Nostr

Yes.

The original function of VPNs was to give you a secure backhaul to your office when you are off-site. This is still a valid use case.

Then people started to discover they could consume regional content by using a global, public VPN. This is still a valid use case, however content providers could easily detect and block this if they were incentised.

The last case, which was never true was security. Stopping your ISP or government from monitoring what you are doing. Yes your path to the exit node is probably secure, but with the 14 eyes agreement as well as many other agreements, this simply means you are being observed and reported back by a different agency to your home agency.

How many VPNs do you hold the private encryption key for?

Now, NOSTR VPN's, where you hold your own key 🤔

But you're still being observed at the exit node.

Diacone Frost 5mo ago

e.g. mullvad vpn accepts a (wireguard) public keys you give them. You hold the keys.

and they have strict no-log policy.

but yes, they all are more or less "trust me bro"

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Discussion

mike 5mo ago

I run my own private VPN across multiple sites using Tailscale, I am trusting Tailscale, but if I were incentivised I could build out my own Wireguard VPN.

I then run Mullvad within that setup to allow me access to public VPN exit nodes and I am trusting Mullvad. And yes, I trust that they don't log me.

I can't easily replace Mullvad because I don't have servers all around the world to exit from. This is where MysteriumDark has an advantage, it is peer to peer VPNs whereby you exit from other users home or business broadband connections.

This is great as it is nearly impossible for anybody to log these exit nodes affectively as there are around 50,000 nodes online at any time and they are constantly changing.

The problem, however, with Mysterium is they recently made being an exit node a lot easier by including browser extensions, meaning you don't need to permanently run a Raspberry Pi to earn their Crypto token $MYST.

What's great for earning is not great for using as nodes come on and offline all the time, meaning as a user, your connection may be disconnected at any time without any notice.

I've noticed this happening a lot recently which is why I've mostly stopped using it as a client from my Fedora Workstation box.

Diacone Frost 5mo ago

I also have my own wireguard (exit/entry) point. proble is that it's in a DC in sweden and treated like other public VPNs (so blocked by reddit etc).

At home I chain proton and mullvad and sometimes tor circuits.

Anyways, I would not bet on privacy that much. Proton allegedly use cloudflare, who knows what mullvad does and who they work with...

mike 5mo ago

I think the problem is your phone / computer. It's telling the site your visiting everything it needs to know.

Whether the site bothers to enquire is what I was discussing in my post. Some sites are incentivised to believe your lies, others are not.

For the ones that are not, they can either find out all the information they need, or simply block you for not being honest in the first place.

Your VPN, is doing nothing worthwhile unless you are using it to connect to your home / office or view regionally locked content on sites that are deliberately oblivious to your dishonesty