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It's been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different g

It's been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it's a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook. If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. If you want a VPN for any other reason that "normal people" think they want a VPN, you're probably wrong. Why do we even give these companies the time of day? (Small clarification - Most people who want VPNs should use a proxy instead. It fits the use case better. Those still exist and don't route ALL of your device's traffic over the tunnel.)

Raed667 5y ago
What if you want a VPN to unlock location based content?
- elagost 5y ago
  Then either do without (because, come on, nobody's gonna die if they can't watch reality TV), buy it on disc, or pirate it? Netflix is blocking IP ranges so hard that residential space is getting caught in the blast radius. It's a cat and mouse game that you'll only win by refusing to play. https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-intensifies-vpn-ban-and-targets-residential-ip-addresses-too-210811/ https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-intensifies-vpn-ban-and-tar...
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Some of us would like to get home country news besides the quite poor international channels, it is not always about Netflix.
  - onli 5y ago
    To pirate it you need a VPN, in countries that have a surveilled internet and laws that enable suing file sharers. Germany for example.
  - BRedSox 5y ago
    I use a VPN to watch my local sports team - whose owner is currently in a contract dispute resulting in the team not being played on local tv.
  - nyuszika7h 5y ago
    What do you think the pirates who rip the content use to get it? There's not always going to be a local user to rip every single title.
- hannob 5y ago
  Circumventing geoblocking is legit, but don't tell people that VPNs are about "security".
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    They are, it's just in very rare circumstances (monitored public wifi + possibly unsecured connection, for example). Most people should do fine and thanks to https, public wifi is far less of a threat than it used to be (plus, some started blocking VPNs).
- trutannus 5y ago
  Essentially the only valid use of a VPN. That, or masking your location from other users online. I find YouTube in my country is just filled with content being pushed because it's local to my country. Some VPN exit points have less local content pushing, which gives me more options. Eastern European content is really good, but also completely missing from American YouTube suggestions.
- cm2187 5y ago
  Also create a fuse between DMCA requests and your sole broadband provider if you do any torrenting.
lol123456789 5y ago
idk mullvad seems pretty alright
- z3c0 5y ago
  It is - they know their market and they serve them well. One of the few VPNs that actually don't log traffic. That said, I've had websites flat-out refuse me because of using Mullvad (not just because it's a VPN, but a supposedly "disreputable" VPN). Meaning blackhats love it. Meaning it works.
  - antegamisou 5y ago
    > One of the few VPNs that actually don't log traffic. How can one be so certain that this is the case? The only thing that's for sure is the claim they do not keep any evidence. I don't have anything against this VPN, it's really just an inherent trust problem with any provider. You take their word for it and be smart/ethical enough not to have any sketchy activity when you use it because there's a pretty good chance logs are being kept. I don't mean to make this personal to you but it's weird seeing a tech-literate crowd like HN act naive when it comes to VPN usage, based on arguments like "oh X is shady you should use Y instead, it's 100% private!". My point being, don't expect that doing extremely dumb shit online means any service, no matter how reputable, that may aid you do so will have your back.
    - darthvoldemort 5y ago
      The only ones you can trust are the ones that have actively fought court orders. That is a reasonable show of certainty that they do what they say otherwise there are real legal consequences.
      - lilsoso 5y ago
        You still don’t know if they’re feeding your data to an intelligence agency or data broker. For example, why wouldn’t China run a few top VPN companies — or at least compromise them? The benefit would outweigh the costs. So they shield you from piracy lawsuits and the like, they gain data to blackmail and compromise key figures later on.
lemoncookiechip 5y ago
It's far from a waste of money. They help with things such as skipping geoblocking, able to deceive ISPs that send mail warning users about pirated content, can in some cases help with gaming ping, allow users to trick sites that rely on IP logging and many other applications besides cybersecurity and privacy. The main issue is that they all seem to advertise themselves as these privacy and cybersecurity services first, while ignoring all the other added benefits.
- warent 5y ago
  And no wonder! All of those things you listed as benefits sound shady and illegitimate to people who aren't very tech savvy or have a poor understanding of their rights to a free web. Notice you're using words like "Trick" and "deceive" good luck selling that!
  - anamexis 5y ago
    I think VPNs are having no problems selling that, for exactly those reasons.
- elagost 5y ago
  Browser fingerprinting works much better than checking IPs. With multiple devices being behind the same IP, it's necessary to distinguish between users. I'm not saying VPNs are worthless - I'm on one right now for work. Commercial VPNs, for most people who purchase them, are completely worthless. And I very much doubt that tunneling your connection through a VPN can improve ping.
  - selykg 5y ago
    > And I very much doubt that tunneling your connection through a VPN can improve ping. Yea... as someone who used to play a lot of online games, this was always a surefire way to increase ping time lol. "Crap, my VPN is still on... brb"
    - ev1 5y ago
