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People should take this list with a serious health warning. Firstly, a lot of this is just 'internet sleuth'ing and innuendo. Plenty of companies want to operat

People should take this list with a serious health warning. Firstly, a lot of this is just 'internet sleuth'ing and innuendo. Plenty of companies want to operate multiple services to be able to use different marketing and differentiation strategies. Secondly, the fact that the site is funded by affiliate links to a coupole of the big VPN services should really ring alarm bells. I trust we all learned from the Mattress review debacles? [1] Thirdly, the companies who are funding this site through affiliate links, despite not being investigated in this article are arguably more worth of some serious suspicion. For example: NordVPN, one of their "Top VPN providers" is run by the same guy who runs a Lithuanian data harvesting company[2], but don't worry, lots of websites who make money from affiliate links to NordVPN (Sign up Now! 75% off when you use the code "SCAM" at checkout!) Now, maybe I'm being cynical - but I suspect if NordVPN weren't lining the pockets of all these referral websites their reviews of NordVPN would involve a lot more of the faux concern they show about other VPN companies in this hit piece, rather than the credulous write-ups about how it's totally not a problem that this shifty Panamanian company has suspicious links to data harvesters. [1]:https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers-lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg... [2]:https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/is-nordvpn-operated-by-tesonet/ https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/is-nordvpn-operated-by-tesone...

