https://kumu.io/embed/9ced55e897e74fd807be51990b26b415#vpn-c...
Don't use the embed link from above, use this one: https://kumu.io/Windscribe/vpn-relationships
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
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".
Something happened, but THAT didn't.
https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-tr...
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.
Source: I bought this data from VPN companies... 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.
…except approximate content sizes and timing patterns.
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.
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?
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?
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.
In your later comment you said "DNS is very useful, and unencrypted. OpenDNS makes its money on this same info." Is the VPN company only openly selling DNS info or are they selling more, such as connection logs?
How did you approach the VPN provider to ask to buy this info?
How did they make money? Easy: there were also selling a botnet! So if you used their "free VPN", you could be part of a botnet for DDOS or to create fake reviews/upvotes from thousands of "legit" IP addresses.
1. Getting access to geolocked data
2. Torrenting "Linux ISOs"
?
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...
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.
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.
Getting someone to open an unencrypted webpage is almost trivial. It's often one of the only web pages you can open on a device.
So you have identified some marginal privacy issue, and have identified that a VPN doesn't solve it, but rather that it moves the risk to a third party actor you subjectively feel is better. Well I feel that, subjectively, introducing a third party generally decreases security.
I believe that not all privacy and security considerations can or should be solved technically, but rather we have extra-technical mechanisms like law and social norms that provide some protection on the edge cases. For example, an employee cannot lookup information for personal reasons on a system they are entrusted to in a professional capacity. I'm no expert, but you probably have first laws that prohibit that, second corporate policy that prohibits that, and thirdly social pressure that prohibits that to some extent. Are they perfect? Not necessarily which is why for the most part we rely on technical encryption and security mechanisms.
But at some point these examples become so contrived and the medicine becomes the poison, so you enter into territory that is pretty standard in other industries, what's to stop a waiter from spitting into a cup? There's no spit filter in place of McDonalds, there's other mechanisms protecting us.
On a similar note, logic and debate is not the only way to convey this phenomenon, so here's some more artistic retort to privacy schizophrenia.
How is any of this "medicine becoming the poison" or "schizophrenic"?
Also, you are just switching up the "unprotected stretch" between your local wifi, and, say, Google's servers, whereas now that "unprotected stretch" lies between the VPN provider servers in Latvia or British Virgin Islands or Panama, or whatever dubious jurisdiction, and, say, Google. Sure, you added a layer of protection against the random hacker sitting in your Starbucks, but you have added many more vectors.
It becomes the poison because the solution you are introducing brings more issues. And it's schizophrenic because the issue to begin with, was minuscule (a hacker stepping into MacDonalds, breaking the network encryption and then also the application encryption.
Maybe if this were 2010 and websites still used HTTP, or you are using a local email client without TLS configured. But it's 2025, everything has HTTPs and you are using an HTTPs email client.
VPNs to protect corporate networks is sensible. Consumer VPNs are a different thing entirely and they do not provide increased security at best, decrease security at worst, and usually cater to schizoid threat models, where the threat actor is the state, rather than more realistic threat scenarios.
As long as the VPN is up, the worst the wifi can do is cut you off. It can't alter your connections.
It's far fewer trust points.
> Also, you are just switching up the "unprotected stretch" between your local wifi, and, say, Google's servers, whereas now that "unprotected stretch" lies between the VPN provider servers in Latvia or British Virgin Islands or Panama, or whatever dubious jurisdiction, and, say, Google. Sure, you added a layer of protection against the random hacker sitting in your Starbucks, but you have added many more vectors.
When I use a VPN for protection, the server is in the US too.
And if it's for netflix I'm going to some major country, not dubious-land.
(Also I'd say datacenter and internet core routers are less likely to attack some random person's traffic, but that's not core to my argument.)
> It becomes the poison because the solution you are introducing brings more issues. And it's schizophrenic because the issue to begin with, was minuscule (a hacker stepping into MacDonalds, breaking the network encryption and then also the application encryption.
