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Port forwarding doesn't seem to be a problem for long-established independent VPNs like AirVPN (based in Italy but very ingeniously without exit servers in Ital

• capableweb 3y ago
  It seems pretty evident why they had to turn it off: > The manner and extent in which it came to be abused in recent months made it unacceptable for us to continue providing it. Probably the difference between Mullvad and AirVPN/AzireVPN is how popular the service is, which also usually dictates how popular it is for people to try to abuse it. Maybe 1% of each service's traffic is abuse, which for AirVPN/AzireVPN is not that much, but on Mullvads scale it becomes a whole nother beast.
• kfreds 3y ago
  I'm sorry we haven't been more clear in our communication. Our decision to remove port forwarding was not a question of margins - it was a moral and practical decision. Port forwarding is a feature with many legitimate use cases. This year it became clear that we had become popular for use cases we didn't want to support. Undesirable content and malicious services is a good summary. I'm not privy to more details than that as my main focus is research. Technology is often a double-edged sword, but thankfully it is often also a net benefit to its users and society in general. Privacy online is exactly that kind of technology. Enabling anyone to host any service anonymously on the open Internet is another matter. I hope AirVPN and AzireVPN somehow succeed with providing that feature while steering clear of its downsides. That would be awesome. Nitpick: Mullvad is older than both Air and Azire. :)
  • madars 3y ago
    Thank you! That clarifies :) I'm also glad for all the innovations Mullvad has invented/supported/etc in the VPN space -- anonymous account numbers, multi-server SOCKS proxies, Wireguard over TCP, post-quantum Wireguard, stboot, open APIs, the list goes on. It feels like VPN for apps is very different than a VPN for browsing. While in both cases I want my traffic to be mixed in with a lot of other people's traffic (so service provider dealing with complaints about neighbors is part of the value proposition), browsing use case is tied to IP reputation (so don't want someone to run a Tor exit on the same IP), whereas the app use case is much less IP reputation-sensitive but definitely benefits from port forwarding (e.g. to anonymously run nodes that powers distributed infrastructure like crypto). I'd definitely pay premium, with longer commitments up front for "this server might be useless for browsing but run all your anonymous crypto nodes behind forwarded ports" type of service. Maybe if port forwarding is active only if you have 6+ months of outstanding service commitment (and you forfeit the balance if your port gets used for C&C or whatnot) is enough of a deterrent. Some VPNs are doing some traffic segregation already, e.g. having dedicated servers for P2P, though nothing exactly like this.
• Victor1024 3y ago
  Mullvad is probably the VPN with the longest track record of not keeping logs. I find it likely that the vast majority of people who hosted immoral content using Mullvad's port forwarding feature solely used Mullvad for this purpose because of their reputation. After Mullvad discontinued port forwarding, IVPN (probably the second most trusted VPN provider) came out a month later and announced that they were also discontinuing port forwarding [1]. I think it is likely other VPN providers will follow suit. According to Mullvads blog [2] the police raid was related to a blackmail attack in Germany. [1]https://www.ivpn.net/blog/gradual-removal-of-port-forwarding https://www.ivpn.net/blog/gradual-removal-of-port-forwarding [2]https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/2/update-the-swedish-authorities-answered-our-protocol-request/ https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/2/update-the-swedish-auth...
  • codedokode 3y ago
    So basically no companies wish to provide anonymous unrestricted uncensored information exchange.
    • slikrick 3y ago
      be even more hyperbolic why don't ya