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I'd say that cloud service providers serving billion dollar contracts definitely have much more at stake with regards to confidentiality. This is in contrast t

I'd say that cloud service providers serving billion dollar contracts definitely have much more at stake with regards to confidentiality. This is in contrast to whatever unaccountable colocation provider and residential IP botnet swarm a typical consumer VPN provider would rely on. AWS Lightsail costs the same as a consumer VPN service while also giving you always-on compute and storage for sync and long-running jobs.

weberer 4y ago
Let's say some Hollywood lawyer finds the IP address of your Amazon VPN in the list of seeders for some big movie torrent. They send a threatening legal letter to Amazon. Will Amazon forward them your contact information? Will they lock your AWS account?
- Grimburger 4y ago
  So this has happened to me. On holiday, hotel surprisingly had a decent firewall in place to block torrenting, used my personal server to download a tv series. Had a copyright notice and warning email within 6 hours. Deleted the content and they were happy. Learnt my lesson not to try that again. Wasn't AWS but a reasonably big vps provider.
  - okdood64 4y ago
    What country was your VPS in?
- nucleardog 4y ago
  Can't speak to AWS, but I used a dedicated box at another US-based provider as a seedbox for nearly two decades. When they received a DMCA complaint they didn't provide our information and generally just didn't seem to care as long as we provided the bare minimum of ass-covering for them. We'd get a ticket opened against our account with a copy of the notice, reply "We've identified one of our users operating in violation of our TOS and have banned the offending user. All copyrighted materials referenced have been deleted." and they'd close the ticket every time. I imagine if this was more than a once-every-three-to-six-months kinda thing the support burden would have had them drop us as a customer, but at no point did they share our information or did any rights-holder take it further.
SahAssar 4y ago
Mullvad does not use residential IP botnets. They also own at least 150-ish of their 800 servers, and the rest are rented. 45 of their servers also run diskless: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/1/12/diskless-infrastructure-beta-system-transparency-stboot/ https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/1/12/diskless-infrastructur.... If you still don't trust their datacenters a multi-hop will probably hide your actual traffic source. Having a stable, unchanging, unique IP (that is also tied to your identity via billing, etc.) for all of your traffic (like you would with a VPS VPN) is terrible for privacy and the cloud provider will often give out your info for any legal or governmental request.
Last5Digits 4y ago
The confidentiality required by businesses with billion dollar contracts is far removed from the confidentiality required by a VPN user. Do you think Ebay or Uber would care that their web traffic can be linked to them? Even in the low stakes situation of a lawyer going after you for torrenting, I see a high risk of a cloud provider giving out your information. They'd just have to reveal who rented your VPS instance. Not only would companies not care about discretion when it comes to catching torrenters, they especially would not care for confidentiality about who rented their infrastructure.
- maven29 4y ago
  They serve competitor workloads as well, I'd say they there is a huge incentive for cloud providers to put in backdoors if they could get away with it. They are deeply entrenched in rigid processes and rigorous compliance audits. If torrenting is the basis of your risk profile, seedboxes are a lot more safer.
  - Last5Digits 4y ago
    But you don't need a backdoor. Log incoming and outgoing traffic from a VPS and you'll have all the information you need to deanonymize you. This is something that they will probably do as a policy, simply because "AWS used for torrenting, storing and seeding CP" is a headline that can do far more damage to their business than some logging ever will.

weberer 4y ago

Let's say some Hollywood lawyer finds the IP address of your Amazon VPN in the list of seeders for some big movie torrent. They send a threatening legal letter to Amazon. Will Amazon forward them your contact information? Will they lock your AWS account?

Grimburger 4y ago
So this has happened to me. On holiday, hotel surprisingly had a decent firewall in place to block torrenting, used my personal server to download a tv series. Had a copyright notice and warning email within 6 hours. Deleted the content and they were happy. Learnt my lesson not to try that again. Wasn't AWS but a reasonably big vps provider.
- okdood64 4y ago
  What country was your VPS in?
nucleardog 4y ago
Can't speak to AWS, but I used a dedicated box at another US-based provider as a seedbox for nearly two decades. When they received a DMCA complaint they didn't provide our information and generally just didn't seem to care as long as we provided the bare minimum of ass-covering for them. We'd get a ticket opened against our account with a copy of the notice, reply "We've identified one of our users operating in violation of our TOS and have banned the offending user. All copyrighted materials referenced have been deleted." and they'd close the ticket every time. I imagine if this was more than a once-every-three-to-six-months kinda thing the support burden would have had them drop us as a customer, but at no point did they share our information or did any rights-holder take it further.

SahAssar 4y ago

Mullvad does not use residential IP botnets. They also own at least 150-ish of their 800 servers, and the rest are rented. 45 of their servers also run diskless: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/1/12/diskless-infrastructure-beta-system-transparency-stboot/ https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/1/12/diskless-infrastructur.... If you still don't trust their datacenters a multi-hop will probably hide your actual traffic source. Having a stable, unchanging, unique IP (that is also tied to your identity via billing, etc.) for all of your traffic (like you would with a VPS VPN) is terrible for privacy and the cloud provider will often give out your info for any legal or governmental request.

Last5Digits 4y ago

The confidentiality required by businesses with billion dollar contracts is far removed from the confidentiality required by a VPN user. Do you think Ebay or Uber would care that their web traffic can be linked to them? Even in the low stakes situation of a lawyer going after you for torrenting, I see a high risk of a cloud provider giving out your information. They'd just have to reveal who rented your VPS instance. Not only would companies not care about discretion when it comes to catching torrenters, they especially would not care for confidentiality about who rented their infrastructure.

maven29 4y ago
They serve competitor workloads as well, I'd say they there is a huge incentive for cloud providers to put in backdoors if they could get away with it. They are deeply entrenched in rigid processes and rigorous compliance audits. If torrenting is the basis of your risk profile, seedboxes are a lot more safer.
- Last5Digits 4y ago
  But you don't need a backdoor. Log incoming and outgoing traffic from a VPS and you'll have all the information you need to deanonymize you. This is something that they will probably do as a policy, simply because "AWS used for torrenting, storing and seeding CP" is a headline that can do far more damage to their business than some logging ever will.