askura

Seeing as those that fall for online scams, hacks, and breaches tend to be the elderly - I hope the punishment is as severe as it can get.

Which I hope they do, because they're scummy companies that shouldn't exist. But seeing as they do the people involved should be strung up

Makes sense to be fair. People only think of personal quick gains over long term generational games as has been shown time and time again

I would love it just as a screen for things like Slack or Discord as I'm on the move a lot :D

https://twitter.com/windscribecom/status/1667177373534494729

Here's one bang on subject for example. The company that won the bid to formalise digital IDs donating directly to the party members responsible for choosing in favour of them. 6 states are trying to link porn sites to a digital driving licence. So porn habits and identity are linked for example.

Cheers mate! Will see to them too :D

Mullvad are absolutely the GOAT for most people so that's fair.

If you need port forwarding or other fringe uses then not so much but you can't go wrong with how well they stick by their guns and by who they choose to associate with.

The top right feature the last remaining indies who for better or worse are the last remaining folks holding onto any kind of standards. Corporate VPNs use tons of marketing tracking, affiliate marketing, and skewer the discussion to suit their profits over all else.

Kape for example have been on a buying spree over the past few years so now all those VPNs tout whatever line is set from above.

Nah some VPNs allow you to rent a "residential" I.P which is shared by 5-15 people tops. They're rarely caught up or get flagged. This was in 2021 however so can't comment on the effectiveness rn

Top right my guy, with the same treatment as others.

There's 100% a difference between a billion dollar corporate owner vs indies. As well as the amount of spend that goes into affiliate marketing.

IVPN are studs of the industry, no doubt. Very serious folk working hard on sticking to their privacy principles - rare today for sure!

I'm the author of the map and I'll get those updates on there now, the Mozilla node was actually hidden (as I need to update the corp info) and there's other corrections I'm making now.

If you have any other suggestions I'm more than happy to look into them and start getting them updated. This has been a passion project of my own for the past few years so I'm really grateful for any other feedback.

Yeah I made the original map and the updated version, updating the suggestions from the thread now so if you have any by all means let me know and I'll add them.

I made this while in China: https://www.reddit.com/r/shanghai/comments/pp39xi/the_2021_c...

Was based there 4 years so got very familiar with the VPN scene over there so if you have any questions let me know! I found for gaming for example you can't beat local VPNs for latency. No western operation can compete with that.

Affiliate campaigns! So basically you'll see in review articles for everything a link with a ton of fluff and tracking in it.

Say you want a new pair of headphones. You'll probably do something like this.

1. Search Google & look for forum/reddit threads talking about specific brands.

2. Look for those brands for further reviews, feedback, and price comparisons.

3. You will come across a review that has links to the "best price".

4. By clicking that link if you purchase that product then, or within 15-30 days (depends on the affiliate agreement) the affiliate will earn commission.

That's why big corps work with media companies. They make hundreds of thousands per month via affiliate commissions alone.

This induces a large amount of biases as media sites always recommend their affiliates over non-affiliates.

I like the idea that their grandmother has a zero-trust relationship with them regarding tech lol

It depends on what you're doing but the ones in green to the top right are independents but IVACY recently have suffered an issue. If you have issues with the corporate owners you can avoid them by seeing who the parent is and who they own.

"SentinelLabs researchers have discovered that a Chinese APT group known as Bronze Starlight has been signing off malware with a valid certificate. This certificate is used by Ivacy VPN, and the hackers' target is the gambling industry in Southeast Asia."

Honestly, what's your use case?

I used to find it worked here and there for me (Shanghai Telecom, 4/5G was OK. Home didn't work). Shadowsocks worked well for me but then got janky - ended up using a local VPN for gaming and Windscribe for general browsing. For 3 sweet months I could run a AWS node and relay through that with awesome speeds but then that broke too. Ended up just with a residential IP and that solved everything til I left.

There is of course times like when the Two Sessions are in order and nothing worked.

Always been a fan of the simple suggestion we just Nascar up these folks: https://honestgil.com/nascar

An update to the 2022 VPN affiliate relationship map. A handy reference for who is owned by who - including their status or whether they're actually part of a bigger corporation.

The reference article for the map itself with key updates & findings: https://blog.windscribe.com/the-vpn-relationship-map-2023/

All the best to them. I was involved with a few Vice projects in 2011-2014 and it was honestly leadership that let them down. They have great talent but it's not easy in this day and age to run any kind of content site.

Hope they pull it off.

Honestly, it's going to be one of those things I champion now whenever it comes up in conversation haha. Very solid points.

Yeah had the same issue as above but this does help clear it up

This site does what it preaches but these seem a little off. Some of these I'd argue against but I'd also argue I'm not qualified to.

Anyone care to chime in with their caveats to some of these?

With SEO it's entirely the case of Google being Google and just doing whatever they fancy. Core changes aren't often to the benefit of the scene these days. The little space that isn't paid ads is often useless these days.

I don't think the generative AI results they're going to do will be much better either.

The only downside with DP is just devices that actually have that versus HDMI / Mini hdmi.

This post though has made me annoyed as DP is clearly the better standard.

I don't personally see it so cynically but I get what you're trying to say.

However it's being handled though I think the gesture is pretty nice in general. A ton of WeVPN customers were about to lose their money and for some people in restricted countries losing VPN access can be a hell of a blow.

When in Shanghai for example being able to jump across like this would have been pretty handy. As opposed when one that I used went down I had massive issues trying to get back online as other VPNs were being super restricted.

Each to their own.

WeVPN: No personal info exists in our database. We have a list of email hashes + expiry dates that were provided to us. When you enter your email into the box, we look for a hash of the provided email and see if there is a record for it, which is used to upgrade the Windscribe account.

Nah no acquisition.

https://discord.com/channels/435955361955053579/435955361955...

Interesting spot there

I've noticed community ran ISPs are on the rise. It would be great to see a boom like in the 90s as some ISPs have such a monopoly

Yeah seems to be the case. Express VPN's parent corp acquired CyberGhost, Zenmate, Private Internet access over the last few years.

They also paid as much as several of these put together for the marketing/affiliate websites Webselence, VPNmentor, Safety Detectives. Which shows how much money must be in these affiliate programs.

I'm seeing it more going the other way. Over the past few years so many services have been bought by bigger corps or even media companies. These bigger companies seem to be able to undercut the competition. Causing things like this I guess.

Though it's anyone's guess what has happened as service over time had deteriorated quite drastically.