SundryTornAsunder

SundryTornAsunder , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

I am not associated with Mullvad VPN in any capacity and I have nothing to disclose, lol.

Mullvad VPN doesn’t even offer a renewing subscription, that I know of, and I’m almost entirely certain that they used to and have since stopped doing so on principle. Their VPN service costs a little less than $5/month (USD) if you get their card off Amazon that’s good for a year, and that is literally a physical card sent through the mail—the kind you have to scratch off on the back to get to the number underneath, in other words—and so at least AFAIK, there’s no possible way for whichever unique card you happen to end up with, to ever be traced directly to that specific transaction on Amazon, even if you pay for it using your credit/debit card, and directly associate that purchase with your bank account in so doing. It’s even better than that if you pay them by means far less traceable to begin with, of course, and they make those options available as well. In fact, they prefer doing it that way as opposed to credit/debit card purchases, even of physical cards through Amazon, IIRC. At least AFAIK, they don’t even accept any form of payment directly traceable to a bank account on their own website, for every obvious reason.

They actually do not keep logs like they claim not to, at least according to the one time they were ever affected by a search warrant, at which point it was discovered by law enforcement that said warrant in its entirety described information that did not exist because it never had.

One thing I really like about (using) it, and I have no idea what other VPNs would also do something like this, if any: it sets up a SOCKS5 proxy for you internally, and you can use that anywhere that supports that, wherever you may need/want a killswitch properly—meaning to make said application unable to resolve hostnames in the event of your connection to the VPN being interrupted for some reason. I’m also pretty sure you can use their DNS-over-HTTPS no matter what, even if you don’t already use their VPN service. Anyway, especially if you already do, though, I always figure it’s never a bad idea to just use the same provider everywhere you can: use their encrypted DNS wherever possible, in addition to using the proxy provided by their VPN wherever possible, in addition to using their VPN anyway. I do that, and I also enable the setting (under Wireguard) to use multi-hop, which, albeit at the expense of some latency, even more thoroughly conceals my real external IP address from the ostensibly innocuous honeypots for people who are not lunatics of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, or whatever company doing business on that level of dystopia. It’s simply a technical matter that doing all of that will make nearly everything—excluding any/all abject OPSEC failure, browser fingerprinting, EXIF metadata, etc., which should go without saying—way more difficult to trace back to your real world identity than it otherwise would be. It has to be. I didn’t say “impossible” because I know better, and again, it’s never gonna protect anyone from themselves because it can’t. It’s good enough to be able to use the internet and also sleep, though, at least for me.

It’s just so many consecutive layers of obfuscation contrary to the best interest of the boogeyman, especially for the price, that if I didn’t have immediate access to $60 in order to buy another year’s worth of Mullvad VPN, or immediate access to Mullvad VPN, I would literally beg and/or borrow, figuratively steal, or otherwise aquire.

SundryTornAsunder , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

These Terms of Service, your use of this Website, and the relationship between you and us shall be governed by the laws of the Republic of Cyprus, without regard to conflict of law rules. Nothing contained in these Terms of Service shall constitute an agreement to the application of the laws of any other nation to this Website. You agree that this Website shall be deemed a passive Website that does not give rise to personal jurisdiction over us, either specific or general, in jurisdictions other than the Republic of Cyprus. The sole and exclusive jurisdiction and venue for any action or proceeding arising out of or related to these Terms of Service shall be in an appropriate court located in Limassol, Cyprus. You hereby submit to the jurisdiction and venue of said Courts.

—Terms Of Service, PornHub

They will never allow themselves to become subject to any kind of accountability, or oversight, or call it whatever you will—in so far as it would concern any interest of anyone outside of their existing tax haven—be it age verification according to the State of Texas, or be it anything else. They would totally nullify their own terms and conditions as of the most recent change if they did, which is why they’re not, and they’re never going to make any legal change in order to accommodate anyone who is not Cyprus, simply because they would stand to lose revenue currently pocketed to taxes if they did.

SundryTornAsunder , 3 months ago

For people with amateur radio licenses, amateur sattelite is already a thing that exists. I haven’t looked into it, or even thought about it at all until now, but I’m sure it’s least theoretically possible for a completely decentralized, amatuer internet to be built using only radio/sattelite infrastructure, which would actually be really interesting. I think we could really use another internet, totally separate from this; an internet that requires a license to access legally, which itself requires passing a test demonstrating a solid understanding of how the system works on a technical level; that exists on the air and only on the air, overseen by whatever regulatory body already oversees the airwaves in a given country anyway, and by them only and by no one else; a totally disparate internet wholly unrelated to this, which, by definition and by law, exists exclusively for every individual reason imaginable that is already legal and which is not commercial; an internet wherein a literal felony is commited by advertising in any way. We could really use a self policing internet owned and operated by the people, for the people; completely free as in going to prison for trying to sell something; completely free as in freedom of speech without limitation otherwise. The internet, meaning this internet as it exists at present, cannot effectively police itself because it’s already used for commercial purposes legally. Don’t get me wrong: we need an internet like that to exist, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. If for no other reason than exactly that, it would benefit everyone involved for an amateur internet to exist by itself, I think.

SundryTornAsunder OP , 3 months ago

This is amazing.

SundryTornAsunder OP , 3 months ago

Lol.

SundryTornAsunder , 3 months ago

Not sure why you were downvoted. I’ve successfully made most of my friends, and my mom for that matter, talk to me on Signal.

SundryTornAsunder , 3 months ago

And the Electron desktop apps are far too bloated.

No argument. Electron is categorically silly in its own right, lol.

They don’t want you installing it from a safer space like F-Droid.

F-Droid is by no means safe; use Droidify.

They still by default send notification metadata to Google & Apple (websocket support exists but drains a fair amount of battery & they refuse to support UnifiedPush).

Easy: use the FOSS version of Molly instead of the default Signal app.

SundryTornAsunder , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Certainly.

To answer your question: yeah, pretty much.

I got all of this information, originally, through this guy’s channel (Side Of Burritos on YouTube):

1. www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzpVI4zaso0
2. www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAbgeJau3eE
3. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFz57zNR_M0

It’s also worth mentioning that part three of that series ended up directly inspiring another project called Obtanium, which he then did a video on here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiN37bn0OE8