
What do you think @dang ?
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The second part of your comment seems like a non sequitur
I'm a pragmatist
Calling out Israeli conspiracy isn't Jew hating.
This is the whole issue. No one can question what Israel is doing for fear of anti semitimtism.
If everyone is "anti-semitic" then you allow real antisemitism to foster unabated.
> No one can question what Israel is doing
I literally said "it certainly should be allowed"
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.
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I specifically put the OP in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), which is why it got re-upped (https://hnrankings.info/45469376/). Rather an odd way to suppress discussion, no?
Israeli crypto ag
I liked Express VPN
I have to admit that discovering that ProtonVPN was actually just owned by Proton Technologies feels underwhelming.
Idk what's the official status, but it's Tesonet.
Some fake debunking in the comments of this thread that is factually almost correct: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/protonvpn...
EDIT: ProtonVPN app was "accidentally" signet by Tesonet. How do you think this could happen?
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.
Source: I am a Proton VPN employee.
So, why were the employees shared?
EDIT: I'm not saying being related to Tesonet is bad, but it is a fact that you cannot run away from.
> Proton VPN was briefly sharing employees with Tesonet during initial app bringup
I assume they needed the experience in how to run a VPN company, so that initial partnership was needed.
But why would tesonet spend resources to help a competitor to start? I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least an equity deal.
Proton's response in the thread:
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:
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.> 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.
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
thanks, this reddit thread doesn't inspire confidence in proton's story :/ at all
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If you’re worried about your VPN provider but you can trust your VPS provider, try an SSH Tunnel.
https://joeldare.com/ssh-tunnels-my-vpn-alternative-for-priv...
This is the way: SOCKS5 via SSH
You do need some minimal technical understanding and some scripting.
Pick any cloud provider that can give you a VM with SSH access.
Read up on doing this on your local device or another device on your LAN:
Change 10001 to whatever.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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
How is confidential computing applied to VPNs?
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.
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.
Is there any other real world usecases for VPN nowadays other than:
1. Getting access to geolocked data
2. Torrenting "Linux ISOs"
?
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.
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-...
[1] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/falschaussage-im-fall-sc... (it's in German)
You don't treasure your freedom of speech until you lose it.
What idiot signed that bullshit into law?
That law has existed since 1951 and is based on an executive order from 1931 by Hindenburg.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* Russia
* Kazakhstan
* China
* Belarus
* Iran
* Mayanmar
- list of countries that are known or suspected to MITM traffic, including SSL
how so they supposedly do it?
SSL certificates have a centralized hierarchy. Many browsers trust a long list of root certificate authorities from multiple countries.
https://cyberscoop.com/russia-tls-security-certificate-autho...
https://jpgamboa.com/china-ssl-authority-revoked-by-browsers...
Do some countries force the browser companies to add their root cert, despite abuse?
Accessing services from the UK without handing over your personal ID to a service that will inevitably get hacked.
This happened to discord literally a few days ago.
"Hacked" will be "left the data on a public S3 bucket until someone noticed" or similar.
3. Watching porn without your ISP knowing you are into furry sharks wearing banana costumes
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.
> Getting access to geolocked data
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.
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
CGNAT won't save you in a world where everything is fingerprinted to within an inch of it's life.
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.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/i2p/comments/tc3bhs/is_anybody_else...
Those two are pretty big already to be honest. I guess a third one would be avoiding eavesdropping on public wi-fis.
With TLS being everywhere, and just few clicks away from having DNS over TLS, I really don't get eavesdropping on public wifi prop value.
1. example.com is not on the HSTS preload list
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?
VPN unifies all destination IPs to server.ip.addr.ess. IP reverse lookups tells some stories if you are to be so paranoid
TLS doesn't hide which websites (hostnames) you visit
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.
SNI leakage is what encrypted client hello (ECH) tries to solve: https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-encrypted-client-hell...
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.
I think this is only true if SNI is disabled. Otherwise you really only get the IP of SRC and DEST.
Which is more likely, your barista collecting this data for nefarious purposes, or your ISP?
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"?
I use a VPN for 3 main reasons:
1) I need to come out of a particular country for some systems access. If I'm travelling it's easier than having IT team change permissions.
2) I use dedicated IPs for some systems.
3) Testing websites where I want to appear local to a particular country.
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. 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.
Accessing "the internet" while visiting your family in China/Russia/Iran/Thailand/...
Another one is getting around content filters / service-specific throttling (think college dorms and campuses, hotels, public hotspots etc).
3. Not revealing your IP/location with every outgoing web request.
ISPs bad routing and peering
I VPN into my home network for added privacy in public wifis, and to access private services.
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.
Free wifi hotspots
Nowadays most traffic is tls encrypted, but there are still metadata that can be collected.
