Firefox Private Network Is Now Official As Mozilla VPN

[starshipeleven]

I've always found public VPNs to be more like honeypots. Wanna know who sends shady stuff? Start by looking at VPN users. But that may be just in my head, DPI can do as good a job anyway.
Corporate VPNs are another story though.

To be fair, those that really want max anonimity to do shady stuff are not using their own Internet to begin with, so whatever tracks them down will hit the legitimate owner of the internet contract, not them.

VPN users are in most cases legit or gray area users, the worst offence is torrenting or bypassing geo-restrictions for Netflix and such.

And of course people from China and other states that have shitty understanding of how Internet works

[ruthan]

VPN is mainly for get content available in your country like here Playstation now, or stadia, some broacasting and news that is why its banned in China..

[Giovanni Fabbro]

I'm guessing you don't really know much about how transactions work in say Bitcoin right? The whole idea behind cryptocurrencies is to provide the agency to have the ability of making transactions without centralized intermediaries that you're forced to trust using essentially math. Oh and the set-in-stone rules for making new digital notes, that's about it.

The electricity bit more or less an unwanted, but still unsurpassed, side effect... (proof of stake didn't prove itself properly yet)

It's all about you being the bank yourself and having the ability to send to anyone else. Fiat money btw. is the same digital 1s and 0s in the end today. No difference but for the ability of some to "print" more on a whim and as you said manipulated on a whim. Proper cryptocurrencies actually enforce the fact that nobody but the private key holder can do the manipulation.

Once anything is digitized, it has no intrinsic value. It may have market value, but without intrinsic value, it's ultimately worthless. A power surge can't wipe out the price of gold.

[Giovanni Fabbro]

Which is why cryptocurrencies were invented

Ow, my sides hurt from the laughter.

[Giovanni Fabbro]

Wanna know who sends shady stuff? Start by looking at VPN users.

Funny, I say the same thing about Bittorrent and Tor.

[Giovanni Fabbro]

[Almindor]

Once anything is digitized, it has no intrinsic value. It may have market value, but without intrinsic value, it's ultimately worthless. A power surge can't wipe out the price of gold.

And what intristic value does a dollar have?

[board]

So yes a company in a country that is overseas and cannot be easily contacted by your government unless you did something so bad that you attracted Interpol's attention (at which point a VPN is the least of your worries) might actually have logs of what you are doing (usually nothing particularly bad), but is it that bad at the end of the day?

Well assuming you are using HTTPS, they can know what domain-names you connect to (SNI in TLS). If the DNS lookup is also behind the proxy, as it should be if you trust your VPN provider more than your ISP, then that's usually non-encrypted. In reality, some websites use HTTP without TLS, so the entire payload including HTTP-headers will be non-encrypted as well. Torrents are even worse. Other protocols may have their own problems.

We can assume that the VPN provider will grab everything it possibly can. What's mentioned above can be used to create a profile on you. You can't buy a VPN service without using your Credit Card (personally identifiable information).

I'd say it's better to limit VPNs to specific domains, or protocols (torrents, etc.) rather than letting it run system-wide or browser-wide. That's probably the best way to use a VPN. But most people don't know how to do that or don't understand what they're dealing with. The way VPNs are advertised right now isn't helping either. Therefore many people will end up using VPNs wrong while having this false sense of security.

I mean, this isn't for protecting high profile targets like Snowden, but to keep shitbags like Verizon from throtling your Netflix or selling your browsing history to your government and avoid getting cease and desist letters for all the torrenting you are doing and such.

And that's what VPNs are good for.

Luckily we don't have any news about VPN providers selling out their old customers to the highest bidder in the entertainment industry, yet. But I can imagine there is a financial incentive for that.

[Giovanni Fabbro]

And what intristic value does a dollar have?

A dollar. So long as it's cash and not deposited in a bank.

[board]

I read this a while ago, and I agree his point, VPN only gives your unverified safe feelings.
But most of its recommendations, well lemme be frank, is BS.
There is also no way you can verify the VPS provider does not steal your generated private key inside your VPS, and you can neither verify the chain of your tor nodes are not pile of traps (it happened before).

Let's not talk about differential privacy and DPI+machine learning. These tracking methods are easier to implement and harder to counter.

Sure Tor is not perfect either, it has obvious flaws such as being vulnerable to timing attacks. But it's better than a VPN, because Tor is designed not to trust the proxies, and it succeeds a lot of the times. VPN never anonymizes you to the proxy, by design. It's a significant difference, not perfect, but still good. No one here is arguing that solutions like these are in anyway perfect. I agree that flaws should be pointed out so that people don't get a false sense of security, but I don't agree that we should dismiss Tor because of it being imperfect.