Are we allowed to discuss (edit: if it's not too political?) if Kape Technologies has any connections to Israeli security services, given the nature of VPNs and given the amount of data that can be trivially collected, and:
"Being from Israel, Teddy Sagi had connections with the Israeli military intelligence sphere and was able to procure himself a real-life cyber spy [his co-founder] from the famed Unit 8200 (kinda like Israel’s version of the NSA)" [0]
?
Unit 8200 is the premier software development track in the Israeli military.
Every Israeli tech company likely has multiple developers from Unit 8200 in it. Whether it's building e-commerce shops or making video games.
While 8200 definitely falls under the military intelligence wing, I don't think describing people in it as Cyber Spies is anywhere near accurate. And unless that guy was very high ranking it is a stretch to imply that's an indication that IL military intelligence is involved in the company.
That is not to say that the military isn't involved with the company - that might very well be true, just that someone being from Unit 8200 isn't an indication of it.
>Teddy Sagi had connections with the Israeli military intelligence sphere
Does this mean much given that israel has mandatory military service? Unlike in the US where you have to make a conscious choice (eg. patriotism or desperation) to join the CIA/NSA/military, that's not really the case in israel. "has ties to unit 8200" might as well mean "has ties to stanford/MIT/caltech" or "has ties to big tech".
If I was running an intelligence agency and was given my choice of conscripts,
I wouldn't hand my intelligence secrets to people who resented being forced to be there; or to mouthy people I thought might blab about it after the end of their service; or to people with an anti-authority streak or at risk of a Snowden-style attack of conscience about civil liberties.
I would select for people with a deep love of their country; and a sense of loyalty that would extend well beyond the end of their service. The rest I'd send elsewhere - plenty of other units need tech folks, that drone/radio/printer isn't going to fix itself.
I think VPNs are one of the clearest cases of tech/politics intersection, it's not just OT for tech but also for hacker culture.
What do you think @dang ?
Israeli crypto ag
I liked Express VPN
Note that all of these companies are also under the umbrella of Tesonet, a Lithuanian VC firm also headed by Tomas Okmanas (Tom Okman in TFA). Their flagship investments are Nord Security, Hostinger, Oxylabs, Surfshark, Decodo, Mediatech, and nexos.ai - all closely related business models around proxying.
They don't seem to have Russian ties: "In 2022, CyberCare opened an office in Lviv, Ukraine. Although planning for the move started before the war, according to Dainius Vanagas, CEO of CyberCare, one of the reasons why it was followed through was a desire to help Ukraine rebuild."[0]
They also donated money to help arm Ukraine.
Don't forget ProtonVPN links to Tesonet, which they're trying hard to "debunk" (though no clue why, I have nothing against Tesonet). They only shared employees and accidentally signed apps with the same certificates, but are "totally unrelated". Their PR people are already on this thread.
If they didn't try so hard to fight it, people might care less.
Back when I was running PIA, they threatened me a significant amount just for pointing these facts out.
Now that I launched a verifiable VPN, they are once again sending legal threats [1].
So did you sell pia? Why won’t you sell your next venture ?
If you’re worried about your VPN provider but you can trust your VPS provider, try an SSH Tunnel.
https://joeldare.com/ssh-tunnels-my-vpn-alternative-for-priv...
This link displays just the map, freed from it's painfully small frame.
https://kumu.io/embed/9ced55e897e74fd807be51990b26b415#vpn-c...
Anyone got this as a regular single image infographic or (better yet) a text-only bulleted outline?
I have to admit that discovering that ProtonVPN was actually just owned by Proton Technologies feels underwhelming.
Idk what's the official status, but it's Tesonet.
Some fake debunking in the comments of this thread that is factually almost correct: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/protonvpn...
EDIT: ProtonVPN app was "accidentally" signet by Tesonet. How do you think this could happen?
It’s not Tesonet, Proton is wholly self-owned and managed. Proton VPN was briefly sharing employees with Tesonet during initial app bringup, and that partnership is long over. Naturally due to competition and the huge importance of privacy in this space, people still bring this up, but Proton VPN does not and never will sell or share your data with anyone.
Source: I am a Proton VPN employee.
So, why were the employees shared?
EDIT: I'm not saying being related to Tesonet is bad, but it is a fact that you cannot run away from.
thanks, this reddit thread doesn't inspire confidence in proton's story :/ at all
We should really be moving towards a world of Multi-Party Relays rather than Single-Party VPN operators: https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/11/17/where-are-...
With Multi-Party Relays you no longer have a trust a single entity not being malicious or compromised.
