Comment by nickstinemates
3 years ago
This partnership makes me want to remove tailscale from my stack and instead use wireguard directly. Leaves a bad impression. Fighting against my instinct and telling myself I'm irrational. Tailscale is one of the first things I install on every machine. It's so good. But this partnership erodes trust, doesn't build it.
Does Mullvad have a bad reputation? I genuinely don't understand why this partnership would erode trust? Can you elaborate?
mullvad has one of the best reputations in the entire consumer vpn space. they were one of if not the very first businesses to accept bitcoin back in 2010 when no one knew what bitcoin was and before the word crytpo existed or anyone was in it to make money. they were one of the early funders and supporters of wireguard itself before it was merged into linux(and before anyone cared about it). they are working in cooperation with firefox to run their vpn system. they require no email address or personally identifiable information at all to use them. they don't do scammy sponsorships on podcasts or youtube channels to mislead people into thinking that their service or vpns in general solve problems they don't actually solve.
and at the end of the day if you think consumer vpns are stupid you can always just not use it. i don't think that them teaming up with mullvad implies anything bad or suspect about either of them. this type of a service is something that is really important and useful to a certain subset of users, and if they were going to wind up teaming up with a consumer vpn provider this is probably the least shady and most principled one they could have done it with.
I personally think all of the VPN providers are essentially selling snake oil. In addition, I think there are better tools for the job. If you want anonymity, use Tor. If you want to bypass geo-restricted content, use Bittorrent.
From a strategy standpoint, I am not sure how this helps Tailscale at all. It changes how I view them and not in a good way.
>use Bittorrent
Funny you should mention that as it's often a key reason to pick up a VPN for many users...
There are not only two reasons to use a consumer VPN. It is entirely reasonable to shift trust from an opaque, investor-owned corporation that has no profit incentive or regulatory reasons to protect their customers personal information and network footprint (in fact they have incentive to sell as much data about their customers as possible) to a much more transparent company that does have the incentive to protect their customers' data.
Mullvad has been at the forefront of not just VPN companies, but of any company, in their transparency, focus on their technology and pushing for further improvements in protecting data, raising the bar for trust and integrity and being more open.
Consumer VPNs are not a panacea (and Mullvad does not market themselves to be one). It is unfortunate that almost every single VPN company is actually snake oil, but Mullvad is a welcome counter-example.
> If you want to bypass geo-restricted content, use Bittorrent.
I mean, if I just want to watch some geo-restricted show on a streaming service, it's a lot nicer of an experience just to use a VPN rather than having to torrent the show and run Plex or something else to provide a half-decent content browsing experience for your TV. Also, you don't have to worry about some copyright holder suing you (or more likely, extorting you) because you seeded 30s of video. Yeah, the VPN might sell your routing logs to some content company, but (1) that's unlikely and (2) is it even illegal to stream copyrighted content (pretty sure it's only illegal to provide it)?
Also out of curiosity, how adequate is Tor for bittorrenting? I would guess it constrains bandwidth pretty severely?
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> I personally think all of the VPN providers are essentially selling snake oil.
this is incorrect.
nearly all the consumer VPN providers are indeed selling snake oil, and are only useful for obscuring your traffic from ISPs snooping. they keep logs, they have lax security, they sell aggregate whatever to data brokers, they don't give a shit about stopping leaks, etc.
Mullvad isn't, though, and spent loads of effort on ensuring even they can't usefully spy on their users.
> In addition, I think there are better tools for the job. If you want anonymity, use Tor. If you want to bypass geo-restricted content, use Bittorrent.
this is extremely dumb and unimaginative.
"I want to play on multiplayer game servers in regions other than the one I live in" is a use case of VPNs that is not covered by your alternate methods.
The privacy benefits are massively oversold, I agree with you there.
Maybe try Nebula? https://github.com/slackhq/nebula Or Defined Networks: https://www.defined.net/