For most wifi networks, there is no encryption between users. And it's quite likely that the neglected router got hacked over the internet and is part of a botnet.
> Maybe if this were 2010 and websites still used HTTP, or you are using a local email client without TLS configured. But it's 2025, everything has HTTPs and you are using an HTTPs email client.
Until you type in a URL and HSTS isn't set.
WPA2? Sure it can be broken, but you still would have to break HTTPS on top of that.
I don't deny that a third layer adds security in that scenario, as 3 layers is more than 2 layers. But you necessarily weaken some other stretch in a zero-sum fashion, as mentioned. I'll concede that the server can be in your own country if you so choose to. But these datacenters are not necessarily controlled by the VPN provider, and they may be highly heterogeneous, in addition there will be many routers in the VPN DC to destination stretch that can still be hacked. Although again I'll grant that endpoint routers are probably weaker targets than ISP routers.
If you're on a WPA2 network you just have to observe a device connecting and you can crack their session key. It's very easy. Not that you need to do that, you could ARP spoof. Or the router could be hacked.
And you don't have to break HTTPS to have a good chance of attacking someone. There's enough HTTP around.
So it's easy to fall through both of those layers.
Is it that easy? I'm not sure if you are a genius hacker or just somewhat misinformed.
My understanding was that observing the initial connection is a requirement for the typical exploit. The attack itself is considerably more complex. Additionally WPA2 is a sort of envelope protocol, the actual encryption cipher can vary and so will the attacks.
I'm not an expert, but I looked into this stuff 7 years ago when I was broke, and I apt installed aircrack-ng from a starbucks so I could try siphoning off my neighbour's wifi, I wasn't able to. Skill Issue sure, but it wasn't as trivial as "just observing a device connecting".
I personally don't see much HTTP, I think a more reasonable attack would be hoping that the user clicks on "continue anyway" whenever a TLS error pops up.
On another note, this would relate to local attackers only right? If a router has been pwned remotely, it wouldn't matter whether the last mile is a twisted pair or air.
> In the WPA2 handshake, everything except the GTK is sent unencrypted. Recall that the PTK is derived with the two nonces, the PSK, and the MAC addresses of both the access point and the client. This means that an on-path attacker who eavesdrops on the entire handshake can learn the nonces and the MAC addresses. If the attacker is part of the WiFi network (i.e. they know the WiFi password and generated the PSK), then they know everything necessary to derive the PTK. This attacker can decrypt all messages and eavesdrop on communications, and encrypt and inject messages.
No genius hacker, no misinformation. WPA2 in the normal password mode does not protect clients from each other. It's not part of the design.
https://wiki.wireshark.org/HowToDecrypt802.11
Here's a page about how you can use wireshark to decrypt WPA2 if you capture the handshake, but you can't do it on WPA3. (Also it's not hard to force new handshakes.)
> I'm not an expert, but I looked into this stuff 7 years ago when I was broke, and I apt installed aircrack-ng from a starbucks so I could try siphoning off my neighbour's wifi, I wasn't able to. Skill Issue sure, but it wasn't as trivial as "just observing a device connecting".
Trying to get a password is a completely different thing from trying to attack someone else on the same network as you. You did not fulfill the "If you're on a WPA2 network" part of the sentence.
There was a password-finding attack called KRACK that came out in 2017 but it's fussy and there are ways to defend against it. And you can still brute force WPS sometimes but I guess their device didn't allow it.
> On another note, this would relate to local attackers only right? If a router has been pwned remotely, it wouldn't matter whether the last mile is a twisted pair or air.
Yes, "someone sharing the network" and "hacked router" are two different ways you could be attacked.
Oh yes, of course, this is not unlike the capacity of computers in my LAN being able to see my packets, for example if my roommate was a hacker, they would be able to intercept packets while on their way to the router.
Now an interesting thing I've seen in public networks like say Starbucks or McDonalds, they usually don't rely on WPA2 password default security mechanism. I'm not sure what mechanism they use, but they have me log through a browser first.