Disclaimer: I run obscura.net, which does exactly this with Mullvad (our partner) as the Exit Hop.
Can you control the geography of the exit node? I really like Private Relay but it doesn't get around geo restrictions because the IP is still in the same country you are.
Yes, you can with Obscura. That limitation of Private Relay is just an arbitrary limitation made by Apple.
Is there any other real world usecases for VPN nowadays other than:
1. Getting access to geolocked data
2. Torrenting "Linux ISOs"
?
In Germany (and probably in the UK too), you now have to be very careful about what you write online. There is actually a section 188 that makes insulting, defaming, or slandering people in political life a criminal offense. You can now face heavy fines for minor insults (“idiot”) or even have your home searched. A VPN can be useful here.
What idiot signed that bullshit into law?
That law has existed since 1951 and is based on an executive order from 1931 by Hindenburg.
The original use for a VPN - getting access to private resources - is still very much in play.
I don't just mean being able to access some private web interface you have on a private server in your at home, I mean connecting a satellite office to the main corporate office.
But for all of these consumer marketed VPNs, I think your list has 90%+ covered...
Interesting that we use the same word to describe both technologies, but semantically and technically they are very different.
Perhaps we use the same word to describe them because initially they did use the same technologies, but they have branched out ever since? Maybe IPSec would be a common tech used. But the algorithms are not the same anymore since they serve different purposes (Personal privacy vs corporate/sysadmin security)
In the corporate world VPNs were usually a lower level abstraction security mechanism or a redundant security mechanism to either complement application layer_security, or to hot-patch modern security unto legacy LAN systems. VPN encryption is usually provided by the local router. Common algorithms are IPSec/IKev2.
In the personal privacy world, we are talking about a proxy that hides identification such as IP addresses, and pools connections to provide privacy. The actual encryption is not the main security mechanism even, as it only covers the transit between consumer to proxy, leaving (a potentially longer transit) between the proxy to the actual destination.
In terms of purpose and architecture it's closer to bitcoin tumblers, or Tor or Freenet, or money laundering placement. The fact that they call it VPNs seems to me more of a marketing scheme or political play to avoid association with all of the above, than an actual technical or academical description. If someone were to analyse these technologies, I'm sure a neutral or critical approach would avoid uncritically calling them VPNs in the same way that research is published not about Viagra, but on Sildenafil.
One others seem to have missed 3. ad blocking on your phone away from home. Almost all VPNs have a block ads / known malicious traffic function. This can be done with just a DNS but often mobile carriers will block using your own DNS.
Accessing services from the UK without handing over your personal ID to a service that will inevitably get hacked.
This happened to discord literally a few days ago.
"Hacked" will be "left the data on a public S3 bucket until someone noticed" or similar.
A ton of ISPs use deep packet inspection for various kinds of filtering (and other shenanigans). When they get it wrong it manifests to the user as certain websites or access patterns being inaccessible and the ISPs customer support agreeing that you should have access and being able to do fuck all to fix it. A VPN in the middle usually solves the issue.
Wait, I think an ISP cannot inspect the content of packets that are encrypted, say, with HTTPs. In order to inspect TLS encrypted packets you need access to the end-device, controlling the end-router is not sufficient since you would not have access to the device certificates.
If you can prove that an ISP can inspect packets, it would be major news.
Protection from IP tracking, especially if your ISP doesn't do CGNAT. Of course there's a trade-off here between
a) your ISP (who knows your billing information) knowing which sites you visit, and any site you visit can correlate internet activity back to your household
b) your VPN provider knowing all the sites you visit
CGNAT won't save you in a world where everything is fingerprinted to within an inch of it's life.
> Getting access to geolocked data
I use VPNs when I'm trying to ferret out the scope of an outage. I have VPN servers on local ISP which moves me around different routing. I use a commercial service to move me further out and to other countries.
Those two are pretty big already to be honest. I guess a third one would be avoiding eavesdropping on public wi-fis.
With TLS being everywhere, and just few clicks away from having DNS over TLS, I really don't get eavesdropping on public wifi prop value.
1. example.com is not on the HSTS preload list
2. Because you normally visit example.com using an incognito window, your browser hasn't cached the redirect to SSL, or the address bar suggestion, and you haven't bookmarked the site.
3. You key in example.com, the browser connects over http, and the evil wifi MITMs your unencrypted connection - removing the redirect to SSL and messing with the page however the evildoer wants.
Obviously a VPN provider can also do this, but you might hope they're less likely to.