homero 7y ago
VPNs are the best data mining solution out there. You're literally giving them all traffic plus using their DNS. TLS helps a lot now but DNS hurts.
- mercora 7y ago
  better yet it makes it really easy to pinpoint traffic to a single person despite all other measurements to make this harder. I would guess being an IP transit provider would be a lot more beneficial for them otherwise with regards to the amount of traffic they would handle....
- Fnoord 7y ago
  If you tunnel 0.0.0.0/0 or equiv through it, sure. You don't have to, though. I just run my own VPN server on my cable internet. It allows all my roaming devices Pi-Hole access, and the same privacy as my cable internet.
- novok 7y ago
  And that is different from your ISP how? The distribution is less international?
  - homero 7y ago
    There's nuances. ISP is whole household, VPN is device. ISP has a business, VPN might be interested in selling data especially the many free ones. You can VPN over ISP but can't hide VPN on VPN.
petargyurov 7y ago
I am a bit confused -- are you saying that the article in your second reference is one of those "credulous write-ups" that we should be wary of or are you using it as a genuine reference?
emerongi 7y ago
I know someone making tens of thousands a month from shilling VPNs. They have site where they "review" and "rate" VPNs. The reality is that the customers of those products barely understand them and are buying into the BS of "stay anonymous" and "be private online". It's an easy market, especially considering you don't even need to develop the VPN software, just run instances on some cloud/VPS provider and do a ton of marketing. The person doing the shilling is marketing himself as a "privacy & crypto expert" and having a masters degree in cybersecurity, reality is dude barely graduated high school. He actually works for a friend of his who runs a whole variety of these sites and is about to clear $10M+ this year alone. What I've learned from this is that if you Google for some popular product, the first 5 pages are going to be SEO-optimized shilling sites. Just skip to page 10.
- dorgo 7y ago
  > What I've learned from this is that if you Google for some popular product, the first 5 pages are going to be SEO-optimized shilling sites. Just skip to page 10. Is a less SEO-optimized site less likely to be a scam?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - goldenkey 7y ago
    Yes, because knowledge isn't SEO-optimized by default. It takes time to do so. And time is money. And 99% of the time, those who are willing to spend a lot of time to get on the first page of Google are doing it to gain money, not to spread knowledge.
    - ptx 7y ago
      > Yes, because knowledge isn't SEO-optimized by default. Isn't it? I thought Google was trying to optimize their search engine for finding useful information, so if someone were to make an honest website that just tries to provide useful information (anachronistic as that may seem) wouldn't they hypothetically have the full manpower of Google's search team optimizing for finding it?
iforgotpassword 7y ago
I watch a bunch of tech related YouTube channels and the amount of NordVPN shilling is outrageous. Some fine folks making good content telling their audience that "your ISP is seeing everything you do but if you use a VPN you are safe, it's totally not like the VPN provider is then able to do exactly what the ISP could before!" Even worse the VPN provider is usually operating from some country with much less regulation regarding privacy. If it were revealed that some ISP here in Germany is sniffing traffic and selling your data, shit would hit the fan, but if your trusty VPN provider from whoknowswhere does this, good luck going after them.
- Kaveren 7y ago
  don't forget the "military grade encryption" NordVPN makes the youtubers include sometimes.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    But if you take a closer look at many of them, they actually do TLSv1.1 with weak primitives, have weak CA certs or other problems in their system.
  - mushufasa 7y ago
    eh. I wouldn't take that as a strike against them. It's pretty impossible to communicate crypto to laypeople using technical language, like AES or even SSL. You have to use analogies, to banks or militaries. For better or worse, that's just how it goes.
    - CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
      > For better or worse, that's just how it goes. No, it isn't. You don't have to use "bank-grade", "military-grade", etc. in your marketing. They don't actually mean anything, and only serve as a red flag for "we don't know what the fuck we're doing". You can use almost-equally meaningless phrases like "state of the art", "industry standard", etc. You can sell on a "proven track record" of not selling out to data brokers or yielding to government search warrants (although that mostly hinges on "never been subpoenaed" rather than "resisted a subpoena" in practical terms). There's lots of other paths to take besides using "${DUMB}-grade" in your marketing copy. Saying "that's just how it goes" is yielding to a lazy cop-out with another lazier cop-out. It absolutely isn't just how it goes.
mushufasa 7y ago
The article you cited, to support your claim that NordVPN is owned by a data harvesting company, says the opposite. It says that Tesornet only provided general business consulting to Nord, and that Nord users have nothing to worry about. It seems there are a lot of back and forth allegations about this topic on the internet. I don't know the truth. That article doesn't really demonstrate anything, though, and your tone seems unhelpful. As a general rule of thumb, adjectives are often a crutch for weak arguments. >"Shifty panamanian company" But they explicitly chose to locate in Panama because it is exempt from 5 Eyes government data spying. That seems the opposite of shifty. > "Suspicious links to data harvesters" Have you ever used Google or Facebook? Run a service on GCP? If you run a service on GCP I could say you have "suspicious links to data harvesters." This seems like a scare tactic, lacking substance.
- Traster 7y ago
  Yeah, the article I cited concedes all the facts, but tries to play it off. I thought it would be funny to cite that website specifically because it's another website sponsored by NordVPN and is literally doing exactly what I claim - playing down the exact behaviour that the original article is playing up about their competitors. All I'm saying is that if you're predisposed to buy into the concerns this website is pushing about NordVPN's competitors, then you should absolutely have the exact same worries about NordVPN themselves.
dontbenebby 7y ago
This is why I self host algo vpn. I seriously doubt my hosting provider would jeopardize their business by snooping on/messing with a vpn given the breach of trust would cause large customers to ditch them.
- oarsinsync 7y ago
  Unfortunately, your hosting provider gets to see 1. Tunnelled & encrypted (and in most cases, easily identifiable as VPN) traffic coming from your VPN client to your server 2. Untunnelled traffic from your server to whatever server endpoint you're visiting. Correlating the two, even when it's a massive multi-user service, is not difficult for a hosting provider with half a clue to do. Especially when handed a police order (which they usually have an obligation to not tell you about).
  - neurostimulant 7y ago
    Running your own VPN server doesn't provide you with anonymity, but if configured right, it'll give you more privacy compared to just blindly trusting some random VPN companies with your data. Your data that passed through your own VPN server will only be seen by you and your vps vendor (as opposed to your VPN provider and whatever vendors they used to run their services).
    - oarsinsync 7y ago
      Completely agreed, however the parent comment suggests that they aren't aware that their vps provider's underlying network infrastructure is 'snooping' on them by default: > I seriously doubt my hosting provider would jeopardize their business by snooping on ... a vpn given the breach of trust would cause large customers to ditch them. Any half decent network provider logs sampled flow data by default. This is all that is needed to de-anonymise any vpn session. Even on a host that is shared by hundreds of VPN sessions.
- auslander 7y ago
  > This is why I self host Goals are to hide your traffic from ISP (1) and your real IP from internet (2). Self host VPN achieves (1) but not (2), your VPN's IP is yours truly.
Tomspark 7y ago
Yes I can confirm VPNPRO is most likely owned by NordVPN. The site itself wrote a hit piece trying to defame me (falsely claiming I work for one of there competitors). Ironically, lots of Nord shills also think I am the CEO of PIA or something. This article lines up perfectly with Nord's "MO" of casting blame around at other companies to deflect themselves from the bad PR. Now NordVPN is trying to remove my reviews on my Youtube: https://youtu.be/gZdQx9iv_1U https://youtu.be/gZdQx9iv_1U, and they've been caught blackmailing another VPN provider. The site always rushes to NordVPN's defense when any bad news is going on, and there are several shills on Reddit trying to spread this article around.
usaphp 7y ago
> For example: NordVPN, one of their "Top VPN providers" is run by the same guy who runs a Lithuanian data harvesting company [2] Did you even read the article you linked? Nowhere in that article it says that NordVPN is ran by the same guy as data harvesting company. Also the same article you linked says in the end: "However, after thoroughly investigating this recent “scandal”, we still feel confident that NordVPN is still one of the safest VPNs around. It’s quite possible that its rapid growth and increasing popularity are part of the reason it’s being attacked by other VPN providers."
dmix 7y ago
Are those mattress startups any good or is it all hype? I keep seeing them pop up everywhere...