WPA3 uses a better calculation where listening in doesn't tell you the key.
At least from a blue team perspective that's what I assume can happen. The power lines outside my home have the network cables all spliced together anyways, it's not like you'd have to make a new connection.
Nowadays most traffic is tls encrypted, 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.
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.
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.
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 :).
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.
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.
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.
I think you've managed to exactly describe the problem with them, and yet you phrase it as a positive.
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
Many other countries have protections like that, "on paper" (!!!) - but the point is in how it is used or misused, or rather completely ignored - directly or indirectly, like in the USA currently and many other countries in the world.
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 must not set foot in the USA, India, China, et cetera, then.
Imagine you say? Getting arrested might be the least of your worries in today's world if you decide to call a president (or the immediate underling) an idiot in many countries :D
If you can prove that an ISP can inspect packets, it would be major news.
* Kazakhstan
* China
* Belarus
* Iran
* Mayanmar
- list of countries that are known or suspected to MITM traffic, including SSL
https://cyberscoop.com/russia-tls-security-certificate-autho...
https://jpgamboa.com/china-ssl-authority-revoked-by-browsers...
Now it only sounds weird when a country exherts their national sovereignity because the US doesn't need to perform any additional steps to install any of their Certs, they have hundreds of them by design.
Yeah. I don't think the US explicitly requires it but they don't have to, there are more than enough US-based entities with root certificates who they could send a National Security Letter to if they ever wanted one. (Also the US FKPI root certificate is at least shipped by some vendors, although it seems to be disabled by default)
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.
Using timing, amounts of data, and what was being connected to, you could recreate what someone was looking at and swiping direction. (left/right sent different amounts of data)
DPI does not require any decryption of payload. Even cheap consumer devices can perform DPI on encrypted traffic. ISPs absolutely use DPI as a part of standard practice, and have been for decades. It is a basic network traffic management tool.
This happened to discord literally a few days ago.
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.
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...
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.
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?
"Crypto" in the 90s meant secret keys and message encryption, nowadays it's the term for the numerous ponzi scheme "investments"...
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.
2- The hammer doesn't care where the nail is; local carpentry or third-party furniture still require the same tool.
3- Both sides of the VPN are encrypted to each other, and anonymous to anyone else. No difference that I can see.
First, a hammer is a build (compile time) tool, while VPN is a runtime tech. Closer to a nail if you will.
Additionally, millions of products use hammers, while there's two product categories that use VPNs.
The product distribution of VPN products is bimodal, there's no inbetweens it's either a privacy oriented consumer VPN, or it's a security oriented corporate product.
Regarding the specific technology, there is no technical definition of what a VPN is, it's not an industry term, it's a marketing term. Similar to "Web", it's not HTTP, it's not TCP. This is in stark contrast to Internet (as in Internet Protocol).
Related technologies are IPSec, IKev2, WireGuard, but VPN is one of those trademarkless industry buzzword terms that companies are can latch onto for free and participate of a commodity market.
On an unrelated note, this is not unlike the term AI, which can somehow apply to fake images and conversational software. And coincidentally, modern AI is also bimodal, it's either text or syntethic images, the common ancestor might have been that the textual product originally was also synthetic generated text, but with agents and text as thought (in a Sappir-Whorf fashion) have since greatly diverged.
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.
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.
It's all a game of who do you trust most / least versus convenience in the end.
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.
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.
Recently a SaaS supplier blocked my IP because I was logging in programmatically every thirty seconds to collect data on batch processing in a customer project, basically two HTTP requests to get an access key and then the data, and I was lazy so I just put those in a script and dumped the second response to a log file and put that in a scheduler. Turned out that another customer of the SaaS supplier somehow could see the traffic on my customer's SaaS instance and panicked because in their mind it was obviously the russians attacking or something, and when they brought this to the supplier they also panicked.