VPN unifies all destination IPs to server.ip.addr.ess. IP reverse lookups tells some stories if you are to be so paranoid
TLS doesn't hide which websites (hostnames) you visit
It does if you do DNS over TLS or HTTPS, although I guess that information would still be knowable to your DNS provider if they terminate your TLS behind the scenes
Not quite. In order to make TLS certs work on a per-site basis, requests sent over HTTPS also include a virtual host indicator in cleartext that shows the hostname of the site you’re trying to connect to, so if the IP on the other end is hosting multiple domains it can find the right cert. For this reason some people feel that DNS over TLS is pretty pointless as a privacy measure.
SNI leakage is what encrypted client hello (ECH) tries to solve: https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-encrypted-client-hell...
It's still not perfect since you're still leaking information about the privacy set implied by the outer ClientHello, but this possibly isn't much worse than the destination IP address you're leaking anyway.
I think this is only true if SNI is disabled. Otherwise you really only get the IP of SRC and DEST.
Which is more likely, your barista collecting this data for nefarious purposes, or your ISP?
Or that dude in the black hoodie in the corner who always seems to be camped at whatever cafe you and your cow orkers are using as your startup "office"?
Sharing corporate info with your employees and not everyone else. You know, the "go to work" thing some people do.
Just because something is called with the same name, doesn't mean it's the same thing. Especially if the naming is done on a product by a company that wants to sell the product, and especially if the name is not a protected trademark.
Express VPN, NordVPN and Surfshark belong to another category of software than the VPNs used by companies.
Some differences are:
1- One is used by consumers, the other is used by businesses.
2- One protects communications to a client-controlled Local area network. The other protects communications with third party services.
3- One provides encryption, the other provides anonymization.
3. Not revealing your IP/location with every outgoing web request.
3. Hosting websites with DDNS (though the abuse from that caused Mullvad and IVPN to drop port forwarding)
4. Though it hurts anonymity, and is relatively rare: I2P or Hyphanet, because some websites block known P2P nodes[1]. Important if your bank or work is being a jerk about it.
5. As ThatMedicIsASpy notes, ISP issues: some routers soil the bed from P2P, some ISP's throttle P2P traffic regardless of legality, etc.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/i2p/comments/tc3bhs/is_anybody_else...
Access sites the government has blocked in your state/country
ISPs bad routing and peering
I VPN into my home network for added privacy in public wifis, and to access private services.
3. Avoiding government-mandated record keeping by ISPs in a country like the UK, where all ISPs have to keep a year of your browsing history and it can be accessed warrant free by 17 different agencies(including DEFRA, the agriculture agency).
And yes, I'm aware that you're most likely trading one surveilence for another - but honestly at this point I'd much rather trust my paid VPN provider with my browsing data than my ISP and ultimately the government.
Given that most of the web has TLS and you can easily do DNS over TLS - that's very very high level metadata, where I personally just don't see much ROI vs to giving that metadata to random company with no regulations whatsoever.
> but honestly at this point I'd much rather trust my paid VPN provider with my browsing data than my ISP and ultimately the government.
Your ISP will need to comply with local laws and regulations, and you'll have some recourse if broken. A third-party VPN operating in an overseas jurisdiction could be doing anything with your data.
Unless it's selling the data back to my own government, I'd rather a foreign commercial VPN provider have that information rather than my own domestic ISP or my own domestic government.
My government can do parallel construction, can send teams of armed gunmen to my house, and otherwise find far more methods to persecute me than the intelligence services of Russia or China can.
Being innocent of any kind of crime does not necessarily remove one from the crosshairs of law enforcement organizations, particularly the FBI, who have an extensive, well-documented history of violating citizens' constitutional rights, conducting partisan witch hunts against political opponents, being a lawless menace to civil rights activists, anti-war activists, gay rights activists, both pro-abortion and anti-abortion activists, and is probably busy right now planning on being a menace to trans inclusivity activists.
There is no such thing as a friendly government, but I'd much rather have my data in the hands of a government 10,000 miles away than in the hands of my own government. My own government hunts, injures, stalks, harasses, socially ostracizes, and even kills my fellow citizens far more than any foreign government ever has.
Free wifi hotspots
Nowadays most traffic is tls encrypted, but there are still metadata that can be collected.
>but there are still metadata that can be collected.
That logic is questionable given how poorly "spying on public wifi users" scales. You either need to put a bunch of eavesdropping radios in a bunch of public places or somehow convince a bunch of small businesses to use your "free wifi" solution. Even if you do have access, it's hard to monetize the data, given that nearly every device does MAC randomization (so you can't track across different SSIDs) and iOS/windows rotates mac addresses for open/public networks. OTOH setting up metadata capture on a commercial VPN service is pretty straightforward, because you control all the servers.