neom 5y ago
I'm not sure I totally agree, sure I don't know every single employee, but I use Nord because I like and respect Tom Okman[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Okman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Okman
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
young_unixer 5y ago
> At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it's a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook. My ISP is required by law to be an informant for government agencies, so the VPN can only be equal or better than my ISP.
angelzen 5y ago
To make it slightly more expensive for the adtech industry to spy on all my internet traffic. I have little illusions that any tech measure whatsoever can thwart government entities.
dangerface 5y ago
You are right that most people are just signing up with the same credit card and details as their isp and even if they claim they don't keep logs the vpn needs to link the use of their service to your details for billing just like your isp. That said if you live in the UK the government logs your internet history to be used against you at their convenience. Using a vpn like mullvad.net that you can buy with bitcoin and no details prevents the government logging my history, thats worth the £5 a month.
- zelphirkalt 5y ago
  Accounts can be completely decoupled from the payer. As long as the account is paid for, it should work. If there are no speed or time limits imposed, then why worry about who is using the VPN? If you allow a reasonable number of connections to the account at any given time, the rest shouldn't matter.
h_anna_h 5y ago
Mind you, tor had basically the same issue a while ago https://archive.is/4FMxm https://archive.is/4FMxm
nitrohorse 5y ago
https://www.doineedavpn.com https://www.doineedavpn.com enumerates legitimate use cases well I think. > This site was conceived and built by IVPN to challenge aggressive marketing practices in the VPN industry.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  > Hide geographic location > VPNs do not effectively solve this issue. Most modern browsers can detect the geographic location of a device based on data from GPS, available Wi-Fi networks and GSM/CDMA cell IDs and will submit this information to websites requesting it. Did I miss something? Even the ad-tech browser will ask the user before sharing that?
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    I block the Mozilla positioning trackers. They were getting over a million request per month from my household. It’s just a regular API call from any website and doesn’t need any browser permissions.
bsdnoob 5y ago
I wouldn't say commercial VPNs are waste, It depends for what purpose do you want to use the VPN. Privacy? Yeah maybe not the best for that but these are extremely useful to bypass geoblocking of content. Moreover, many ISP do not like you downloading content via torrent. How do you propose we solve it? User experience with Tor is not always the best as well. Tor network does not have lots of bandwidth, It is okay for browsing but the moment you want to download something using Tor you'd notice that its actually very slow. I'd bet my money that using Tor would attract lot more attention by your ISP than using a regular VPN.
cool_scatter 5y ago
> At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. I'm not sure what country you live in, but in the US, all the big ISPs might as well be run by the government, at least when talking about privacy. Private VPN companies are far more trustworthy, all else being equal.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
  > Private VPN companies are far more trustworthy, all else being equal. How? I don't see how being a VPN company as opposed to an ISP makes a difference in regards government seizure or request of logs.
addingnumbers 5y ago
> At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. When one party with auditors says they will protect your privacy, and the other openly spells out in their stated policies that they will run roughshod over your privacy, cataloging and trading your data as much, as long, and as insecurely as they like... You don't have to trust the former party a lot to recognize the lesser evil.
fnord77 5y ago
Tor is practically unusable in 2021. Tor is blocked or is very difficult to use for a growing number of sites. Google is the big one (whether one should use google at all is a different story). Plus ISPs can detect tor use by its customers just from packet patterns. I don't want to be flagged as a tor user by either my ISP or the sites I visit. The only other option is to set up your own ISP either in a colo rack or on a cloud VM. That's going to cost $50-$100 month plus your time fiddling with it and any network overages
garyrob 5y ago
Honest question: it's still a consensus that they do have value in situations such as airport Wi-Fi, correct? Separately from that, I still do wonder whether, if you subscribe to a VPN that has well-examined security practices and whose reputation depends on such practices, whether it still may have value over relying on the security over a local ISP which may not have as much expertise or reputation investment with respect to security. I'm not arguing, just trying to understand the issue better.
- gizdan 5y ago
  > Honest question: it's still a consensus that they do have value in situations such as airport Wi-Fi, correct? No. I don't think this was ever a consensus. When is the last time you've used a (sensitive) website that is not run over HTTPS? Unless the CAs (or the certs) are compromised, you have no reason to use a VPN when on public Wi-Fi, because it is encrypted with this so-called "military grade encryption" that VPN providers love to mention. Edit: forgot to add, if the CAs or the certs are compromised, VPNs won't help anyway.
- elagost 5y ago