So to keep doing this I had to move over to checking whether the previous access key was still valid and reuse it if so, as well as moving my 'location' to another country. Apparently this is fine but logging in two times a minute is not. It also happens that I need to do research on network services and cloud environments, where having the ability to just hit a couple of terminal incantations to switch 'where' I am helps out quite a bit sometimes.
Is this common?
It was surprising in a way I don't hesitate to call bad, but this supplier is an enterprise style organisation so of course they've only ranted at me and don't plan to alter their infrastructure.
If you live in a country that restricts your internet access, which to be fair is most these days, a VPN can help. Most of us just don't care about those restrictions or they are more easily circumvented using a 3rd. party DNS. Also if you're in country like Iran or Russia, you really need to trust your VPN provider and strange corporate structures and staff sharing really isn't helping in that respect.
For the average person, no you don't need a VPN. You might need one for a few days or week per year, if you travel and need to access your bank or corporate infrastructure (in that case your employer most likely have their own VPN). VPNs are a niche business, but online influencers have convinced a lot of people that they need a VPN for everything, which simply isn't the case for the vast majority of us.
For what exactly? All sites are HTTPS now anyway, so the only thing you're leaking is the hostnames / IPs you visit. I don't exactly see how the whole "hotel WIFI" thing is relevant at all, except as a dishonest marketing strategy by VPN salesmen
If someone also accidentally downloads a TB of movies and music on the way to the latest Mint upgrade, oops.
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?
Source: I am a Proton VPN employee.
EDIT: I'm not saying being related to Tesonet is bad, but it is a fact that you cannot run away from.
I assume they needed the experience in how to run a VPN company, so that initial partnership was needed.
I thought tesonet is venture / seed fund?
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.
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.
Out of curiosity, why not release the new version as a separate app under a new package name. I realise that’s not an ideal solution since it would mean starting fresh with installs and reviews, but it could allow you to move forward without being locked into the old key.
I have no dog in this fight, but I agree with the "smear campaign" that this is 100% bullshit. I work for a fully remote company with employees from all over the world, including Eastern Europe, and we didn't need to partner with any local company, let alone a competitor. Plus even if we need local HR assistance there are plenty of global/local HR services to choose from that focus on HR, no "employee sharing" needed.
I don't know if any other claims are false, but this kind of bullshit obvious to anyone who has been in a similar position undermines everything else they claim. Plus it was never mentioned what these "local partners" get in return, which seems to be the most interesting thing if there's no secret ownership, which is the thing they set out to debunk.
Because your company already has considerable experience in working remotely in another territory, of course they didn't need any help. Or potentially, they were already contracting a firm for local bureaucratic matters.
> Plus it was never mentioned what these "local partners" get in return
Money? They could sell these bureaucratic services at a markup, where they have experience with the paperwork etc. part of expanding internationally.
Additionally, another commenter said they offloaded some worse talent on them[1], so that's another possible benefit to them.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45500737
And to cover the astroturfing allegations in this thread: no, I don't work for or have any relationship with ProtonVPN, other than being a user.
What are you talking about, my company was fully remote with global employees from day one. And no, our CEO/CFO haven’t founded or worked for another fully remote company before that. This is not a radical concept at all, especially not here on HN.
"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]
?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45476243
etc etc etc etc.
As you yourself put it there, you are happy to have moderation abuse pointed out but when I do, you just ban me.
Such a wasted potential and time to move on.
Since your account isn't banned, you must be talking about a different account. Why not link to it so readers can make up their own minds?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Similarly: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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".
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.
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.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/nvidia-plans-to-boost-presence...
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.
Well, I know people there from all groups you mentioned. Especially the "resented being forced to be there", which is very common in all parts of the army, with people counting down the days until their 2-3 years are over. It didn't feel like the unit selected against this, choosing to accept it because of the technical skills of who they accepted.
(And yes, this is a new account. I've been on Hacker News for years, this is just for privacy reasons.)
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)
What do you think @dang ?
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.
Judging an Israeli citizen on their IDF ties is like judging a US citizen on the fact that they went to public school.
