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Mullvad becomes highest level of Tor Member (Shallot)
- eimrine 4y agoImagine using Mullvad VPN for entering Tor and realizing that your activity is transparent for Mullvad.
- beardog 4y agoWhat do you mean by transparent? If you mean that a VPN can see you are using Tor and when, sure, but I'm not aware of circumstances where that would matter.
- duxup 4y agoIsn’t that just how VPNs work / a typical risk with VPNs?
- danuker 4y agoIndeed. Different tools for different use cases.
- red-iron-pine 4y agoYou gotta trust someone, somewhere. Mullvad at least only requires that you use a PIN number instead of an ID.
- vorpalhex 4y agoGiven that they have literally switched their nodes to be diskless and released lots of their work to strongly disable logging in systems, that may be acceptable for most users. The risk model determines your behavior.
- Zetice 4y agoYeah I’m not trying to hide from the law, I’m trying to get the airline to stop giving me weird price quotes and bbc to let me stream their shows.
- seanw444 4y agoWell I am. I have a right to. If you want to have plausible deniability when you inevitably must do something legally wrong but morally right, then you must always be hiding.
- Zetice 4y agoNo? Also I do struggle to think of a situation, for me, that would require TOR access in order to do something morally right but illegal.
- seanw444 4y agoThe most obvious example: whistleblowing.
- Zetice 4y agoFair enough, but I have no idea how that would require me to always use TOR, lest the insanely unlikely scenario arise that I need to expose some hidden information. Also wait, whistleblowing on the government? I’m not privy to anything like that.
- seanw444 4y agoMaybe not now. But you don't know what your life will look like in 10 years, or even 20. People end up in politics more than they ever imagined, out of necessity. It's the OpSec equivalent of holding something behind your back and saying "no, there's nothing there." Makes you look even more guilty. You look a lot less guilty if you hold non-suspicious things behind your back often. Then people are more likely to think you're odd, rather than guilty. Kind of a bad example, but you get the point in the abstract. Suddenly starting to join the Tor network often around the time some major information is leaked would be a strong correlator pointing to your guilt. I'm just using one example, but there are many scenarios where this matters.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y agoGiven that they have SAID they are diskless, etc. I feel like there is no scenario where it should be allowed to forget that all the claims are always falsifiable. Not saying they are lying, just that no one ever truly knows. It's important to not be complacent with that.
- dymk 4y agoIt's true we can't know for 100% certain, but things like third party audits can give one sufficient confidence (depending on your risk tolerance, of course) https://www.assured.se/publications/Assured_Mullvad_relay_server_audit_report_2022.pdf https://www.assured.se/publications/Assured_Mullvad_relay_se...
- infogulch 4y agoAlmost any proxy configuration could be useful in a specific scenario. It's almost always a tradeoff. For example, you could trade off your ISP knowing that you connected to Tor for your ISP knowing that you connected to mullvad and mullvad knowing that you connected to Tor. Who do you trust with that metadata more?
- bombcar 4y agoIt's a question if you'd rather your ISP see you using a VPN and Mullvad seeing you use Tor or your ISP knowing you're using Tor.
- yieldcrv 4y agoTor bridges mask Tor use to your network and ISP
- costco 4y agoBridges including "private" ones are trivially enumerated: https://github.com/scriptzteam/Tor-Bridges-Collector https://github.com/scriptzteam/Tor-Bridges-Collector I would not rely on bridges if you ever need to deny that you used Tor at a certain point in time though they may be useful for bypassing some censorship systems. A VPN could hide Tor use from your ISP but that obviously comes with a different set of risks (the VPN provider will know you are using Tor).
- bauruine 4y agoI run multiple private bridges and they aren't in this list.
- SahAssar 4y agoIt's not transparent (or at least any more than any other means of accessing TOR). If you at all access the internet through somewhat normal means (without running your own ISP and connecting to an IXP physically) you are placing some level of trust in a service provider. What these sort of VPNs do is allowing you to move that point of trust to another party than the one that maintains your intrastructure (your normal ISP). You do not give them any more trust than your normal ISP, but since your normal ISP is usually more regulated it is a good idea to scrutinize the VPN provider more. I trust mullvad more than my normal ISP on privacy. mullvad is also one of the few VPN providers that has not sold its product as a end-all-be-all privacy solution while a lot of others have been spreading FUD (things like saying that your ISP can see in cleartext all your traffic even though 99% is over https, saying their products protect against hackers when there is no evidence for that, etc.).