  Argument is the spice of life! An argument doesn't have to be angry. But nonetheless I appreciate your earnest kindness. It's less of an issue when every site you connect to uses https, and every app you use employs ssl/tls for its connections. That is common practice these days. Getting man-in-the-middle'd on airport Wi-Fi is less feasible these days than it was 10 years ago. The attacker would have to also install a certificate on the user's device. I welcome corrections if I'm wrong. VPNs aren't obligated to tell you the truth. They don't have to have good security or even honor what they say on the front page. People trust marketing, not actual policy or actions - just look at Apple. Still waiting on "HMA" VPN to go out of business because they handed over users to the FBI. They're still around and claim No Logs just like everyone else, just like ProtonMail did until this month. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/09/privacy-focused-protonmail-provided-a-users-ip-address-to-authorities/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/09/priva... https://hacker10.com/internet-anonymity/hma-vpn-user-arrested-after-ip-handed-over-to-the-fbi/ https://hacker10.com/internet-anonymity/hma-vpn-user-arreste... https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/26/hidemyass_lulzsec_controversy/ https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/26/hidemyass_lulzsec_con...
hammock 5y ago
>If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. Isn't using Tor browser trusting a group of unknown people as well (nodes)? I hear all the time theories that Tor is a giant honeypot
- elagost 5y ago
  Diversification. Theoretically most of the nodes are owned by different people, and every connection will randomize your node list route between them, making it difficult to track, unless most of the nodes were owned by one organization. With VPNs, all of your connections are through servers owned by one company, identified by an account ID.
dkersten 5y ago
> If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. What about Tor over VPN, so that your ISP can't see that you're using Tor? That is, the VPN hides your usage of Tor from your ISP and Tor hides your browsing from the VPN (and since many VPN services even advertise Tor support, its not like it would be suspicious, plus you can pay for many VPN's with cryptocurrency while I definitely can't hide my identity or location from my ISP).
acchow 5y ago
> If you want a VPN for any other reason that "normal people" think they want a VPN As far as I can see, normal people are asking for VPNs to access Netflix catalogs of other countries.
deelowe 5y ago
What assurances do we have that most tor end points aren't compromised as well?
qw3rty01 5y ago
> If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser so replace a vpn, which might be logging your traffic, for a service which absolutely is logging your traffic? Tor is an anonymity service, not a privacy service.
- joconde 5y ago
  What traffic does it log exactly, and who logs it? As I understand Tor: - the exit node knows the second-to-last node, the cleartext data and the destination, - each intermediate node knows the previous and next nodes, - the entry node knows the sender and the second node. And using HTTPS prevents the exit node from knowing the cleartext data. This doesn't enable any individual node to know who sent what to whom, assuming that the whole path isn't entirely controlled by one person.
  - qw3rty01 5y ago
    Everything you mentioned goes back to my point that it's an anonymity service, not a privacy service. Tor exit nodes don't know who sent traffic, but they do see all the traffic that passes through them. HTTPS can mitigate some of that, just like it can for VPNs, but the site you're going to is still very much visible. Don't get me wrong, Tor is a very useful service if anonymity is your goal, but it requires a solid understanding of what can go wrong, which torproject provides a decent list for: https://support.torproject.org/faq/staying-anonymous/ https://support.torproject.org/faq/staying-anonymous/
    - saurik 5y ago
      With Tor the site you are going to is visible, but not who you are (there actually are some quibbles with this, but those don't seem to be your better argument); that someone--somewhere out there--is accessing a specific site doesn't seem to be particularly secret information. I think Tor might tend to use a single circuit for all of your traffic, which allows for correlations, but that is trivially fixable (you can hash the websites you are accessing to multiple circuits that egress with separate exit nodes, so you don't provide the attacker that information).
baron_harkonnen 5y ago
> you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations I've always seen this argument but it's never made sense to me. For starters I absolutely don't trust my ISP. I know they are collecting, storing, likely selling my data and that they are 100% going to comply with any government requests from my government (I don't even trust that they would only respond to legal requests). Years ago I used to use AirVPN. They claimed: > AirVPN started as a project of a very small group of activists, hacktivists, hackers in 2010, with the invaluable (and totally free) help of two fantastic lawyers and a financing from a company interested in the project and operated by the very same people. Maybe they're lying but at least there's some chance they actually care about privacy. But even if they don't care about privacy at all and are lying, at the very least they are based in Italy and have their servers spread throughout Europe. Additionally you can pay via crypto (which gives you more anonymous payment options than your ISP). Simply being in another country then the one I live in makes it much harder for my government to arbitrarily request my data. Yes if I want to do highly illegal activity that is going to get my government interested in me I absolutely don't think that would be enough. But if I want privacy from routine surveillance this seems like a fantastically better option that 100% giving up.
- dannyw 5y ago
  Plus, you can chain through a couple VPNs. Both VPNs have to be compromised for you to lose privacy.
  - ralusek 5y ago
    The first one would still know everything though.
    - simiones 5y ago
      The first one would know that you are talking to the second VPN. The second VPN would know that VPN1 User is talking to facebook.com. In principle, neither of them has the full picture. In practice, you may leak enough information that both of them could get the full picture.
