4 ms·
Most of the big VPN companies known from advertisments all over the internet are probably honeypots of the usual countries.
by trvz 2mo ago
Most of the big VPN companies known from advertisments all over the internet are probably honeypots of the usual countries.
- red-iron-pine 2mo agoif you didn't roll it yourself you need to assume that someone is snooping on you maybe mullvad is legit but their leadership keeps leaning to dubious causes
- adrianN 2mo agoThe point of VPNs often is hiding in the mass. Rolling your own kind of defeats that purpose.
- sparkling 2mo agoEven very basic browser fingerprinting will still identify you. The IP address is just one of many data points.
- Bender 2mo agoNo need to roll your own. There are many open source VPN's, proxies and much more. When dozens, hundreds or thousands of people share and forward load balance their traffic across hundreds of self hosted networks it gets a lot harder to perform attestation and attribution. The reason to cycle through many VPN/proxy networks would be the assumption that a percentage of them are vigilante owned and operated. That's the easy part. The harder part is to encourage people to be fearless, keep their mouth shut and let their lawyers do all the talking.
- pluto_modadic 2mo agoby rolling your own they don't mean write a VPN from scratch, but host a VPN on a VPS.
- Bender 2mo agoThe term "rolling your own" as it applies to the internet means writing your own code. For example, "rolling your own encryption" would mean writing your own protocols, algorithms, ciphers, hash formulas, etc... Hosting something on someone else's servers is "server or VPS renting". Self hosting implies running something on your own servers you own and fully control. So lets run with they mean running it on a VPS. That is still better than all the delicious eggs in one big basket but it's also risky as there is a money trail and most VPS providers can live-clone, live-migrate a VM to capture and perform forensics all memory contents without impacting performance. If going this route I would try to get one of the cheap "gaming" physical servers and try to find a way to pay that is hard to track. One can at least update the firmware, change all the IPMI accounts and lock it down a little bit. On a bigger scale one can get their own colocation space. KimDotCom for example had a massive colo in Equinix in Ashburn, VA that ran for a very long time.
- inigyou 2mo agoIf you did roll it yourself, you definitely aren't anonymous because there is only one user of the VPN IP address.
- mrln 2mo agoWhat do you mean with "leaning to dubious causes?" I was under the impression mullvad was fine.
- s5ma6n 2mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469
- laserdancepony 2mo agoThe blue haired are upset someone supports political views unapproved by them. It was on here some time ago and a fierce discussion.
- sparkling 2mo agoAdd to that that half of these companies are registered in obscure offshore locations where it is practically impossible to even find out who are the ultimate owners.
- inigyou 2mo agoNot probably - most of them are confirmed.
- AmazingTurtle 2mo agocoughs in agressive nord vpn ads
- porknubbins 2mo agoOf all possible scenarios this seems one of the least bad. Government is less likely to sell you out and they can't really use the information to prosecute you legally without revealing "oh btw we were behind that VPN", which is kind of a one time trick.
- Jackson__ 2mo agoParallel construction has been a thing for a very long time to get around this.