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I'm shocked - shocked - that a shady VPN company would ruin a community resource like that.
by M2Ys4U 5y ago
I'm shocked - shocked - that a shady VPN company would ruin a community resource like that.
- marcus_holmes 5y agoIs PIA shady? Or is it VPNs that are shady? Where's the shadiness here?
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoThey’re incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and no one can find out the names of the directors/owners/CEO/people in charge. That’s not shady to you, especially for a company that sells privacy?
- jaywalk 5y agoSo what you're saying is, the people in charge are really good at privacy? And this is a problem? /s
- ta988 5y agoYes because giving your privacy to someone requires trust if you want it to stay privacy.
- bigth 5y agoSounds like they know how to keep private.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoAnd that’s the problem. How do you know they are not a state actor?
- marcus_holmes 5y agoI don't care tbh. The threat I'm protecting against isn't the state reading my emails, it's Spotify (for example, but there are many, many more) refusing to sign me up because my IP is in a different country to my bank account. Or every single bloody website on the internet ignoring my browser's preferred language settings and serving me content in the language that they think my IP address comes from.
- jcims 5y agoThey sell privacy but it would have been obvious from the very beginning that they’re going to be a magnet for illegal activity. I would probably do the same thing if I were them.
- jussij 5y agoThey should have used the "Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich" model like Google.
- mistrial9 5y agoyou compare aggressive teams with literally billions of dollars to an un-ending network activity that generates more costs than new nickels? have you ever been actually poor and yet working every day? stunningly insensitive, not funny
- varjag 5y agoAndrew Lee of Mt Gox fame is your guy. Also claims to be the crown prince of Korea.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoWhat if it is the NSA instead?
- varjag 5y agoHe's mentioned in the paste.
- humanlion87 5y agoNot OP. I am not sure about PIA. But I had recently done some research on VPNs since I was interested in getting one. From what I remember, most of the VPN services are owned by a few companies. And those companies don't seem to have a track record of good security or acting in the best interests of the customer (selling data, giving up logs, etc). My takeaway from that research was that I need to be real careful when trying to choose a VPN service provider and keep track of acquisitions.
- o-__-o 5y agoOr just get a dedicated server or vps somewhere and run OpenVPN or wire guard. There is no shortage of cheap vps providers so you could create deploy scripts and rotate your vpn endpoint regularly Disclaimer: I’ve been doing just that for 13 years now
- CarelessExpert 5y agoWhich is trivially traceable back to you and therefore defeats the purpose of providing anonymity. Much of the value of one of these VPN services is they effectively launder your traffic by mixing it with that of their other clients.
- o-__-o 5y agoYeah I guess it _is_ illegal to tumble bitcoins now
- fastball 5y agoFor anyone that wants a less shady VPN, I've found Mullvad[1] to be very good. They take privacy to the next level, where you can literally mail them an envelope full of cash with your anonymous login key and they'll top up the credit on the account. I also like Mullvad because they seem to spend approximately $0 on marketing (at least compared to the other guys) and don't do any of those bullshitty perpetual "limited-time offer" shenanigans. If you're American and want a VPN based in America (not the Virgin Islands etc), I've found TorGuard[2] to be very good as well. [1] https://mullvad.net/en/ https://mullvad.net/en/ [2] https://torguard.net/ https://torguard.net/
- Nextgrid 5y agoThe majority of the VPN industry is shady. It relies on spreading FUD and unfounded claims about security & privacy, and the economics don't make sense for a lot of them - they appear to spend more on marketing than the expected profits from such a service, so extra money must be made somehow, probably though unethical means.
- marcus_holmes 5y agoI travel a lot (well, not right now because pandemic), and live in countries that I don't have a bank account in, or speak the language of. This is a problem for a lot of web services. Apparently where your IP is located determines where you bank and what language you speak. Apparently people like me don't exist, or rather, are a small enough market to be completely ignored (which was the upshot of my conversation with Spotify support when I asked them to send me invoices in a language I understood, please, since they know I use the English client but send me bills in German). So to make my life easier, I use a VPN and pretend I'm in Australia/UK/Jersey/USA/Estonia/wherever makes most sense. I'm happy to pay for that. So far PIA have been great. They even have a good-looking Linux client that works with Wireguard. But if there's shadiness, then I'd like to be aware of it. I was genuinely asking where the shadiness is here.
- techrat 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679682 Not OMG SHADY! but definitely gives me cause for concern. As one comment said: "Trust and ethics are important."
- Nextgrid 5y agoI'm not saying there aren't legitimate reasons to use a VPN, but beyond circumventing geo-blocking and defending unencrypted protocols (which are very rare nowadays) against malicious local networks (public Wi-Fi, etc) there aren't many. The vast majority of VPN selling points are nothing but FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). Security-wise, most (all?) websites you care about now use HTTPS which provides end-to-end encryption and are thus immune to malicious networks (public Wi-Fi isn't risky at all despite what some VPN ads say), and even if not, then the VPN isn't bulletproof either as it merely shifts the unencrypted traffic from your "local network -> server" to "VPN provider -> server" which might actually attrack more scrutiny from malicious actors as they've now got to only tap a single point and get lots of unencrypted traffic. Privacy-wise the biggest threats to your privacy are advertising companies and social networks, which will track you just as well if you're on a VPN based on cookies or browser fingerprinting (a VPN alone wouldn't protect you - I guess if you clear your cookies before switching to the VPN and never allow cookies to cross-over between VPN/non-VPN you might have a chance, but surprisingly this is never mentioned in any of their ads).
- rascul 5y agoPIA was aquired by a company that some consider to have a shady past. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679682
- marcus_holmes 5y agoThanks for the link :) Though that top comment seems to explain that situation fairly well? Reading the rest of the thread it looks like FUD and the usual HN mess, is there any actual evidence of shadiness since the merger?
- FDSGSG 5y agoDon't forget about rasengans cryptocurrency scheme that Freenode has been helping to promote.