Comment by nickstinemates
3 years ago
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?
>Also out of curiosity, how adequate is Tor for bittorrenting? I would guess it constrains bandwidth pretty severely?
I've never done it, but it will have some problems: no UDP support (cannot connect to UDP trackers or use uTP with peers), no port forwarding (cannot connect to peers with closed ports), and some exit nodes might block outgoing activity towards the well-known ports (6881) though most peers don't use this port and instead use random ports.
> 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.