- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
I’m sharing this one because I’m curious what more knowledgeable people think about this one. Please take a peek at the article before joining the discussion, as my limited quote might have dropped useful information
The VPN industry runs on a promise. Pick almost any provider and the pitch is the same: “we don’t keep logs.” You hand over your entire internet connection and, in return, you get a pinky-promise that nobody is writing anything down.
For a lot of privacy-minded people, that promise stopped being good enough a while ago. A no-logs policy is only as honest as the company making it, and even an honest company can be hacked, subpoenaed, or quietly acquired.
Obscura VPN is trying to answer to that problem. Instead of asking you to trust its word, it splits the job across two independent companies so that neither one can tie your identity to your browsing. The first hop is Obscura’s own servers; the exit hop is run by Mullvad. a respected VPM company out of Sweden. Your traffic is end-to-end encrypted to Mullvad’s keys, so Obscura literally can’t read it, and Mullvad never sees who you are.
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That’s stupid.
The tor network is free to use. You get three hops there!
and still crazy show most of the time nonethless somehow.
also fuck Mullvad’s cofounder for bankrolling the far right
I mean yeah duck those people but if my enemy makes the honestly best quality vpn out there I’m going to use it.
It’s really sad that we only have two other trusted and properly audited alternatives, which is iVPN and ProtonVPN.
I am not sure on proton, same right wing boat but also they want to be more than what I want them to be.
Nord is named a lot with these aswell
Nord runs too many ads for me to like it
As in like on youtube, not in service?
The issue is, any time I see a company pay a ton to advertise on YouTube, I distrust it.
The cut they give affiliate marketers is massive too, meaning the service is hella overpriced.
They also show ads on TV. I haven’t tried Nord so I can’t say if they’ve got ads in the program
“the exit hop is run by Mullvad. a respected VPM company out of Sweden.”
been living under a rock?
The pinky promise to not look at who you are on the tech side is only useful if it’s also accompanied with the promise to not know who you are on the business side ie.: not requiring any kind of payment data.
Easily pay using Bitcoin’s Lightning Network for better privacy, instant payments, and lower transaction fees. We also accept Monero.
Crypto? That’s almost worse!
As far as I’m aware, nobody has ever been identified by a Monero transaction or a Bitcoin lightning network transaction without getting verification from the other party, e.g., you send money to a company that retains records and gets subpoenaed. Bitcoin transactions made on the lightning network aren’t even recorded on the blockchain, so it’s completely immune to chain analysis.
Yeah but that still means you have to get into crypto which is a well-known scam (and from what I gather even if there might be “legal” crypto exchanges, that “legal” carries its own implications there).
Crypto is not a scam. Crypto is an unregulated transfer mechanism, which has many scammers. If you’re just buying crypto to fund your vpn, you’re not getting scammed unless the VPN itself is a scam.
Using Monero for payment is fine once you have it set up. You’re just using it for facilitating anonymous payments, not treating it like stock.
That being said, setting up Monero securely is a pain. I’d like to use it at some point in the future but right now I have more pressing projects to work on
There are a TON of scams in crypto, no doubt about that at all. I don’t think Bitcoin is one of them, though. I don’t think Monero is, either, but I don’t think it’ll thrive long term. Most of the rest is bullshit just chasing dollars.
I doubt I’m more knowledgeable but the argument made is reasonable. I’m not totally convinced that trusting 2 providers is an improvement on trusting one. The point not canvassed in the article is that if Mullvad is the encrypted end point with keys then it doesn’t really matter if they don’t know who you are from account info, it’s not very hard for them to have an unencrypted data flow split off for inspection which sooner or later will provide sufficient info to identify you.
Tl;dr if you trust mullvad deal with them directly. If you don’t trust mullvad this doesn’t actually fix that although it makes it harder and more effort to identify you it can still be done.
I wouldnt pay a premium over mullvad’s price for this. No real value added.
this isn’t a revolutionary concept or anything, it’s basically just tor, without the middle hop, and with entry nodes that knows who you are
The point is that Tor is too slow and unreliable for general everyday use.
I’ve tried using Tor as a daily browser, I don’t have nearly enough patience
too slow and unreliable for general everyday use
There was a guy on Lemmy awhile back who was daily driving TailsOS, as a bit. I wonder how it turned out
I’m actually using TorVPN on my device, and if it drops, I force all my internet connections to drop with it instead of leaking.
I find that I can still access most things, although some things will pretend that the connection can’t be established as if the site was down, and others will just give me like an access denied page.
The reason I am doing it at all to begin with is because one day we as free citizens are going to have to abandon the clear net entirely as it’s becoming the cuck net. I’m just preparing for that day by learning to use the services over tour today and getting used to the speeds and stuff I will have to deal with at that point.
Seems a lot easier to just use mullvad directly.
It’s just as easy not any easier because you don’t need to pay or run mullvad yourself.
Ok smarty pants you know what I meant.
no, because my immediate first thought was that I’d need to hire two services, I can’t read minds without looking at you
But you can read minds if you are looking at them?!
I can’t either way, not at this hour
What hour can you do it at then?
The same people who were asking for a Google account so they could sign up for Obscura VPN beta 🤡
So it’s a VPN, and legal bullshit to deal with jurisdictions?
