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FrootVPN – Surf anonymously on the Internet
- hobs 12y ago1. We offer a free service. 2. With free support. 3. And we somehow have enough ips to go around for everyone? 4. Btw, we are not MITMing you or logging anything. What?
- ToastyMallows 12y agoYou know what they always say, when something is free, you are the product.
- vdaniuk 12y agoThis phrase should be put down with a shot in a back of its metaphorical head. Whisper Systems, TOR, tox are free. Should we apply the same principle to those products? (I am not defending this shady VPN service)
- dethstar 12y agoThis phrase refers to stuff free as in free beer.
- ceejayoz 12y agoAnd Whisper Systems, TOR, tox are free as in free beer. What's your point?
- explorigin 12y agoProbably a better disambiguation would be "services" that are free. Open-source projects can always be validated to make sure that they are not monetizing their user-base. Tor is a service but by reading the source code, you can see (if you understand the code) that nothing monetizable leaves your computer. I don't have as much confidence in Tox just because it hasn't been around as long (and I haven't read the source).
- icebraining 12y agoWikipedia is a service.
- jdiez17 12y agoWikipedia is a service puts up a huge banner every year asking you to please give them money if you don't want them to be forced to show advertisements, implicitly making you the product.
- icebraining 12y agoI say, the lengths people go to justify a trite thought-terminating cliché don't fail to astonish me. If the mere possibility than a service you use might in the future have ads is sufficient to justify the phrase "you are the product", then I don't see how anything can be an exception to that. After all, the next release of Tor might have ads! Who knows?
- teamhappy 12y agoTOR isn't free. The support and development is paid for by donations and funding, the bandwidth (currently over 12000 MiB/s) is paid for by lot's of volunteers. I get your point though. The question isn't whether something is free to use, it's who's paying for incurring costs.
- exelius 12y agoYou're talking open source software vs. free services. Free software is write once and release; it costs the author nothing to maintain it. Free services require maintenance and incur operating expenses that need to be covered somewhere. The original quote was always about SaaS anyway.
- exelius 12y agoYou don't need enough IPs to go around; you can always assign a private IP address and do NAT (this is how most VPNs work anyway). But yeah, I don't understand how they're paying for it. My best guess would be they found a loophole to exploit peering agreements, similar to how small rural telephone companies will set up free conference bridges because the big telcos have to pay them connection fees. Or they're just capturing info and selling it (unlikely; personal information just isn't worth that much and it's easy enough to buy already from data brokers). Or they're MITMing the big ad networks and showing their own ads instead. I consider this the most likely scenario.
- hobs 12y agoOh sure, sorry I meant to imply that effectively those external ips they will be exposing to outside services will be banned fairly soon by a lot of things and marked as a vpn/proxy service. On second reading I realize that I basically in no way say that. Agreed with everything you said though, it's not legit.
- Zalos 12y agoDosen´t seem very legit. According to reddit it´s sluggish not really working and presumingly stealing information. Can anyone back this information? or counter it? I don´t feel like using this software it´s way too fishy.
- teamhappy 12y agoFree product, free support, no logs. They're either lying or trying to turn this into a freemium product at some point in the future. Everything else just seems unlikely. Furthermore, their domain is protected by WhoisGuard (Panama). If they (the people involved, not the servers) were sitting in Sweden this would be unnecessary (compare IPredator). The IP address behind the website points to the same Swedish datacenter(s) that the services surrounding The Pirate Bay use as well (Portlane). IPredator itself seems to have moved to Cyprus though. Uppercase and underlined "anonymous" next to plain text passwords via email is just unprofessional.
- api 12y agoI can't tell you how happy I am to see this as the top comment. Free is a con. If you want a cheap VPN that you control (and that's faster than Tor), set up an endpoint on something that takes Bitcoin payment and pay with Bitcoins obtained via an anonymous route. This list might be helpful. https://www.exoticvps.com https://www.exoticvps.com
- darkstar999 12y agoDepending on your needs, you can just roll your own with Amazon EC2. I use it for an SSH tunnel, mostly to use while at work. Not that I'm doing any weird browsing, I just don't like the thought of my employer keeping a log of what I am doing on my free time (https://xkcd.com/303/ https://xkcd.com/303/). I wrote a script to spin up a new instance when I need it, and to terminate it when I don't. It should cost less than $10/mo, and I only pay for what I use.
- caractacus 12y agoCan you share the script on a pastebin or something? Sounds like an excellent solution.
- darkstar999 12y agoHere it is in all its Bash glory. It works locally on Linux Mint / Ubuntu. I hacked this together just yesterday so I'd be happy to see any improvements. https://gist.github.com/anonymous/223853355d67123fdda8 https://gist.github.com/anonymous/223853355d67123fdda8 This assumes that you are somewhat familiar with EC2 and have already set up a keypair and a security group that allows incoming port 22. Just read the instructions at the top and change the settings to fit your needs. Set your browser to use SOCKS host 127.0.0.1, port 5222 (or whatever you change it to). This allows you to have a browser using the tunnel and everything else using your native connection. Let me know if you have any questions.