>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 :).
Sharing corporate info with your employees and not everyone else. You know, the "go to work" thing some people do.
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.
Access sites the government has blocked in your state/country
My vpn bypasses the paywall on the public xfinitywifi hotspots making internet essentially free because I would likely being paying for Mullvad regardless.
3. Creating multiple accounts with platforms to break their ToS without getting chainbanned.
4. Perform DDoS
5. brute force passwords
6. try out leaked passwords
7. exploit vulns.
8. CSAM
9. Phish
10. Spam
11. Evade taxes with crypto
12. Sell drugs
13. Terrorism
Lots of malicious uses for VPNs, or was your question about legitimate usecases? In which case:
14. Sending emails about cryptography
15. Pornography
16. activism
17. Journalism/Whistleblowing
18. Military
Although some of the legitimate/ilegitimate categories might be subjective, which is precisely why it's a grey legal area at all.
I mean the EU has completely given up on free speech so if you want to say anything you better be hiding who you are.
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.
because i ll get added to a "hidden list" as soon as I even attempt to download tor, let alone use it
Tor is unbearably slow for daily general use.
> [VPN] shifting my trust from my ISP (an entity with way more oversight) to a pvt ltd
Who do you trust when using Tor?
vpns are marketed as hiding you from less trustworthy companies or accessing region locked content.
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
Mullvad doesn't support port forwarding [1] for users that need it unlike proton vpn [2].
Although I have never needed it myself, which in that case Mullvad might be better since they require minimal registration details.
[1]: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/removing-the-support-for-forward...
[2]: https://protonvpn.com/support/port-forwarding
unless you have a specific use case where you need to run a server through your vpn this isn't as much of a problem as you think it is.
torrents for example have hole punching functionality built into uTP where reachable peers help unreachable peers connect to each other.
The companies to trust are the ones that don’t run ads. I’ve used mullvad for a decade, before that airvpn.
I was a Mullvad user but needed forwarded ports so went back to AirVPN.
No issues so far.
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).
PS. I'm from the company who's blog post this is.
> Proton is trying to be Nord
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.
But it is not a US company.
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.
Um, is it some intelligence agencies?
> ExpressVPN was founded in 2009 by Peter Burchhardt and Dan Pomerantzwe who later sold it to British-Israeli security software company Kape Technologies
Close enough.
Ohh cool, we made that map (I'm from Windscribe). If you spot any errors, let me know.
just use mullvad
Mullvad nuff said
They don't support port forwarding anymore though.
I tried Proton but their VPN wasnt as good as NordVPNs…
But if Nord is sketchy, what is the recommended one?
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?
Mullvad, Proton, IVPN and sometimes Windscribe are generally considered the most trusted
Depends on what you mean by "good".
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
Handy that while connected via ExpressVPN, this is blocked
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.
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!
> 95% of VPNs sell your data
This is believable.
> It's where they make their money.
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.
> Source: I bought this data from VPN companies
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?
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.
And look! I am downvoted again!
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.
what VPN companies?
And what types of data?
How does that work with HTTPS being practically ubiquitous?
HTTPS spills what services you are communicating with, but not the content…
…except approximate content sizes and timing patterns.
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.
I reckon that if HTTPS was sufficient to hide your online activity, then you wouldn't need a VPN to hide it in the first place.
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.
Yes, VPNs add encryption only between you and the VPN servers.
How were they able to convince anyone that that matters?
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?
Why you probably don't need a VPN: https://stevesrantsnraves.blogspot.com/2024/09/why-you-proba...
NSA presumably?
Just pay for and use Mullvad.
Just spin up a server with wireguard.
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.
WireGuard/udp commonly gets blocked on public wifi
or with Tailscale (and configure the server as an exit node).
I do and I like them, but Cloudflare blocks their ips aggressively.
There was a bumpy ride with CF a while ago but they seem fine now (still plenty of captchas, of course)
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.
At this point in the cat/mouse game, wouldn't any set of IPs used by a VPN eventually be able to be sussed out by anyone interested?
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
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.
I did until they killed port forwarding.
OOC what's your current favored provider? AirVPN? Proton?
Proton right now. It's okay but it causes some network issues even when it's set to split tunnel default-exclude.
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.
On Mac you can just use OpenVPN/Wireguard and import one of the profiles you can generate through their website.
Not for feature parity.
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
Proton for me.
Yep.
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".
> the CEO were backing Trump and Vance on Reddit and other places
Something happened, but THAT didn't.
https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-tr...
> 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.
Particularly when dealing with someone like Trump, who has, on occasion, backed both sides of an issue, depending on the day of the week! ;P
They dont port forward unfortunately
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scary AF