In today's political climate where people around the world see Israel judging (and sentencing, and carrying out the punishment) every Palestinian as terrorists, I think this wide brush of judging Israelis on their ties with the IDF is probably widely accepted as "only fair". When it comes to Unit 8200 the implications are even stronger.
But I don't get the US public school system reference. You have to start with a baseline and if you see a private Ivy League school on someone's CV and a random public school on someone else's I'm sure you'll probably make the obvious assumption about which one is better, even if sometimes the obvious is wrong.
No, people who live in tiny countries with mandatory conscription don't really understand that it means that their entire country is militarized. It's not surprising that fish can't see water.
> is like judging a US citizen on the fact that they went to public school.
It's exactly like that. If public school in the US trained people to kill and spy, it would be entirely safe to assume that the US was full of killer spies. For example, if you know that US public school taught a view of world history that was distorted in particular ways, and had very little emphasis in foreign languages, it would be safe to assume that Americans have a distorted view of the world, and largely don't speak foreign languages.
I don't know, this seems basic to me.
If an intelligence agency wants to compromise a service, they have much more discreet, powerful, and deniable ways to accomplish this.
https://cyberinsider.com/private-internet-access-kape-crossr...
But if Nord is sketchy, what is the recommended one?
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
This was during the 2022 WC though, so maybe Proton is better nowadays.
In the past I occasionally had to select a different server from whatever it picks by default but I've always been able to watch my content.
> 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.
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.
If they didn't try so hard to fight it, people might care less.
Now that I launched a verifiable VPN, they are once again sending legal threats [1].
https://cyberinsider.com/private-internet-access-kape-crossr...
Re verifiability: the point isn’t trust us, it’s that you don’t have to.
We built it so anyone can independently confirm what’s running.
1. All server and client code is published.
2. Builds are reproducible.
3. Each node provides cryptographic attestations of its runtime and routing identity.
4. Enclaves are used for verifiable isolation.
You can peruse the code yourself to see exactly why the transparency we bring makes legacy “trust based” VPNs obsolete: https://github.com/vpdotnet/vpnetd-sgx
Is there some indication the user has that your server isn't simply hard coded to return the right magic number? I don't understand how this provides any assurance of anything.
When the client connects to the server, the server presents a tls certificate that includes an attestation (with OID 1.3.6.1.4.1.311.105.1) which certifies a number of things:
- the TLS certificate's own public key (to make sure the connection is secure) - The enclave hash
It is signed by Intel with a chain of custody going to intel's CA root. It's not "just a magic number" but "a magic number certified by Intel", of course it's up to you to choose to trust Intel or not, but it goes a much longer way than any other VPN.
In 2016, Proton created its own subsidiary, and these people are now employed by Proton. But for this historical reason, the ProtonVPN keystore on Android still lists Tesonet as the organization name, even though it is fully controlled by Proton.
None of this is "debunking"; these are just the facts. You can make of them what you will, but you should be honest about what actually happened when you talk about it.
Entirely normal behaviour for a competitor to provide “HR assistance”.
In Proton's case, they already knew each other because Tesonet had previously offered to provide infrastructure during a DDoS attack against Proton.
So maybe it's a conspiracy, or maybe it's just how things go. You can make up your own mind, but you should provide the facts when you make sinister insinuations.
Here's the Handelsregisterauszug for Proton, which shows ownership: https://www.zefix.admin.ch/en/search/entity/list/firm/118926...
Proton's peering relationships: https://bgp.tools/as/62371#asinfo
I'm not sure what exactly you're looking for.
It doesn‘t. It’s a joint-stock corporation and while the shareholders are registered, the register is not public.
But I guess they could be lying.
The point is: we don't know.
So either:
1. Tesonet/Nord are loose with their private keys.
2. Proton isn’t being truthful.
Anyone who understands crypto and key management knows “not your keys, not your _____.”
If those staffers worked for Proton and not Nord, why did they have Nord’s key?
This level of negligence with private key management really can’t be explained away.
https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/prot...