Doesn't pretty much every Starbucks location in the United States use a nationwide provider?
Despite the randomized Mac address, you can still fingerprint devices using all the usual tricks when they connect to the authentication and authorization page before you allow them to access the broader internet.
If the receipt had a passcode on it, you've got a link between all of your browser fingerprint, radio fingerprint and payment detail fingerprint and possibly customer loyalty provided at time of payment.
>Despite the randomized Mac address, you can still fingerprint devices using all the usual tricks when they connect to the authentication and authorization page before you allow them to access the broader internet.
Fingerprinting is overrated given that every iPhone 17 is identical to any other iPhone 17. If you leave system settings at stock, which most people do, there's very little to fingerprint.
>Doesn't pretty much every Starbucks location in the United States use a nationwide provider?
True, although mobile data is cheap and plentiful enough that I rarely bother using wifi at cafes or fast food places. The only time I use public wifi is if I'm staying long term, which basically only encompasses trains, airports, and hotels. Those are diverse enough that it's tough to build a complete profile.
>If the receipt had a passcode on it, you've got a link between all of your browser fingerprint, radio fingerprint and payment detail fingerprint and possibly customer loyalty provided at time of payment.
I don't think I ever saw a place that was that guarded about their wifi. The closest I've seen is hotels requiring your room/last name, which would allow them to identify you, but at the same time I'm not sure how much information they can glean, other than that I'm logging into gmail or airbnb. Persistent monitoring that ISPs can do is far more useful.
I mean the EU has completely given up on free speech so if you want to say anything you better be hiding who you are.
3. Creating multiple accounts with platforms to break their ToS without getting chainbanned.
4. Perform DDoS
5. brute force passwords
6. try out leaked passwords
7. exploit vulns.
8. CSAM
9. Phish
10. Spam
11. Evade taxes with crypto
12. Sell drugs
13. Terrorism
Lots of malicious uses for VPNs, or was your question about legitimate usecases? In which case:
14. Sending emails about cryptography
15. Pornography
16. activism
17. Journalism/Whistleblowing
18. Military
Although some of the legitimate/ilegitimate categories might be subjective, which is precisely why it's a grey legal area at all.
There are terrible, incompetent corporate IT departments who lock down every damn port except for http/s, so you can't even use a native email client, ssh, ftp, etc. VPN appears to be the only way around that.
Um, is it some intelligence agencies?
> ExpressVPN was founded in 2009 by Peter Burchhardt and Dan Pomerantzwe who later sold it to British-Israeli security software company Kape Technologies
Close enough.
Mullvad nuff said
Handy that while connected via ExpressVPN, this is blocked
I tried Proton but their VPN wasnt as good as NordVPNs…
But if Nord is sketchy, what is the recommended one?
You will have to be a lot more specific than "wasn't as good as", to get a response that is helpful to you. What are you looking for in a VPN provider?
Depends on what you mean by "good".
Fast/low latency is to some extent diagrammatically opposed to high quality privacy. The fastest route is always you to source. The more hops/mixers/proxies/things you add the worse the experience gets
Why you probably don't need a VPN: https://stevesrantsnraves.blogspot.com/2024/09/why-you-proba...
Been saying it for YEARS: 95% of VPNs sell your data. It's where they make their money. It's absolutely insane the push-back I get when I say this online. I get downvoted to hell and back.
Source: I bought this data from VPN companies... Hell, you can inject ads and surveys if you want!
> 95% of VPNs sell your data
This is believable.
> It's where they make their money.
I'm much more skeptical of this. I know linus tech tips is not exactly an expert organization, but I believe the discussions they've had about almost starting a VPN and backing out for ethical reasons, and they made it clear that the core VPN product would have huge profit margins. You can always do greedy things to make more money, but for a paid VPN I'd need some solid evidence to believe that data sales are a huge line item or especially that they're the main source of money.
If you're including the swaths of free VPNs then that makes your number a lot harder to use.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them have like a Crypto AG thing going on and have the capability to use paying customers as exit nodes as a way to launder consent-manufacturing bot bullshit through legitimate-looking residential and mobile connections.
> Hell, you can inject ads and surveys if you want!
So am I right in saying that the data that's encrypted by VPNS is only in transit? It then sits on a server in plain text, ready to be queried by third parties for money.
Yes, VPNs add encryption only between you and the VPN servers.
How were they able to convince anyone that that matters?
