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Not necessarily. Making that statement, setting up in a country that has enough issues to make it plausible, and then not paying the bribe would also make a lot
by iudqnolq 3y ago
Not necessarily. Making that statement, setting up in a country that has enough issues to make it plausible, and then not paying the bribe would also make a lot of sense. See also: no log VPNs that actually were logging.
Worst case scenario they shut down, collaborate fully with the police and keep all the profits up til then. Better case scenario they make a deal with the police and keep operating and making profits while covertly providing assistance. Best case scenario the issue never comes up and they make all the profits without having to spend those expenses.
My impression is that in this kind of shady web hosting the companies never last that long so you wouldn't want to invest a lot in bribes and multiple data centers and so on when you could lie and make short term profit.
Note also that corruption isn't a boolean flag. First off the cop make take the exact same strategy: take your money, do nothing else, and hope their boss never gets interested in you while planning not to protect you if anything comes up. Furthermore there are all sorts of anticorruption efforts in that area linked to US aid. That doesn't mean there isn't corruption, it does mean that if a major US corp works with the FBI in a major investigation the local police may rather piss you off than lose critical aid funding.
- sillysaurusx 3y agoWhich vpn was no-log-but-logging? I was shopping around for an alternative after mullvad blocked port forwarding, but it seems like no one else is as trustworthy. Not that I need it for my “attempt to port forward smash ultimate from within crummy hospital internet” purposes, but hey, principle of the thing and all that.
- julesallen 3y agoYou might like iVPN.net, been using them for years. A little more money but solid support and mission.
- foobiekr 3y agoAll of them.
- trogdor 3y agoI am all-but-certain that NordVPN doesn't. I am in possession of records from a recent police investigation in which law enforcement subpoenaed NordVPN and the company replied, essentially, that they had no information connecting a particular IP address, at a specific date and time, to any specific user. (I am a reporter who covers law enforcement and crime.)
- ejiblabahaba 3y agoAre you sure you're not thinking of Mullvad? Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35638917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35638917
- trogdor 3y agoYes. This is a totally unrelated case that never made the news.
- wallaBBB 3y agoCountless examples of Nord supplying logs. They all have to keep logs or would be banned from offering services to US citizens.
- Timber-6539 3y agoProvide just one example. Am curious.
- wallaBBB 3y agoHere is a general text on that: https://www.pcmag.com/news/nordvpn-actually-we-do-comply-with-law-enforcement-data-requests https://www.pcmag.com/news/nordvpn-actually-we-do-comply-wit... Exact examples are hard to find in the press. One that comes to mind is from a Belgian Telco company that was internally hacked by an employee hiding behind NordVPN. Nord when approached by the telco responded with the usual no logs, but after the telco involved the Interpol, logs were given and the attacker doxxed.
- jokethrowaway 3y agobuy a cheap vps server with btc and setup your own vpn
- UnixSchizoid 3y agoOr you could use a cloud providers free tier, but then you have to give up your credit card info and name for “verification”
- remram 3y agoYou'd have to hope the VPS host is not logging...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- LeBit 3y agoBuyVM supposedly ignores DMCA for their Luxembourg VPSs. Though, that IP you are using is not shared with anyone else and BuyVM doesn't promess not to log. That IP is directly correlated to you in BuyVM's books. That is the very worst option.
- Etheryte 3y agoRunning your own VPN is the worst option though? There is no shared anonymity and all data is directly linked to one node, you.
- ljm 3y agotl;dr if you want your network to be private, maybe don’t pay a saas to do it. Your ISP already tracks ingress and egress.
- anonym29 3y agoThis is really the unfortunate truth. >90% of global ISP's not only collect but also sell netflow metadata commercially. Nanosecond timestamps, packet sizes, source IPs, destination IP's. Doesn't matter what VPN provider you use, whether you're using Tor, how many residential proxies you're routing through via a complex proxychains config... commercial entities can correlate virtually all of it. Team Cymru is one such buyer of bulk netflow metadata from ISP's (and their upstream providers) around the globe, who do all of the correlation work on their side, and then sell it, under product names like Pure Signal Recon (formerly Augury)... including to law enforcement agencies and the US military... There are also no laws dictating that ISP's must disclose whether or not they are selling that information, and they have no commercial incentive to choose to honestly disclose that they do. If your adversary is NSA/FBI/US Army, or any other deep-pocketed nation-state-level adversaries who Team Cymru is willing to sell to, the safest assumption is that there is absolutely nothing you can do to obscure the origin of your traffic with 100% certainty.
- LeBit 3y agoLet's keep this simple. Let's say you are using an ISP to connect to a VPN provider. That VPN provider does what most of them do and SNATs multiple customers connections to a single exit public IP. How can they correlate the encrypted wireguard data from my ISP connection to the VPN provider and then from the VPN provider to the final endpoint (say, ProtonMail)?
- anonym29 3y agoThere is a known traffic pattern for a GET request to Protonmail - size of the initial request, # of subsequent requests (for subresources, like CSS, JS, images, etc), and size of those requests, as well as size of those responses. There is a known overhead for encapsulating these requests in an OpenVPN or WireGuard tunnel. So even without looking at the contents of the traffic at all, the metadata your ISP collects can easily reveal that you sent outbound traffic and received inbound traffic that had a high statistical correlation with the expected traffic flow of a request to Protonmail encapsulated within a Wireguard tunnel, to a known VPN node, and then a (known) number of milliseconds before that VPN's upstream provider also made a request that perfectly matched the expected packet flow of Protonmail. If you have visibility into the traffic netflow of both your ISP and the VPN's upstream provider, consider yourself confidently unmasked. The initial fingerprinting laid firm groundwork for your adversary to suspect you went to protonmail, and then the network behavior of the first destination machine you connected to simply offered confirmation of that. In case you're unfamiliar with the concept of website traffic metadata fingerprinting I've discussed above: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-irtf-pearg-website-fingerprinting-00.html https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-irtf-pearg-website-fin...
- dan15 3y ago> I was shopping around for an alternative after mullvad blocked port forwarding AirVPN let you forward several ports (up to 20, if I remember correctly) and you can pick the port numbers.