GM friends, happy Saturday! What’s your weekend looking like?

“On this episode of why are we bullish”, I’m bullish AF on the impressive range of amazing privacy tools being built. Left or right, rich or poor, white or black, we all deserve digital privacy. From govt’s, companies, and hell, even nosy neighbors! (Yes, some lady was giving me shit about my license plate yesterday, after yelling at some construction guys about making too much noise. No, she had nothing better to do).

Anyway, I’ve been hearing interesting things about #obscura VPN from Brian Dong (is he on nostr?) so I thought I’d give it a shot. I was very impressed.

Here’s what I texted wifey the other day, when she was having trouble getting her VPN (Nord) to work while traveling:

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If you can’t get connected, I’ve been testing a new VPN called Obscura; it was built by Carl Dong (he was an early Bitcoin Core developer) and its modeled after Apple’s private relay model (uses two “hops” instead of one) but rather than owning both servers, the second one is owned by Mullvad (arguably the best VPN provider), so that neither party can see or de-anonymize the data. And it’s FOSS (obviously I’m not reading the code, but if there’s an obvious issue it’ll be caught sooner or later).

The best part(s) —

1) it’s insanely fast, as in, I’ve taken multiple video calls with zero lag and perfect video quality(!!!),

2) it formats your web traffic in some way so it doesn’t look like you’re using a VPN, meaning sites that often block Nord or Mullvad (like Reddit, BofA, etc.) don’t even realize, and

3) it’s significantly cheaper than Nord, and accepts payment over Lightning/no KYC nonsense.

The only downside is that they haven’t released an iOS version yet, so it’s computer only. But since it’s only your laptop that’s giving you trouble (right?), that shouldn’t matter.

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Needless to say, we’re both converts. Wen iOS? 😁

#vpn #privacy #nokyc