I suppose you're free not to believe them, but I'm unsure what exactly you believe is happening here and what exactly Proton is lying about. Tesonet secretly owns them and has been running a decades-long misinformation campaign to trick you into thinking they don't? To what end? It's not like Tesonet is some nefarious company we should all be afraid of. What would they gain from lying about this if it were true?
And how can they make such an obvious mistake with their certs and then not make another one for the next decade? It's just not plausible.
At some point, you've gotta use some common sense.
1. Either Nord/Teso are loose with keys (horrible)
Or
2. Proton isn’t being truthful.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy or anything that it is Tesonet/Nord. Rather, the problem is you cannot trust someone with your privacy if they can’t even manage their own keys.
[1] The explanation is poor at best and doesn’t explain why they worked so hard to try to delete all of the evidence (all of which was archived already). Additionally, nothing can explain away the lack of security with key management across these two orgs.
> worked so hard to try to delete all of the evidence
The cert is still there. Apparently, they didn't work nearly hard enough.
As pointed out on this reddit post [3], Proton's appears to contradict itself a number of times.
It's a good thing trust based VPN's are obsolete. After all, trust isn't constant [4] as seen in this article showing how Proton supplied IP addresses to "authorities."
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/8x9aik/protonvp...
[4] https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/06/protonmail-logged-ip-addre...
This is a hilarious way to start an ostensibly serious investigation. It's not as if you could easily figure out the answer to that.
At some point, you have to acknowledge that you're a clown.
How? it is obvious.
> During Proton's expansion into Eastern Europe, Tesonet initially assisted Proton with HR, payroll, and local regulation, so for a period of time, people working for Proton were employed by Tesonet, since Proton had no local subsidiary that could hire them. These were not "shared employees", they worked exclusively for Proton.
So basically same people managed teams, same people paid the employes, but my "Links to" is doing heavy lifting and in the previous sentence you say "ProtonVPN is owned by Proton, which has no legal ownership ties with Tesonet."? Who is doing the heavy lifting here?
How much is Tesonet or Proton paying you to post in here?
Sadly, they're not paying me anything, but I would suggest that any belief system in which information contradictory to your belief reinforces your belief is inherently problematic.
So how much is Nord paying you to post here?
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.
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.
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).
Honestly that shone through even from the first sentence.
I mentioned Estonia because Lithuania/Latvia/Estonia have a bit of shared identity, kind of similar to Sweden/Norway/Finland or USA/Canada.
> I think it was founded in CZ and is now HQed in NL. Right?
Yes I was just wrong. I was convinced it was Ukrainian for some reason.
I agree that the combination of those two points made my post particularly confusing.
Some part of management were in CZ. Most of the technical team were in three buildings in St.Petersburg.
Also the place seems to have quite a few rebellions under its belt.
Common-sense like a complete ban for entering the country for red passport holders.
Lithuania is a wonderful, beautiful country and I understand the need to push the hardliner stance in the EU, but their decisions during the conflict have been strictly political, not in the slightest "common-sense".
Context here is Russian Federation.
Now they have got more money than they know what to do with so are making VC investments.
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.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/20059-obscura-vpn-and-mullv...
While I understand potentially not wanting to incorporate in the EU (with Chat Control on the horizon) nor Switzerland (due to their own non-EU-related privacy backslide), why still select the US, which historically other privacy tools have largely avoided? It feels like you're already shooting yourself in the foot, whereas you'd be good in the EU should Chat Control not pass. While it's great that you verifiably can't see a user's internet traffic, you're one US court order away from a forced compromising of the service for a user (or at least, giving up the connecting IP). Historically, EU court orders have been easier and more transparently fought by privacy tools.
Non sequitur, it would be great if you prioritized accepting Monero as payment, like your exit hop Mullvad. Also, how much control do we have over the features Mullvad offers (e.g. DAITA, quantum resistance, DNS filters, IPv6, integration with Mullvad Browser)?