missinfo 5y ago
Tor is too slow and often blocked by sites. And how do you know if an exit node is a honeypot or not? Mullvad VPN seems like the best choice.
ashtonkem 5y ago
The utility in a VPN is in travelling, not at home. I’m not sure if I trust ProtonVPN more than I trust my ISP, but I sure as hell trust them more than I trust the little hotel I stayed at in Brooklyn. Long term I’ll probably just solve this by setting up a VPN server at home, so I can tunnel through to my local services and protect myself from wifi endpoints I use on the go.
WastingMyTime89 5y ago
> Why do we even give these companies the time of day? My understanding is that most people use a VPN to either watch the foreign catalogs of streaming services or insert a third party in a foreign country to make themselves less tempting targets for random enforcement of copyright laws. Obviously they don't advertise like this because these activities are illegal.
dijit 5y ago
I think there’s been good criticism of your arguments so far and I don’t want to pile on; but I see _a value_ in commercial VPN companies. I, a tech savvy person, have no issue creating an SSH proxy server in any country in seconds. But I also make online video games, and the US sanction system means I must block people from accessing our services; even if they have a copy of the game. They did nothing wrong, my company isn’t even US based: we just used a cloud provider and all of those are US based. So, I encourage those users to use a vpn if one is available to them.
mintplant 5y ago
> At worst, it's a government agency honeypot Kevin Poulsen's book Kingpin, about the takedown of CardersMarket, describes how the FBI ran a VPN service as a honeypot for quite a while as part of the operation, logging everything that passed through it. As you say, it could be anyone on the other end of that connection.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
guerrilla 5y ago
> It's been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. This is nonsense. It depends entirely on your goals. It's important to me that my ISP doesn't know what I'm doing while I couldn't care less if my VPN provider does. I also need to circumvent geoblocking from time to time.
caymanjim 5y ago
Tor is almost certainly a government honeypot, but if you're just trying to hide from Google and other ad companies, it'll help. Except that it's cripplingly slow.
wintermutestwin 5y ago
These are the reasons why I use a VPN provider: 1. my threat model is not my government. It seems that the TLAs have thoroughly pwned our privacy for a long time now. (please note that I am in no way advocating for this mass surveillance, but I don't see that I have much choice in the matter) 2. My threat model includes my ISP. I am forced to use a scummy ISP who would openly steal my data if I let them. Same with my mobile provider. 3. My threat model includes the data thieves who have obvious business models built around selling my stolen data to the highest bidder. 4. My threat model includes black hats and script kiddies. 5. Do I trust my VPN provider? Eh. A little. For now. The thing is, I trust them more than #s 2,3,4 above. What other choice do I have?
karaterobot 5y ago
> At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it's a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook. You're starting with the (completely correct) observation that any VPN is not guaranteed to be secure, confidential, or private, and then making an argument as though it were the case that every reputable VPN is equivalent to every untrustworthy ISP. I think that's why your argument doesn't make sense to me: I don't think there's an equal chance that a VPN provider with a good reputation is going to sell me out as my ISP. It's axiomatic in risk management that there is no way to completely remove all risk. Running a proxy and Tor is not a guarantee of security any more than running the world's shadiest VPN is, though it's obviously more secure by far. But, it's a question of what the acceptable level of risk is, and what the marginal cost to reduce that risk is. For many people, a $5-10 (non-shady) VPN is a perfectly reasonable step to take.
jrootabega 5y ago
Having an easily-replaceable IP address is also of some value in case someone tries to DOS you in IRC/game chat/etc.
babypuncher 5y ago
I'm convinced that you can get most of the privacy "benefits" of a VPN with an encrypted DNS, which a pihole can be configured to provide for your whole home network. Your ISP could still figure out which sites you are visiting by what IP addresses your traffic gets pointed to, but I'd be willing to wager that the bulk of their data collection for the purpose of advertising comes from logging DNS requests, since it is far easier to do and captures 99.99% of their customers habits. This won't do anything to protect your IP from being sniffed out by media companies when seeding copyrighted torrents, but that has never been a major concern in my house. This is probably also meaningless if you are being targeted for surveillance.
can16358p 5y ago
The main reason that I use (and many around here) VPNs is to access sites blocked by the government. And these blocked sites even included Wikipedia until recently.
iforgetti 5y ago
It depends on your risk model. We use a commercial VPN at our company because it provides a mechanism for traffic encryption for employees who might be connecting from insecure networks. Sure most sites use HTTPS but there is still some unencrypted traffic like CDN or similar. It’s not a cure all or some privacy guarantee, it’s just that for us, the risk of our employees browser history being stolen by that VPN for some nefarious purpose is just less than the risk of information leaking via insecure network.
ftobin 5y ago
I believe Mozilla's contract with Cloudflare to provide Firefox Private Network provides great value, and I've been happy with it service for quite some time. Mozilla and Cloudflare are both well known organizations, and Mozilla acting as a buyer's agent is a good position to be in.