homero 7y ago

VPNs are the best data mining solution out there. You're literally giving them all traffic plus using their DNS. TLS helps a lot now but DNS hurts.

mercora 7y ago
better yet it makes it really easy to pinpoint traffic to a single person despite all other measurements to make this harder. I would guess being an IP transit provider would be a lot more beneficial for them otherwise with regards to the amount of traffic they would handle....
Fnoord 7y ago
If you tunnel 0.0.0.0/0 or equiv through it, sure. You don't have to, though. I just run my own VPN server on my cable internet. It allows all my roaming devices Pi-Hole access, and the same privacy as my cable internet.
novok 7y ago
And that is different from your ISP how? The distribution is less international?
- homero 7y ago
  There's nuances. ISP is whole household, VPN is device. ISP has a business, VPN might be interested in selling data especially the many free ones. You can VPN over ISP but can't hide VPN on VPN.

petargyurov 7y ago

I am a bit confused -- are you saying that the article in your second reference is one of those "credulous write-ups" that we should be wary of or are you using it as a genuine reference?

emerongi 7y ago

I know someone making tens of thousands a month from shilling VPNs. They have site where they "review" and "rate" VPNs. The reality is that the customers of those products barely understand them and are buying into the BS of "stay anonymous" and "be private online". It's an easy market, especially considering you don't even need to develop the VPN software, just run instances on some cloud/VPS provider and do a ton of marketing. The person doing the shilling is marketing himself as a "privacy & crypto expert" and having a masters degree in cybersecurity, reality is dude barely graduated high school. He actually works for a friend of his who runs a whole variety of these sites and is about to clear $10M+ this year alone. What I've learned from this is that if you Google for some popular product, the first 5 pages are going to be SEO-optimized shilling sites. Just skip to page 10.

dorgo 7y ago
> What I've learned from this is that if you Google for some popular product, the first 5 pages are going to be SEO-optimized shilling sites. Just skip to page 10. Is a less SEO-optimized site less likely to be a scam?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- goldenkey 7y ago
  Yes, because knowledge isn't SEO-optimized by default. It takes time to do so. And time is money. And 99% of the time, those who are willing to spend a lot of time to get on the first page of Google are doing it to gain money, not to spread knowledge.
  - ptx 7y ago
    > Yes, because knowledge isn't SEO-optimized by default. Isn't it? I thought Google was trying to optimize their search engine for finding useful information, so if someone were to make an honest website that just tries to provide useful information (anachronistic as that may seem) wouldn't they hypothetically have the full manpower of Google's search team optimizing for finding it?

iforgotpassword 7y ago

I watch a bunch of tech related YouTube channels and the amount of NordVPN shilling is outrageous. Some fine folks making good content telling their audience that "your ISP is seeing everything you do but if you use a VPN you are safe, it's totally not like the VPN provider is then able to do exactly what the ISP could before!" Even worse the VPN provider is usually operating from some country with much less regulation regarding privacy. If it were revealed that some ISP here in Germany is sniffing traffic and selling your data, shit would hit the fan, but if your trusty VPN provider from whoknowswhere does this, good luck going after them.

Kaveren 7y ago
don't forget the "military grade encryption" NordVPN makes the youtubers include sometimes.
- Avamander 7y ago
  But if you take a closer look at many of them, they actually do TLSv1.1 with weak primitives, have weak CA certs or other problems in their system.
- mushufasa 7y ago
  eh. I wouldn't take that as a strike against them. It's pretty impossible to communicate crypto to laypeople using technical language, like AES or even SSL. You have to use analogies, to banks or militaries. For better or worse, that's just how it goes.
  - CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
    > For better or worse, that's just how it goes. No, it isn't. You don't have to use "bank-grade", "military-grade", etc. in your marketing. They don't actually mean anything, and only serve as a red flag for "we don't know what the fuck we're doing". You can use almost-equally meaningless phrases like "state of the art", "industry standard", etc. You can sell on a "proven track record" of not selling out to data brokers or yielding to government search warrants (although that mostly hinges on "never been subpoenaed" rather than "resisted a subpoena" in practical terms). There's lots of other paths to take besides using "${DUMB}-grade" in your marketing copy. Saying "that's just how it goes" is yielding to a lazy cop-out with another lazier cop-out. It absolutely isn't just how it goes.

