4 ms·
Hi Ian from FreePN here - This is all very unexpected actually! (No one from FreePN made the post here!) We've been doing some early market testing in a few Li
by ian-bateman 6y ago
Hi Ian from FreePN here -
This is all very unexpected actually! (No one from FreePN made the post here!) We've been doing some early market testing in a few Linux communities on Reddit, but full disclosure, the product is currently in an early-alpha stage (it’s only available on Ubuntu and Gentoo Linux currently, and very much under construction). We have big ambitions for the project, but it is still very early days.
Love hearing the feedback from everyone here — some very valid criticisms from a lot of folks — and on a lot of points that have been brought up here, we actually have plans to address. A few bullet points on where we are as an organization / project:
— the marketing copy isn’t set in stone — I’ve been working on the site a bunch recently & it’s very much in flux (we’ve been posting in a few Linux communities to see what the response looks like)
— when we posted a few months ago about the project, in all honesty, it was a demand test to see if this would be something worth pursuing — but we’ve been trying to take the feedback from those posts to heart in our development process
— we market ourselves as a VPN, but to be clear we _are_ a dVPN (distributed VPN). The peer-to-peer VPN wording on our site is mostly for the sake of simplicity. I’d point most folks to our project README on GitHub for more in-depth technical details.
— right now FreePN is structured as a 1-to-1 peer connection, but we eventually plan to build in multi-tenant peer support as well as optional multi-hop routing (similar to Tor) and selective whitelisting of domains so that as a peer you can elect to categorically block certain types of sites — say torrenting. These blocklists would draw from open-source category site-lists like Fortiguard.
— we do currently only route web traffic (+ DNS) — so only traffic on ports 80 and 443 is being routed (optionally port 53)
— we don’t currently support IPv6 (though we have plans to add support in the future)
— we don’t log traffic (you can see in the repo), and while peers logging traffic is a potential concern, that’s only true if you’re using non-HTTPS connections (we have plans to bake in something similar to HTTPS Everywhere, automatically upgrading connections).
As far as our vision for the product — our goal for FreePN is to eventually become a ‘privacy all-in-one’. We started FreePN because we care deeply about internet privacy — but trying to protect yourself online practically is a very technical and time-consuming endeavor (basically — it’s really hard to protect your privacy online, and we’re trying to make it easy). In terms of features, we’re working on building in ad-blocking as our next major milestone.
I’ll do my best to respond to everyone’s questions and concerns here this evening / in the morning & tomorrow as I’m able!
- edf13 6y agoHi Ian, What’s the long term business model then?
- ian-bateman 6y agoHi edf13 - We're still exploring different methods of monetization, but leaning towards an Adblock-Plus style model at the moment (but would want to keep any ads we served entirely local / we'd never send any data off device & would want to be as transparent about everything as possible). Personally, I think it keeps our interests best aligned with those of our users & helps keep the focus on preserving user privacy!
- ev1 6y agoThis sounds even more legally questionable, where you are replacing others' ads with your own.
- dhaavi 6y agoI think this is meant to be more like Brave does it.
- ian-bateman 6y agoYep, if we do go that way, it'd likely be somewhat similar to Brave. Still very much evaluating options here though.
- dhaavi 6y agoSo, if I understand correctly, this means that in the long-term you are going to nerf your (future) adblock feature and actually go a similar route the the Brave browser is going with their ad system? The privacy community did not react positively _at all_ to this. This also has gotten them quite a lot of negative media coverage. Also, how are you funded short-term? Like, right now?
- 6y ago