Unfortunately in the world we live in no single jurisdiction is good enough anymore, laws can always change and Chat Control can be re-proposed over and over again.
Luckily, an MPR like Obscura with hops across different jurisdictions (Obscura in US, and Mullvad in EU) give you a much better scenario than just being in one jurisdiction.
> it would be great if you prioritized accepting Monero as payment
Definitely prioritized, one of our engineers is working on it right now.
> Also, how much control do we have over the features Mullvad offers (e.g. DAITA, quantum resistance, DNS filters, IPv6, integration with Mullvad Browser)?
We're limited by the Partner API that Mullvad offers right now, but we'll be looking into many of these soon. For example, we're implementing DNS filtering as we speak!
This is is what i wrote my master thesis on. I ended up not turning it into something proper. Thank you! i love that you did this!
Its awesome! OMG good job!
Unfortunately, because we don't identify users we cannot offer a free tier (since that would allow anyone to use it freely indefinitely).
However, you can always just top-up for 1 month to see how it works for you! Would love to hear your experience.
https://joeldare.com/ssh-tunnels-my-vpn-alternative-for-priv...
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.
https://github.com/amnezia-vpn/amnezia-client/tree/dev/clien...
But even without that, there are solutions like wg-easy that let you spin up a WireGuard server with a single Docker container
The only advantage of professional VPN is the ability to use obfuscation, so to bypass VPN restrictions in countries like Egypt or others.
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:
ssh -NT -g -D 10001 -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o ConnectTimeout=5 -i your_ssh_private_key your_cloud_login@any_cloud_provider_ip
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.
Are there any cloud providers who don’t charge for network egress?
Biggest issue regular user might find with this is that basically all the VPS host' IP ranges are known, and plenty of websites give you a different (worse) experience compared to when using residential addresses, or straight up block you.
Personally I found the hassle to great, compared to using existing VPN services.
It's a shame because deploying WireGuard was a simple two command process: git checkout followed by a `docker compose up -d` for me etc on a fresh VPS instance.
Firefox supports per-container (and as such per-tab) SOCKS proxies, which I find really useful.
So useful, in fact, that I've come full circle and I am now running a userspace Wireguard to SOCKS proxy [1] in order to have that convenience for a VPN which does not have any host I could SSH to.
Now you can use your home connection as a proxy through wireguard when traveling.
It's probably possible to set up a local SOCKS proxy that knows to use some Tailscale non-exit-node for egress, and to manually allow that traffic within Tailscale and on the remote node, but not out of the box as far as I can tell.
Installing a SOCKS proxy on the remote node, reachable only over Tailscale, would be an alternative, but that doesn't work on an Apple TV.
Seems to have triggered the netsec community on reddit though.
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...
torrents for example have hole punching functionality built into uTP where reachable peers help unreachable peers connect to each other.
PS. I'm from the company who's blog post this is.
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 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.
No issues so far.
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.
Wouldn't be surprised if this was a honeypot for logging Russian internet users, as it appears to cater to Eastern users.
Then you'll notice that it does not tell you what entity they are or where it is incorporated.
Elsewhere they claim to be incorporated as Trusted Solutions Ltd in Mahé in the Seychelles.
https://trust.zone/tr/post/trust.zone-vpn-reviewed-by-the-to...
And this review claims they are an LLC.
https://thebestvpn.com/reviews/trust-zone/
But when I search for this name in the local registry I get no results.
https://www.registry.gov.sc/BizRegistration/WebSearchBusines...
The Seychelles kind of belong to the 'non-aligned' group of countries, and maintains decent relations with Russia, India, China and so on. They also advocate for a diminished US presence in the Indian Ocean. On the other hand, they're a member of the british Commonwealth and only got independence in 1976.
Trust.Zone sure looks fishy but I can't tell from this whether they are surveillance for the UK, traffic to hide in for russian authorities and cyber crime groups or something else entirely. I'd avoid them unless I was already into grey or directly criminal activities and already had layers of protection and indirection in place.
