• stupid_asshole69 [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    7 days ago

    If anyone wants to avoid hearing a Briton speak or avoid seeing his disgusting bog-dweller face and teeth:

    It’s Israeli company Kape Technologies! They run a bunch of the big VPNs, collect user data, turn it over to the iof and mossad and comply with police orders beyond what’s required by law.

    Express and pia were the big kape brands to worry about a while ago but there’s a laundry list.

    Tldr: use mullvad, pay with cash, turn on doh.

      • oscardejarjayes [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        9 days ago

        Mullvad has open-sourced a lot of their infrastructure, and really it all checks out.

        They’ve had multiple independent audits that show that their VPN infrastructure is indeed diskless (RAM only, no permanent storage), and they run what they say they do. Even if they wanted to store all of their logs for the police, it shouldn’t be practical for them to do so.

        https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/8/9/infrastructure-audit-completed-by-radically-open-security

          • oscardejarjayes [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            8 days ago

            These auditors specifically are Radically Open Security out of Amsterdam, their website lists their team with names, pictures, and descriptions, I picked one at random and they had a realistic web presence.

            There is no way to prove what they are actually running, other than audits. Anything a legit system could send, a malicious one could send too.

          • SootySootySoot [any]@hexbear.net
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            8 days ago

            Bit concerned you’re asking questions that aren’t just answered by the webpage oscardejarjayes linked to, but by the link itself “completed-by-radically-open-security”.

            I 100% get the skepticism, but VPNs inherently require trust on the other side, it’s literally impossible to actually “prove” it’s legit. But this is also true of any means whatsoever to connect to the internet. You cannot be truly anonymous online unless you rely on SOMEONE to obscure your identity for you.

            Mullvad have done the best means of building up evidence, if ever got found out as lying, they’d immediately lose 90%+ of their customers.

            And to be honest, allowing and actively encouraging customers to pay by cash would make them a pretty shit Fed honeypot, too.

      • whatdoiputhere12 [any, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        9 days ago

        Only thing I hear about them is that they got raided and police walked away empty handed since they genuinely had nothing, but I’d love to hear more what else specifically makes this provider more trustworthy tbh

        • stupid_asshole69 [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          7 days ago

          Interpol went around and got everyone to blacklist their exit nodes because mullvad wouldn’t cooperate with their investigation into malware and csam using forwarded ports. A few years ago browsing with mullvad got real tough because of that. They decided to pull port forwarding rather than only be useful for running p2p malware and csam behind and everything’s back to normal except now you gotta use air or proton or something to do port forwarding.

            • stupid_asshole69 [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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              6 days ago

              Because proton users don’t just get the vpn, they get some kind of bundle that has a bunch of metadata which can be given up under investigation. So when interpol comes sniffing around with warrants proton can say “here’s all we have” and it’s actually something they can use instead of mullvads “here’s all we have” that’s actually nothing.

              And there wasn’t a malware/csam investigation at a dead end involving proton.

              The police didn’t go around to a bunch of cdns with papers to try to compel them to blacklist mullvad servers because they hate port forwarding, a dastardly computer psuedocrime only useful for disseminating malware and csam, they got cdns to blacklist mullvad in an effort to flush out nontechnical poi to their investigation. My understanding is that it worked.

  • peeonyou [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 days ago

    Maybe this is why everytime someone posts a reddit link here and I click without thinking I get a “blocked” page on reddit. My VPN (mullvad) isn’t just handing my data over to Israel.

  • jUzzo6 [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    9 days ago

    From time to time theregister .co.uk or some other specialized techie rag reports on “international operation led to FBI to arrest criminals operating VPN (or encrypted phones) ‘used by criminals’ “ They pop from time to time. You can deduce that if your VPN really works against state actors, you will be arrested. You can also deduce that all popular VPN are not secure against state actors. Bcs why those dastardly criminals wouldn’t use some “no logs honest” major VPN?

    • stupid_asshole69 [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      7 days ago

      Proton is fine for porn and piracy but you have to be careful what information they have because their warrant canary has been cooked for a while now and there is at least one prominent example of them complying with an investigation and handing over user metadata which was used to corroborate identity with apple (the most famous piece of information was an iCloud email address used as protons recovery vector lol).

      Just be careful what you give them.