mushufasa 7y ago

The article you cited, to support your claim that NordVPN is owned by a data harvesting company, says the opposite. It says that Tesornet only provided general business consulting to Nord, and that Nord users have nothing to worry about. It seems there are a lot of back and forth allegations about this topic on the internet. I don't know the truth. That article doesn't really demonstrate anything, though, and your tone seems unhelpful. As a general rule of thumb, adjectives are often a crutch for weak arguments. >"Shifty panamanian company" But they explicitly chose to locate in Panama because it is exempt from 5 Eyes government data spying. That seems the opposite of shifty. > "Suspicious links to data harvesters" Have you ever used Google or Facebook? Run a service on GCP? If you run a service on GCP I could say you have "suspicious links to data harvesters." This seems like a scare tactic, lacking substance.

Traster 7y ago
Yeah, the article I cited concedes all the facts, but tries to play it off. I thought it would be funny to cite that website specifically because it's another website sponsored by NordVPN and is literally doing exactly what I claim - playing down the exact behaviour that the original article is playing up about their competitors. All I'm saying is that if you're predisposed to buy into the concerns this website is pushing about NordVPN's competitors, then you should absolutely have the exact same worries about NordVPN themselves.

dontbenebby 7y ago

This is why I self host algo vpn. I seriously doubt my hosting provider would jeopardize their business by snooping on/messing with a vpn given the breach of trust would cause large customers to ditch them.

oarsinsync 7y ago
Unfortunately, your hosting provider gets to see 1. Tunnelled & encrypted (and in most cases, easily identifiable as VPN) traffic coming from your VPN client to your server 2. Untunnelled traffic from your server to whatever server endpoint you're visiting. Correlating the two, even when it's a massive multi-user service, is not difficult for a hosting provider with half a clue to do. Especially when handed a police order (which they usually have an obligation to not tell you about).
- neurostimulant 7y ago
  Running your own VPN server doesn't provide you with anonymity, but if configured right, it'll give you more privacy compared to just blindly trusting some random VPN companies with your data. Your data that passed through your own VPN server will only be seen by you and your vps vendor (as opposed to your VPN provider and whatever vendors they used to run their services).
  - oarsinsync 7y ago
    Completely agreed, however the parent comment suggests that they aren't aware that their vps provider's underlying network infrastructure is 'snooping' on them by default: > I seriously doubt my hosting provider would jeopardize their business by snooping on ... a vpn given the breach of trust would cause large customers to ditch them. Any half decent network provider logs sampled flow data by default. This is all that is needed to de-anonymise any vpn session. Even on a host that is shared by hundreds of VPN sessions.
auslander 7y ago
> This is why I self host Goals are to hide your traffic from ISP (1) and your real IP from internet (2). Self host VPN achieves (1) but not (2), your VPN's IP is yours truly.

Tomspark 7y ago

Yes I can confirm VPNPRO is most likely owned by NordVPN. The site itself wrote a hit piece trying to defame me (falsely claiming I work for one of there competitors). Ironically, lots of Nord shills also think I am the CEO of PIA or something. This article lines up perfectly with Nord's "MO" of casting blame around at other companies to deflect themselves from the bad PR. Now NordVPN is trying to remove my reviews on my Youtube: https://youtu.be/gZdQx9iv_1U https://youtu.be/gZdQx9iv_1U, and they've been caught blackmailing another VPN provider. The site always rushes to NordVPN's defense when any bad news is going on, and there are several shills on Reddit trying to spread this article around.

usaphp 7y ago

> For example: NordVPN, one of their "Top VPN providers" is run by the same guy who runs a Lithuanian data harvesting company [2] Did you even read the article you linked? Nowhere in that article it says that NordVPN is ran by the same guy as data harvesting company. Also the same article you linked says in the end: "However, after thoroughly investigating this recent “scandal”, we still feel confident that NordVPN is still one of the safest VPNs around. It’s quite possible that its rapid growth and increasing popularity are part of the reason it’s being attacked by other VPN providers."

dmix 7y ago

Are those mattress startups any good or is it all hype? I keep seeing them pop up everywhere...