I will say I don't think most people need that tech to bypass firewalls and censorship though, or at least not Mullvad's primary user base. So it's not really a threat to them. Whereas Obscura is going to be targeting a slightly different customer base, and yet they're still effectively funneling customers to Mullvad, so I'm sure this is a win for both companies. Obscura gets access to a lot more infrastructure than they could offer and they can just focus on their tech, Mullvad gets lots of new customers effectively through Obscura.

Also, I'm not sure at all on the details of Obscura or how it works or who's behind it or anything (the website seems to be down anyway so maybe they can't handle the traffic of this sudden spike in interest). So take this with a massive pinch of salt, but Mullvad's primary customer base are people who want the best level of privacy from their VPN provider, they allow anonymous sign ups with no account details, pay in lots of different ways etc. And a potential problem with using a service like Obscura which goes through two different services (Obscura and then Mullvad) is that you're increasing your exposure to different parties, so maybe you're increasing your exposure to correlation attacks which could de-anonymise you for example, or maybe to supply chain attacks.

That's why I was saying they're probably different audiences, because it seems like Obscura's main benefit is this tech to bypass firewalls by obfuscating traffic. But that's not really Mullvad's use case. And if you want better obfuscation with Mullvad then you've got their DAITA system anyway which makes every packet the same size/timing to avoid traffic analysis.

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What I learned is that when I pay for mullvad anonymously using lightning... that's the same guys that has now built obscura.

My problem is not with the ISP side anyway, it is always with the server side. No one wants to serve me shit.

A big one is YouTube and Google Music. I actually have a premium family account, so I pay for no ads but I prefer to use Pipewire and those type of apps and they keep getting blocked because of my VPN.

I've even changed countries, it's really annoying to the point I have a downloaded playlist to listen to and I don't really listen to anything else anymore 🤦‍♂️