How does that work with HTTPS being practically ubiquitous?
HTTPS spills what services you are communicating with, but not the content…
…except approximate content sizes and timing patterns.
They sell metadata. DNS queries, locations, apps using data, device info. Usually anonymized, but both unscrupulous and "better" providers do have access to your account and payment info.
I reckon that if HTTPS was sufficient to hide your online activity, then you wouldn't need a VPN to hide it in the first place.
If HTTPS were for privacy it would be called HTTPP. Security features tend to make things less Private, like how opening apps on a Mac makes it phone home for OCSP check.
NSA presumably?
Just pay for and use Mullvad.
Just spin up a server with wireguard.
This is the way (or Tailscale). Easier to move around between datacenters to find one with an ASN/IP that isn't blocked by the apps/websites you use. If you do want a more off-the-shelf solution, Mullvad is probably the best choice. All of the consumer VPNs (including Mullvad) get blocked by various services - I get degraded/intermittent connection to Google Maps on them. GCC countries block most of the well-known VPNs as well, if you ever travel to the Arabian/Persian Gulf region. My private datacenter VPN gets blocked only very, very rarely.
or with Tailscale (and configure the server as an exit node).
By mailing cash, if you like. They don't care if they know who you are or not. They don't ask for your email address, you just log in with a randomly-assigned account number and a password.
I do and I like them, but Cloudflare blocks their ips aggressively.
There was a bumpy ride with CF a while ago but they seem fine now (still plenty of captchas, of course)
Reddit too, I wished they offered residential or dedicated and/or unlisted ips. But most of the time you just have to cycle through different ips to unblock.
At this point in the cat/mouse game, wouldn't any set of IPs used by a VPN eventually be able to be sussed out by anyone interested?
Some vpn services offer dedicated residential IP addresses, meaning you get an IP from just a regular private ISP in some other country. It's admittedly a bit shady though, and more expensive ofc but that will unblock everything
I did until they killed port forwarding.
OOC what's your current favored provider? AirVPN? Proton?
I tried Airvpn but the MacOS client is beyond trash.
And the website just gives 2005 amateur PHP coder vibes. Not just the design. The session expiry is seems very long - I hadn't visited for a few days and I'm still logged in. I'd be surprised if it wasn't infinite.
On Mac you can just use OpenVPN/Wireguard and import one of the profiles you can generate through their website.
Not for feature parity.
And I find there's a good correlation between the quality of the apps and the overall quality of the company. No surprise that the Mullvad VPN app is excellent
For multiple reasons it's better and safer to avoid using official provider client in the first place, regardless of provider, and connect with a good wireguard/openvpn/whatever client.
Not universally true. The Mullvad client has lots of additional features to enhance privacy. Killswitch, split tunnelling (you might otherwise disconnect the VPN to use a certain app, so it can overall improve privacy), Shadowsocks, Lockdown mode etc
It's extremely high quality on MacOS in my experience. It's never crashed for example whereas Airvpn's crashes daily. It connects almost instantly. I don't think I've ever seen it give an error
Proton for me.
Yep.
And I was on Proton for 3y, until the CEO were backing Trump and Vance on Reddit and other places. Their port forwarding was also painful as well, but it worked.
Cancelled. PIA does the port forwarding nicely and stabily. No jank scripts to run every 60 seconds.
Now evidently PIA is a bunch of scum capitalists. But in reality, who isn't?
Mullvad? But they killed port forwarding for "abuse".
> the CEO were backing Trump and Vance on Reddit and other places
Something happened, but THAT didn't.
https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-tr...
> Given Proton’s outstanding track record and reputation thus far as a free, open-source, crowdfunded organization, owned by a non-profit and based in Switzerland (a country known for its neutrality), this topic is worth a deep dive.
Either it was someone paid to write this, or if author really believes this, they are not someone I trust.
Maybe the organization is non-profit (which I do not believe is practically true), it does not explain them sharing so much with Tesonet.
The Proton CEO is not "backing Trump and Vance." He wrote something positive about a narrow policy Trump supported that's favorable to little tech over big tech. That's it. It's certainly possible that someone you detest can still occasionally support a particular policy you think is good.
Particularly when dealing with someone like Trump, who has, on occasion, backed both sides of an issue, depending on the day of the week! ;P
scary AF
Not allowed to have any meaningful discussion on this site. @dang will tell you to edit your posts before banning you.
I specifically put the OP in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), which is why it got re-upped (https://hnrankings.info/45469376/). Rather an odd way to suppress discussion, no?
(We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45496427.)