- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
I’m sharing this one because I’m curious what more knowledgeable people think about this one. Please take a peek at the article before joining the discussion, as my limited quote might have dropped useful information
The VPN industry runs on a promise. Pick almost any provider and the pitch is the same: “we don’t keep logs.” You hand over your entire internet connection and, in return, you get a pinky-promise that nobody is writing anything down.
For a lot of privacy-minded people, that promise stopped being good enough a while ago. A no-logs policy is only as honest as the company making it, and even an honest company can be hacked, subpoenaed, or quietly acquired.
Obscura VPN is trying to answer to that problem. Instead of asking you to trust its word, it splits the job across two independent companies so that neither one can tie your identity to your browsing. The first hop is Obscura’s own servers; the exit hop is run by Mullvad. a respected VPM company out of Sweden. Your traffic is end-to-end encrypted to Mullvad’s keys, so Obscura literally can’t read it, and Mullvad never sees who you are.
You must log in or # to comment.
also fuck Mullvad’s cofounder for bankrolling the far right
It’s really sad that we only have two other trusted and properly audited alternatives, which is iVPN and ProtonVPN.
I am not sure on proton, same right wing boat but also they want to be more than what I want them to be.
Nord is named a lot with these aswell
deleted by creator
Don’t spread misinformation. AirVPN was not audited. Even more, they’ve been refusing to undergo a security audit for a few years now.
As for ProtonVPN, I don’t want to defend Proton, but their ad on that far-right YouTuber’s channel was a mistake. They took it down as soon as users pointed it out and apologized. Andy’s still an asshole, though.
I mean yeah duck those people but if my enemy makes the honestly best quality vpn out there I’m going to use it.
Plenty of alternatives like AirVPN
Air is a piracy vpn that literally can’t let people from the nation its based in use its service because the government would intervene.
Fucking hot stove ass service.
Air is also extremely complex to set up and use and has, not the most buggy app, but a strong contender for it. Users have to be careful to avoid creating an account or using a payment method with pii.
I use airvpn daily. I would never recommend it as an alternative to mullvad.
“the exit hop is run by Mullvad. a respected VPM company out of Sweden.”
been living under a rock?
Also not sure if I’d take a VPN recommendation from an article that misspells VPN.
I doubt I’m more knowledgeable but the argument made is reasonable. I’m not totally convinced that trusting 2 providers is an improvement on trusting one. The point not canvassed in the article is that if Mullvad is the encrypted end point with keys then it doesn’t really matter if they don’t know who you are from account info, it’s not very hard for them to have an unencrypted data flow split off for inspection which sooner or later will provide sufficient info to identify you.
Tl;dr if you trust mullvad deal with them directly. If you don’t trust mullvad this doesn’t actually fix that although it makes it harder and more effort to identify you it can still be done.
I wouldnt pay a premium over mullvad’s price for this. No real value added.
There’s potentially an argument in obscurity.
If Mullvad only sees a firehose of data from one connection, then they might see 200 requests per second to Google, from customer O, for everything under the sun.
Vs, if you go direct to Mullvad they’ll see 1 request per second from customer X for “big goth tiddies”.
Yeah. Fair. Security through obscurity isnt a great protection, but it isnt nothing.
The dns requests and communication to the search provider are encrypted separate from the vpn provider, so they would see traffic shaped like an https data stream.
The tor network is free to use. You get three hops there!
and still crazy show most of the time nonethless somehow.
this isn’t a revolutionary concept or anything, it’s basically just tor, without the middle hop, and with entry nodes that knows who you are
The point is that Tor is too slow and unreliable for general everyday use.
I’ve tried using Tor as a daily browser, I don’t have nearly enough patience
too slow and unreliable for general everyday use
There was a guy on Lemmy awhile back who was daily driving TailsOS, as a bit. I wonder how it turned out
Seems a lot easier to just use mullvad directly.
It’s just as easy not any easier because you don’t need to pay or run mullvad yourself.
Ok smarty pants you know what I meant.
no, because my immediate first thought was that I’d need to hire two services, I can’t read minds without looking at you
But you can read minds if you are looking at them?!
I can’t either way, not at this hour
What hour can you do it at then?
The same people who were asking for a Google account so they could sign up for Obscura VPN beta 🤡
So it’s a VPN, and legal bullshit to deal with jurisdictions?
That’s stupid.