Raed667 5y ago

What if you want a VPN to unlock location based content?

elagost 5y ago
Then either do without (because, come on, nobody's gonna die if they can't watch reality TV), buy it on disc, or pirate it? Netflix is blocking IP ranges so hard that residential space is getting caught in the blast radius. It's a cat and mouse game that you'll only win by refusing to play. https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-intensifies-vpn-ban-and-targets-residential-ip-addresses-too-210811/ https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-intensifies-vpn-ban-and-tar...
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Some of us would like to get home country news besides the quite poor international channels, it is not always about Netflix.
- onli 5y ago
  To pirate it you need a VPN, in countries that have a surveilled internet and laws that enable suing file sharers. Germany for example.
- BRedSox 5y ago
  I use a VPN to watch my local sports team - whose owner is currently in a contract dispute resulting in the team not being played on local tv.
- nyuszika7h 5y ago
  What do you think the pirates who rip the content use to get it? There's not always going to be a local user to rip every single title.
hannob 5y ago
Circumventing geoblocking is legit, but don't tell people that VPNs are about "security".
- Sebb767 5y ago
  They are, it's just in very rare circumstances (monitored public wifi + possibly unsecured connection, for example). Most people should do fine and thanks to https, public wifi is far less of a threat than it used to be (plus, some started blocking VPNs).
trutannus 5y ago
Essentially the only valid use of a VPN. That, or masking your location from other users online. I find YouTube in my country is just filled with content being pushed because it's local to my country. Some VPN exit points have less local content pushing, which gives me more options. Eastern European content is really good, but also completely missing from American YouTube suggestions.
cm2187 5y ago
Also create a fuse between DMCA requests and your sole broadband provider if you do any torrenting.

lol123456789 5y ago

idk mullvad seems pretty alright

z3c0 5y ago
It is - they know their market and they serve them well. One of the few VPNs that actually don't log traffic. That said, I've had websites flat-out refuse me because of using Mullvad (not just because it's a VPN, but a supposedly "disreputable" VPN). Meaning blackhats love it. Meaning it works.
- antegamisou 5y ago
  > One of the few VPNs that actually don't log traffic. How can one be so certain that this is the case? The only thing that's for sure is the claim they do not keep any evidence. I don't have anything against this VPN, it's really just an inherent trust problem with any provider. You take their word for it and be smart/ethical enough not to have any sketchy activity when you use it because there's a pretty good chance logs are being kept. I don't mean to make this personal to you but it's weird seeing a tech-literate crowd like HN act naive when it comes to VPN usage, based on arguments like "oh X is shady you should use Y instead, it's 100% private!". My point being, don't expect that doing extremely dumb shit online means any service, no matter how reputable, that may aid you do so will have your back.
  - darthvoldemort 5y ago
    The only ones you can trust are the ones that have actively fought court orders. That is a reasonable show of certainty that they do what they say otherwise there are real legal consequences.
    - lilsoso 5y ago
      You still don’t know if they’re feeding your data to an intelligence agency or data broker. For example, why wouldn’t China run a few top VPN companies — or at least compromise them? The benefit would outweigh the costs. So they shield you from piracy lawsuits and the like, they gain data to blackmail and compromise key figures later on.

lemoncookiechip 5y ago

It's far from a waste of money. They help with things such as skipping geoblocking, able to deceive ISPs that send mail warning users about pirated content, can in some cases help with gaming ping, allow users to trick sites that rely on IP logging and many other applications besides cybersecurity and privacy. The main issue is that they all seem to advertise themselves as these privacy and cybersecurity services first, while ignoring all the other added benefits.

warent 5y ago
And no wonder! All of those things you listed as benefits sound shady and illegitimate to people who aren't very tech savvy or have a poor understanding of their rights to a free web. Notice you're using words like "Trick" and "deceive" good luck selling that!
- anamexis 5y ago
  I think VPNs are having no problems selling that, for exactly those reasons.
elagost 5y ago
Browser fingerprinting works much better than checking IPs. With multiple devices being behind the same IP, it's necessary to distinguish between users. I'm not saying VPNs are worthless - I'm on one right now for work. Commercial VPNs, for most people who purchase them, are completely worthless. And I very much doubt that tunneling your connection through a VPN can improve ping.
- selykg 5y ago
  > And I very much doubt that tunneling your connection through a VPN can improve ping. Yea... as someone who used to play a lot of online games, this was always a surefire way to increase ping time lol. "Crap, my VPN is still on... brb"
  - ev1 5y ago

neom 5y ago

I'm not sure I totally agree, sure I don't know every single employee, but I use Nord because I like and respect Tom Okman[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Okman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Okman

