- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
The IT company Mullvad’s founder Daniel Berntsson is behind a giant donation to the populist Örebro Party, which advocates “comprehensive re-immigration” from Sweden. “It’s sad that it’s needed,” he told Flamman.
~ https://www.flamman.se/techprofil-ger-miljoner-till-orebropartiet/
deleted by creator
also thought mullvad was legit. also want to know if there’s any alternative
I’ve semi-seriously been thinking about bootstrapping a VPN service just to have one “not an asshole” service (and that’s setting the bar low - I’m definitely an asshole, just not that kind of asshole). But I’m also a US citizen living in the US, so not the best choice for the job either.
If you build it, they will come
I’ve been using IVPN.
I originally stopped using IVPN because of slow speeds. Has that improved?
Hey,
No.
Are you able to get through geo-restrictions on streaming services with IVPN? They have fewer servers than Mullvad it seems. Like for Singapore, they have 2, Mullvad has 5. In Japan, they have 1, while Mullvad has 9.
Number of servers is less relevant than users per server.
Mullvad is a much bigger company so I’d expect them to need more servers.
It is, when you want to evade geo-restrictions. More servers spread over different IP blocks means there’s more chances the streaming services aren’t aware of some of those IPs yet, so they aren’t blocking them yet.
I’ll preface this by saying I used to work in the industry.
The restriction evading isn’t really related to the number of servers. VPN companies for streaming block evasions buy IP addresses that aren’t data centre specific. Those ranges are well known and easily blocked. So for example when you browse you’ll generally use a “standard” IP but while connected to the same endpoint if you fire up a netflix session it’ll route that traffic out the “streaming” IP. This is also partly to try to prevent steaming companies from getting easy access to a list of those IPs
It’s quite expensive to get IPs that aren’t blocked by steaming services so that is a cheaper cost per user for larger companies. Where I was that cost was way more than the cost of any individual server per month (and some of those servers were hefty). That is one way that Mullvad would have an edge but it’s minor.
For what it’s worth I did have a call with the iVPN lads (twice I think) and found them lovely. Never interacted with Mullvad but I will never give them money after reading this. Weirdly I’m in the market for a new subscription and they would have been my go to. Their fiver a month thing is really very smart.
Edit: for geo blocks on standard browsing it would generally present to us as a support ticket. We’d raise it with engineering and they’d assign a new outgoing IP with whoever our provider was. We used M247 a lot and they were very responsive when that happened. Usually a few hours and it was sorted.
Thanks for the info, I learned something new. So if for example I run my tv through my VPN and I’m watching youtube. When I switch to the netflix app, the VPN service determines that I’m trying to hit a netflix IP, so it routes it out to an outgoing IP specifically for netflix geo-blocking evasion that is separate from what youtube was using?
Yeah that’s exactly it. That’s how we did it anyway. I guess other providers may have their own secret sauce but I have to assume it’s some variation of that. We paid for a pool of, I think, 1000 non-contiguous residential / business IPs and if any of them got blocked we just immediately rotated.
Honestly we never had much trouble with it after the initial engineering work was done. I don’t think the providers really give a shit beyond best initial effort to make the rights holders happy.
Its been a couple of years but I didn’t have much luck with IVPN and mlb.tv but that was really the only one I tried at the time.
safing
Signal was kickstarted by the CIA, so dissidents in regimes they wanted to topple could communicate securely, but at least that seems genuine.
Matrix was an Israeli spy company’s invention.
Telegram is Russian.
Reddit started out as the creation of Aaron Schwartz, but he got demonised and committed suicide. Then it was left to that shit eater spez, who sold his soul to the Epstein crowd making Ghislaine Maxwell a powermod among others, also hosting r/the_donald and bridging Trump’s popularity from 4chan into the mainstream. Now he sells everyone’s data to Google, while still not paying the manufacturers of that data anything.
TrueCrypt got shut down because it was too cool.
Matrix does have fundamental design issues you would expect from cellebrite devs…
Simplex, Monero and Whonix are all as cool as veracrypt!
and the SimpleX creator is a far righter, too https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/114630877715286899
You’d think with all the trans programmers out there we would have more tech companies built by leftists…
But I suppose the leftists are the ones building the platforms for a pittance while the generationally wealthy right-wingers are the ones paying people to do all that work…
The ones built by leftists don’t pay as well.
Doesn’t matter as much here. It’s open source and has passed two audits. Look at the code. Use different servers if you want. Reimplement the protocol if you can.
No really, please somone do it in go or rust. I don’t want to learn kotlin 🥲
And Veracrypt?
VeraCrypt exists
And we should be thankful that. But merely existing isn’t cool.
How is it now cool that VeraCrypt exists?
Man, after his death Aaron Swartz has gone from an early employee of Reddit, to a founder of Reddit to now the creator of Reddit. Give it a few years and he’ll have provided the VC money for it too.
Aaron Swartz is and always was the guy who coded the core functionality of reddit. He was the man who Tim Burners Lee said would lead the charge for the internet into the 21st century.
Instead, the FBI drove him to death.
Spez and that other dude had the idea to make reddit, but Aaron built it for them. Then Randall from XKCD made the “Best” sorting algorithm.
Then Spez shat all over everything for personal gain.
Then you came here to post.
And he had superpowers too, and was about to bring peace to the middle east.
AirVPN?
Didn’t air have a data mining scandal like nord and others? Cryptostorm is legit though.
Not as far as I’ve heard? Any links?
No. There have been so many over the years, i had to dig for half an hour the last time I tried to find stories on nord
AFAIK AirVPN is run by Italian hacktivist enthusiasts and are not part of the mess with NordVPN and other highly advertised. At least I’ve only heard positive things from nerds as they seem to fly under the radar of the commercial circuit. Like Mullvad did until some years ago when they started running ad campaigns.
Not related to nord whatever I’m remembering was seprate. Maybe they just had a security fuck up or I’m thinking of one of a dosen other data mining VPNs ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, I usually round Robin AirVPN, IVPN, and cryptostorm. Sometimes they leap frog each other in terms of features
I personally use dnsforge.de which is essentially a public Pi Hole with additional configuration choices for strict or porn/gambling blocking. While this one is specifically german, I think there are probably other such services or you could always host your own. (I know you said “major service” but it’s about the concept)