What in particular concerns me is the lack of any type of registration seemingly anywhere. I don't mind if a privacy focused VPN said they don't register at all in any country and stated the reasons as to why, but this company seems to have lied.
"The Seychelles kind of belong to the 'non-aligned' group of countries, and maintains decent relations with Russia, India, China and so on. They also advocate for a diminished US presence in the Indian Ocean. On the other hand, they're a member of the british Commonwealth and only got independence in 1976."
Seychelles is a great place to register for a privacy focused service but I agree with you that being a member state of the British commonwealth is concerning. Could you possibly recommend any place that would be better to register such as service?
"Trust.Zone sure looks fishy but I can't tell from this whether they are surveillance for the UK, traffic to hide in for russian authorities and cyber crime groups or something else entirely. I'd avoid them unless I was already into grey or directly criminal activities and already had layers of protection and indirection in place."
It gives the worst vibes possible for a supposed security service.
Trust.Zone offers a free trial which I signed up for to test with a disposable VM. This is where I learned how they keep user credentials and other major privacy issues, such as the logging I mentioned in my last comment. The support also sent a very questionable reply to a ticket where they wanted to do screen sharing and run an arbitrary script on my server to "diagnose" the issue.
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?
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.
Also VPN is generally much faster and higher bandwidth than TOR.
Who do you trust when using Tor?
For example at VP.NET we're using SGX 1, which uses AES-CTR for memory encryption which is not susceptible to memory reply attack, and comes with a limit of 512MB of ram. It's a lot of pain working with a very small memory allocation (especially nowadays where most machines come with 128GB+). batteringram.eu calls that "Client SGX" with a checkmark on "Read", but reading the actual paper it only mentions being able to know which areas of memory were written to (see 7.1). There might be applications where memory access pattern gives detail on the underlying work performed, but this is likely coarse (encryption is likely per page) and unlikely to yield to anything useful.
This said we are also exploring other TEEs including Intel TDX, and having a wider array of options will give us the ability to instantly disable any technology for which we know security has been compromised.
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 solve this with vp.net, by making the service verifiable. The code can be reviewed, the builds are reproducible, and each node can prove what software it’s running and where your traffic actually goes [1].
It doesn’t turn a VPN into an anonymity tool, but it makes trust measurable instead of blind. That’s the part the industry should have fixed a long time ago.
For example, France is spying torrent downloads of copyrighted content but they only look at the domestic consumer ISP IP addresses. They ignore all foreign IPs, so if you're using a VPN it doesn't matter if the VPN keeps all the logs they won't bother.
Of course if you're doing things that will get you personally targeted by the police, like cyber-bullying or CSAM, a VPN won't protect you.
For now. The surveillance apparatus must feed from time to time.
Why?
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.
All it takes is an unattended machine for someone to boot another os on and grab the file
If you're going to the trouble of using a VPN, that is not a very likely scenario, and ditto for other users(!) on your machine.
Mulvad connected to malwarebytes ups
I thought mullvad was clean
Were VPNs ever really providing privacy? The underlying business model is selling user data.
It's a shame because Mullvad has a deal with Tailscale where you can sign up for Mullvad through Tailscale and use any of their servers as a Tailscale exit node. It's super slick and nice since Tailscale has really decent apps for nearly everything (even Apple TV, etc) and I already have a decently sized Tailnet of all my devices / ssh accessible things.
They have an Apple TV app so I just switch it on as needed, and it's restricted to just that Apple TV. (Without having to fiddle with a separate WiFi network etc.) IKEv2, OpenVPN and Wireguard work without their apps so I don't have to install their apps on non-sandboxed platforms (Windows, macOS).
That doesn't sound good for privacy.
This is not really a technology problem, it's a social and legislative one. Many of us are afraid of (other people's) privacy, so we vote for legislators that will make it illegal. The legislators stoke this fear of privacy because they want an excuse to deepen their control of discourse, and their own citizens.
So really, everybody wins!
holyknight•4mo ago