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

young_unixer 5y ago

angelzen 5y ago

To make it slightly more expensive for the adtech industry to spy on all my internet traffic. I have little illusions that any tech measure whatsoever can thwart government entities.

dangerface 5y ago

You are right that most people are just signing up with the same credit card and details as their isp and even if they claim they don't keep logs the vpn needs to link the use of their service to your details for billing just like your isp. That said if you live in the UK the government logs your internet history to be used against you at their convenience. Using a vpn like mullvad.net that you can buy with bitcoin and no details prevents the government logging my history, thats worth the £5 a month.

zelphirkalt 5y ago
Accounts can be completely decoupled from the payer. As long as the account is paid for, it should work. If there are no speed or time limits imposed, then why worry about who is using the VPN? If you allow a reasonable number of connections to the account at any given time, the rest shouldn't matter.

h_anna_h 5y ago

Mind you, tor had basically the same issue a while ago https://archive.is/4FMxm https://archive.is/4FMxm

nitrohorse 5y ago

https://www.doineedavpn.com https://www.doineedavpn.com enumerates legitimate use cases well I think. > This site was conceived and built by IVPN to challenge aggressive marketing practices in the VPN industry.

Semaphor 5y ago
> Hide geographic location > VPNs do not effectively solve this issue. Most modern browsers can detect the geographic location of a device based on data from GPS, available Wi-Fi networks and GSM/CDMA cell IDs and will submit this information to websites requesting it. Did I miss something? Even the ad-tech browser will ask the user before sharing that?
- withinboredom 5y ago
  I block the Mozilla positioning trackers. They were getting over a million request per month from my household. It’s just a regular API call from any website and doesn’t need any browser permissions.

bsdnoob 5y ago

I wouldn't say commercial VPNs are waste, It depends for what purpose do you want to use the VPN. Privacy? Yeah maybe not the best for that but these are extremely useful to bypass geoblocking of content. Moreover, many ISP do not like you downloading content via torrent. How do you propose we solve it? User experience with Tor is not always the best as well. Tor network does not have lots of bandwidth, It is okay for browsing but the moment you want to download something using Tor you'd notice that its actually very slow. I'd bet my money that using Tor would attract lot more attention by your ISP than using a regular VPN.

cool_scatter 5y ago

> At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. I'm not sure what country you live in, but in the US, all the big ISPs might as well be run by the government, at least when talking about privacy. Private VPN companies are far more trustworthy, all else being equal.

0xdeadb00f 5y ago
> Private VPN companies are far more trustworthy, all else being equal. How? I don't see how being a VPN company as opposed to an ISP makes a difference in regards government seizure or request of logs.

addingnumbers 5y ago

> At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. When one party with auditors says they will protect your privacy, and the other openly spells out in their stated policies that they will run roughshod over your privacy, cataloging and trading your data as much, as long, and as insecurely as they like... You don't have to trust the former party a lot to recognize the lesser evil.

fnord77 5y ago

Tor is practically unusable in 2021. Tor is blocked or is very difficult to use for a growing number of sites. Google is the big one (whether one should use google at all is a different story). Plus ISPs can detect tor use by its customers just from packet patterns. I don't want to be flagged as a tor user by either my ISP or the sites I visit. The only other option is to set up your own ISP either in a colo rack or on a cloud VM. That's going to cost $50-$100 month plus your time fiddling with it and any network overages

garyrob 5y ago

Honest question: it's still a consensus that they do have value in situations such as airport Wi-Fi, correct? Separately from that, I still do wonder whether, if you subscribe to a VPN that has well-examined security practices and whose reputation depends on such practices, whether it still may have value over relying on the security over a local ISP which may not have as much expertise or reputation investment with respect to security. I'm not arguing, just trying to understand the issue better.

gizdan 5y ago
> Honest question: it's still a consensus that they do have value in situations such as airport Wi-Fi, correct? No. I don't think this was ever a consensus. When is the last time you've used a (sensitive) website that is not run over HTTPS? Unless the CAs (or the certs) are compromised, you have no reason to use a VPN when on public Wi-Fi, because it is encrypted with this so-called "military grade encryption" that VPN providers love to mention. Edit: forgot to add, if the CAs or the certs are compromised, VPNs won't help anyway.
elagost 5y ago
Argument is the spice of life! An argument doesn't have to be angry. But nonetheless I appreciate your earnest kindness. It's less of an issue when every site you connect to uses https, and every app you use employs ssl/tls for its connections. That is common practice these days. Getting man-in-the-middle'd on airport Wi-Fi is less feasible these days than it was 10 years ago. The attacker would have to also install a certificate on the user's device. I welcome corrections if I'm wrong. VPNs aren't obligated to tell you the truth. They don't have to have good security or even honor what they say on the front page. People trust marketing, not actual policy or actions - just look at Apple. Still waiting on "HMA" VPN to go out of business because they handed over users to the FBI. They're still around and claim No Logs just like everyone else, just like ProtonMail did until this month. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/09/privacy-focused-protonmail-provided-a-users-ip-address-to-authorities/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/09/priva... https://hacker10.com/internet-anonymity/hma-vpn-user-arrested-after-ip-handed-over-to-the-fbi/ https://hacker10.com/internet-anonymity/hma-vpn-user-arreste... https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/26/hidemyass_lulzsec_controversy/ https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/26/hidemyass_lulzsec_con...