- ccooffee 4y agoShallot donor means annual donations in excess of $100k USD. From the Tor website[0], it appears Mullvad is the only donor in excess of $49k USD annually (and possibly the only donor above $10001 USD). [0] https://www.torproject.org/about/membership/ https://www.torproject.org/about/membership/
- sodality2 4y agoIt looks like there are multiple "Green Onion Members", which is 10k-49k.
- WithinReason 4y agoIt's possible they only donate the minimum to get into the tier
- Mtinie 4y agoAnd they should be applauded for that. The tiered naming system is working as intended.
- jakear 4y ago...besides the US Government, TOR's largest benefactor by far. In case anyone needed reminding. https://www.torproject.org/static/findoc/2020-TorProject-Form990.pdf https://www.torproject.org/static/findoc/2020-TorProject-For...
- winter_blue 4y agoI'm not sure which page of the link above (the tax return) I'm supposed to look at... Where does it say the US govt is funding Tor, and if so, by what amount are they funding Tor?
- washmyelbows 4y agopage 10 lists over 2 million in government grants
- temptemptemp111 4y ago[dead]
- pphysch 4y ago> Those that understand privacy, actively work to improve anti-fingerprinting and to protect users against more advanced attacks - are even fewer. > We believe that the Tor Project is one such organisation. We share their values when it comes to human rights, freedom of expression, anti-censorship and online privacy. The Tor Project is primarily funded by the State Department and DARPA. Make of that as you will.
- wunderland 4y agoThis is brought up sometimes as some clever gotcha but Tor gets funding from many sources, and DARPA and the other US agencies that give money to Tor (like OTF) give on the order of 10s of thousands of US dollars per year. OTF (Open Technology Fund) — recently severely diminished — was funding tons of anti-censorship efforts like this with small grants to help get American propaganda into Iran, China, etc. Helping spread the message of the US Government is apparently a more valuable goal than surveillance of western citizens.
- pphysch 4y agoTheir tax documents unambiguously state that the US government is their primary funder. At any rate, the USG has enormous leverage over the governance of Tor and that should worry anyone that pretends to care about their online privacy re: Tor. Mullvad putting out PR about funding TP as a peer of the USG doesn't make TP look good, it makes Mullvad look seedy.
- godelski 4y ago> Their tax documents unambiguously state that the US government is their primary funder. No one is objecting to this fact. We're all objecting to your conclusion that because the US Gov gives Tor money that it is not secure and/or has a nefarious purpose. This is quite literally the same logic people use to justify the anti-vaccination movement and many other dangerous conspiracies. You don't have to trust the US Gov (what American does?), but you need more than association to prove something nefarious.
- 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mikece 4y agoI'm not a fan of this. Any chance Mullvad would offer a service plan where the money I'm paying them does NOT go to the support of Tor?
- duxup 4y agoI doubt it.
- precommunicator 4y agoWhy you are not fun of it? And why those concerns don't apply to Mullvad?
- huggingmouth 4y agoI'm a big fan of this and I am already a paying Mullvad customer :D
- shmde 4y agoWhy would you bother whom Mullvad pays if you get your dollars worth of service ?
- Cerium 4y agoPeople commonly boycott companies over how they spend their money. Many people won't eat at Chick-fil-A because of their donation history.
- karaterobot 4y agoYou're being downvoted presumably as a vote of support for either Mullvad or Tor, but you are allowed to have those opinions. I wish people didn't do that! The best answer I know of is that you cannot specify spending when you pay Mullvad. There is no place on the payment form to do it, and in the future (present?) you can only pay anonymously anyway, so there's no way to get in touch with someone who could do that, even if they allowed it. I imagine they wouldn't want to offer that option anyway, because it'd be way too complicated on their end.
- dymk 4y ago
- Nihilartikel 4y agoTIL mullvad is not actually a SIMD opcode to multiply and add vectors.
- duskwuff 4y agoMULtiply Long Vector And Decrement, surely.
- unixhero 4y agoMullvad er best
- UtopiaFans 4y ago[dead]
- bestbuyer__ 4y agoFriendly reminder that Tor privately tips off the federal government to security vulnerabilities before alerting the public [0]. [0] http://surveillancevalley.com/blog/claim-tor-does-not-provide-backdoors-to-the-u-s-government http://surveillancevalley.com/blog/claim-tor-does-not-provid...