- gondo 12y agoreceived email with password in plaintext after registration
- rabble 12y agoI was just going to say the same thing. What the hell kind of group offers security and VPN services and then sends passwords plaintext!
- Someone1234 12y agoThey will need to store them in plain text or encrypted plain text (which is just plain text with sugar on top) just due to the way some of the VPN protocols they support work. They should avoid emailing them however, if they can.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- sgdesign 12y agoNot sure if it's relevant here, but I want to point out that just because you received it in plaintext doesn't mean they store it in plaintext. So if you change it immediately to something more secure, and it might not be a security risk after all.
- sp8 12y agoThat isn't the point, if they can send it in plaintext then they have it in a recoverable form. They shouldn't be storing your password at all. They should be storing a hash of your password. And on top of all that, sending it plaintext via email, itself a largely open format, means they've broadcast it to all kinds of other potentially bad actors. Plus it indicates (to me) a questionable grasp of security, not a great sign for a VPN provider. Its just wrong.
- Karunamon 12y agoIt could very well just mean that the email is sent before any hashing occurs (as part of the registration controller, in other words) - but yeah, you're right, considering that email's physical equivalent is a postcard, it shows a tremendous lack of respect for the user. Kiss of death for a supposedly privacy focused operation like a VPN provider.
- Gabriel_Martin 12y ago"Do you keep logs?" "We dont keep any logs of any kind. all we ask from you is your email address and username. and thats it. no other information is keept in our system." One must immediately question a company whose customer facing copy appears in such a way.
- Someone1234 12y agoThe whole site/concept/product only appears to be a week old. Even Googling the name turns up stuff from the last few days only.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- AdmiralAsshat 12y agoCould be another Anon OS. I'd be weary of anything marketing itself as a "free" VPN.
- TomH_NL 12y agohmm could abuse the plaintext password for <script> and <iframe> tags... Something smells fishy with everything free!
- sauere 12y agoWait... so... - free - no logs - support - unlimited bandwidth Is this some kind of badly executed sting operation?
- furyg3 12y agoI'm not quite sure what the appeal of free VPN services are, or why anyone would trust them. Setting up a VPN server takes very little time. From a default Ubuntu installation you only need to install the OpenVPN Access Server package, visit a web page and add a user. You can do this from a cloud service provider in a location with favorable privacy laws, like Iceland. I do this with GreenQloud, and just spin up my VPN instance when I'm on an untrustworthy wifi network, behind a corporate firewall, traveling to a country that censors, or whatever. Powered on instances cost little, and powered off nearly nothing. The attack surface is low, as it's usually powered off. People who wish to be nearly untraceable can use a prepaid credit card for anonymity.
- Torgo 12y ago>People who wish to be nearly untraceable can use a prepaid credit card for anonymity. Does anyone have experience with this? I tried it once, and found that most places blocked the use of these cards and needed a "real" one.
- click170 12y agoI used a prepaid card to sign up for an AWS account because I'm not comfortable giving them my real one for a "free trial", they accepted it at the time, approx 1 year ago.
- beagle3 12y agoIn the US and many other places, prepaid cards are not anonymous. IIRC you need ID of some kind to buy them in Germany, for example (similarly for SIM cards)
- driverdan 12y agoYou do not need an ID to get a prepaid card in the US.
- beagle3 12y agoTrue, but they are not technically anonymous - you have to provide a name and address. And while the average person will not care, I'm sure an enterprising US district attorney will find a way to pile CFAA and other charges for providing wrong details on a prepaid card if they already are trying to nail you.
- nikolak 12y agoHas to be either a scam or it will require a payment after they get few users.
- gngrwzrd 12y ago"Hide your identity online and surf anonymous. When using our service you will be protected behind a encrypted tunnel and no traces can lead back too you" Shouldn't that be "back to you"? Not back too you.
- jliptzin 12y agoI always chuckle when I see a VPN service claim no logging. While it's probably true, they can't ever prove to you that that's actually the case, which makes the claim moot for anyone who actually cares about their privacy.
- aluhut 12y agoUntil somebody gets sued and posts about it on twitter.
- junglhilt 12y agoInteresting...doesn't work in China.
- benmorris 12y agoI don't really use these VPN services, but I did see they use PPTP (for android at least). Isn't that flawed/insecure?
- KyleSanderson 12y agoSent my password in plain text back in an email. Game over.
- uslic001 12y agoThey are no longer sending the password with the sign-up email. Not going to try it out though given it still is likely some type of scam.
- lodewijkadlp 12y agoThe NSA's leaked docs made known they own every single VPN out there, except for some in the middle east. SIGN UP FOR SURVEILLANCE AT FROOTVPN
- spiralking 12y agoWithin less than an hour of being connected to FrootVPN through OpenVPN, incoming connection to sshd from sketchy IP followed by multiple attemped incoming connections to screensharing from another sketchy IP... bots, or not, I dont know... But if every single comment thus far isn't enough of an indication.. as I have never experienced these security issues in the past, I think it's fair to say.. stay away, stay far away...