hammock 5y ago

>If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. Isn't using Tor browser trusting a group of unknown people as well (nodes)? I hear all the time theories that Tor is a giant honeypot

elagost 5y ago
Diversification. Theoretically most of the nodes are owned by different people, and every connection will randomize your node list route between them, making it difficult to track, unless most of the nodes were owned by one organization. With VPNs, all of your connections are through servers owned by one company, identified by an account ID.

dkersten 5y ago

> If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. What about Tor over VPN, so that your ISP can't see that you're using Tor? That is, the VPN hides your usage of Tor from your ISP and Tor hides your browsing from the VPN (and since many VPN services even advertise Tor support, its not like it would be suspicious, plus you can pay for many VPN's with cryptocurrency while I definitely can't hide my identity or location from my ISP).

acchow 5y ago

> If you want a VPN for any other reason that "normal people" think they want a VPN As far as I can see, normal people are asking for VPNs to access Netflix catalogs of other countries.

deelowe 5y ago

What assurances do we have that most tor end points aren't compromised as well?

qw3rty01 5y ago

> If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser so replace a vpn, which might be logging your traffic, for a service which absolutely is logging your traffic? Tor is an anonymity service, not a privacy service.

joconde 5y ago
What traffic does it log exactly, and who logs it? As I understand Tor: - the exit node knows the second-to-last node, the cleartext data and the destination, - each intermediate node knows the previous and next nodes, - the entry node knows the sender and the second node. And using HTTPS prevents the exit node from knowing the cleartext data. This doesn't enable any individual node to know who sent what to whom, assuming that the whole path isn't entirely controlled by one person.
- qw3rty01 5y ago
  Everything you mentioned goes back to my point that it's an anonymity service, not a privacy service. Tor exit nodes don't know who sent traffic, but they do see all the traffic that passes through them. HTTPS can mitigate some of that, just like it can for VPNs, but the site you're going to is still very much visible. Don't get me wrong, Tor is a very useful service if anonymity is your goal, but it requires a solid understanding of what can go wrong, which torproject provides a decent list for: https://support.torproject.org/faq/staying-anonymous/ https://support.torproject.org/faq/staying-anonymous/
  - saurik 5y ago
    With Tor the site you are going to is visible, but not who you are (there actually are some quibbles with this, but those don't seem to be your better argument); that someone--somewhere out there--is accessing a specific site doesn't seem to be particularly secret information. I think Tor might tend to use a single circuit for all of your traffic, which allows for correlations, but that is trivially fixable (you can hash the websites you are accessing to multiple circuits that egress with separate exit nodes, so you don't provide the attacker that information).

baron_harkonnen 5y ago

> you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations I've always seen this argument but it's never made sense to me. For starters I absolutely don't trust my ISP. I know they are collecting, storing, likely selling my data and that they are 100% going to comply with any government requests from my government (I don't even trust that they would only respond to legal requests). Years ago I used to use AirVPN. They claimed: > AirVPN started as a project of a very small group of activists, hacktivists, hackers in 2010, with the invaluable (and totally free) help of two fantastic lawyers and a financing from a company interested in the project and operated by the very same people. Maybe they're lying but at least there's some chance they actually care about privacy. But even if they don't care about privacy at all and are lying, at the very least they are based in Italy and have their servers spread throughout Europe. Additionally you can pay via crypto (which gives you more anonymous payment options than your ISP). Simply being in another country then the one I live in makes it much harder for my government to arbitrarily request my data. Yes if I want to do highly illegal activity that is going to get my government interested in me I absolutely don't think that would be enough. But if I want privacy from routine surveillance this seems like a fantastically better option that 100% giving up.

dannyw 5y ago
Plus, you can chain through a couple VPNs. Both VPNs have to be compromised for you to lose privacy.
- ralusek 5y ago
  The first one would still know everything though.
  - simiones 5y ago
    The first one would know that you are talking to the second VPN. The second VPN would know that VPN1 User is talking to facebook.com. In principle, neither of them has the full picture. In practice, you may leak enough information that both of them could get the full picture.

missinfo 5y ago

Tor is too slow and often blocked by sites. And how do you know if an exit node is a honeypot or not? Mullvad VPN seems like the best choice.

ashtonkem 5y ago

The utility in a VPN is in travelling, not at home. I’m not sure if I trust ProtonVPN more than I trust my ISP, but I sure as hell trust them more than I trust the little hotel I stayed at in Brooklyn. Long term I’ll probably just solve this by setting up a VPN server at home, so I can tunnel through to my local services and protect myself from wifi endpoints I use on the go.

