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Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

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201 points sdsantos | 3 comments | 03 Sep 25 16:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.717s | source
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fujigawa ◴[03 Sep 25 17:28 UTC] No.45118394[source]▶
Commercial VPNs will go down as one of the greatest money-making schemes of the last decade. Outside of a few specific use cases their sales often rely on leveraging non-technical users' fear of what they don't fully understand.

I have non-technical friends and relatives that have fully bought into this and when I asked why they use a VPN I got non-specific answers like "you need it for security", "to prevent identity theft", or my personal favorite: "to protect my bank accounts".

Not a single person has said "I pay to route my traffic through an unknown intermediary to obscure its origin" or "I installed new root certificates to increase my security."

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some-guy ◴[03 Sep 25 17:38 UTC] No.45118486[source]▶
Mine is simple: avoid my ISP complaining about torrents.
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1. ThatMedicIsASpy ◴[03 Sep 25 18:24 UTC] No.45118933[source]▶
Avoid my ISPs piss poor routing and peering - especially during peak times.
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2. thisislife2 ◴[03 Sep 25 18:48 UTC] No.45119161[source]▶
My ISP is smarter - they just block all the torrent and streaming site I visit, and try to push me to upgrade to a plan with many streaming platforms bundled in it. Sucks for them, because I already subscribe to a few of them but still prefer torrent-ing to download videos to watch them offline whenever I want, without unnecessary time limits, in the video / audio quality I want, in the medium I want (TV, computer, mobile devices etc.), with the software (player) I like, without ads and other nags.
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3. crossroadsguy ◴[04 Sep 25 08:14 UTC] No.45124895[source]▶
I used to do private P2Ping actively. Now I don't. Not enough time - for that, not motivated enough - for that. So I was planning to let go of that VPS of mine where my Seedbox resides. But I am not sure anymore. I do feel I may let it up and running just like many others who did it when I couldn't afford a Seedbox.

Then on the other hand I feel that the real need are from people who come to find those Linux ISOs from public P2Ps and for that I think I will be booted off my VPS in a day or two. So eventually I think this will be better - dust off that old r-pi (or maybe get a new one), get a cheap HDD, get a VPN and let it stay at home and keep seeding.