WastingMyTime89 5y ago

> Why do we even give these companies the time of day? My understanding is that most people use a VPN to either watch the foreign catalogs of streaming services or insert a third party in a foreign country to make themselves less tempting targets for random enforcement of copyright laws. Obviously they don't advertise like this because these activities are illegal.

dijit 5y ago

I think there’s been good criticism of your arguments so far and I don’t want to pile on; but I see _a value_ in commercial VPN companies. I, a tech savvy person, have no issue creating an SSH proxy server in any country in seconds. But I also make online video games, and the US sanction system means I must block people from accessing our services; even if they have a copy of the game. They did nothing wrong, my company isn’t even US based: we just used a cloud provider and all of those are US based. So, I encourage those users to use a vpn if one is available to them.

mintplant 5y ago

> At worst, it's a government agency honeypot Kevin Poulsen's book Kingpin, about the takedown of CardersMarket, describes how the FBI ran a VPN service as a honeypot for quite a while as part of the operation, logging everything that passed through it. As you say, it could be anyone on the other end of that connection.

deleted 5y ago

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guerrilla 5y ago

> It's been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. This is nonsense. It depends entirely on your goals. It's important to me that my ISP doesn't know what I'm doing while I couldn't care less if my VPN provider does. I also need to circumvent geoblocking from time to time.

caymanjim 5y ago

Tor is almost certainly a government honeypot, but if you're just trying to hide from Google and other ad companies, it'll help. Except that it's cripplingly slow.

wintermutestwin 5y ago

These are the reasons why I use a VPN provider: 1. my threat model is not my government. It seems that the TLAs have thoroughly pwned our privacy for a long time now. (please note that I am in no way advocating for this mass surveillance, but I don't see that I have much choice in the matter) 2. My threat model includes my ISP. I am forced to use a scummy ISP who would openly steal my data if I let them. Same with my mobile provider. 3. My threat model includes the data thieves who have obvious business models built around selling my stolen data to the highest bidder. 4. My threat model includes black hats and script kiddies. 5. Do I trust my VPN provider? Eh. A little. For now. The thing is, I trust them more than #s 2,3,4 above. What other choice do I have?

karaterobot 5y ago

> At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it's a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook. You're starting with the (completely correct) observation that any VPN is not guaranteed to be secure, confidential, or private, and then making an argument as though it were the case that every reputable VPN is equivalent to every untrustworthy ISP. I think that's why your argument doesn't make sense to me: I don't think there's an equal chance that a VPN provider with a good reputation is going to sell me out as my ISP. It's axiomatic in risk management that there is no way to completely remove all risk. Running a proxy and Tor is not a guarantee of security any more than running the world's shadiest VPN is, though it's obviously more secure by far. But, it's a question of what the acceptable level of risk is, and what the marginal cost to reduce that risk is. For many people, a $5-10 (non-shady) VPN is a perfectly reasonable step to take.

jrootabega 5y ago

Having an easily-replaceable IP address is also of some value in case someone tries to DOS you in IRC/game chat/etc.

babypuncher 5y ago

I'm convinced that you can get most of the privacy "benefits" of a VPN with an encrypted DNS, which a pihole can be configured to provide for your whole home network. Your ISP could still figure out which sites you are visiting by what IP addresses your traffic gets pointed to, but I'd be willing to wager that the bulk of their data collection for the purpose of advertising comes from logging DNS requests, since it is far easier to do and captures 99.99% of their customers habits. This won't do anything to protect your IP from being sniffed out by media companies when seeding copyrighted torrents, but that has never been a major concern in my house. This is probably also meaningless if you are being targeted for surveillance.

can16358p 5y ago

The main reason that I use (and many around here) VPNs is to access sites blocked by the government. And these blocked sites even included Wikipedia until recently.

iforgetti 5y ago

It depends on your risk model. We use a commercial VPN at our company because it provides a mechanism for traffic encryption for employees who might be connecting from insecure networks. Sure most sites use HTTPS but there is still some unencrypted traffic like CDN or similar. It’s not a cure all or some privacy guarantee, it’s just that for us, the risk of our employees browser history being stolen by that VPN for some nefarious purpose is just less than the risk of information leaking via insecure network.

ftobin 5y ago

I believe Mozilla's contract with Cloudflare to provide Firefox Private Network provides great value, and I've been happy with it service for quite some time. Mozilla and Cloudflare are both well known organizations, and Mozilla acting as a buyer's agent is a good position to be in.