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Comment by krn | Hacker News Reader

I have zero trust in Proton<anything> after learning, that the free ProtonVPN service is provided by a data mining company from Eastern Europe[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258203 (please turn on "showdead" in settings, to see the entire thread)

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Please, that's not a verified claim[0], and you shouldn't trust any VPN service that isn't operated by you in the first place.

[0]: Plus, it was raised by a competitor, Private Internet Access, so it makes it even more difficult to get the facts straight.

> Please, that's not a verified claim[0], and you shouldn't trust any VPN service that isn't operated by you in the first place.

The co-founders of ProtonMail were caught providing multiple inaccurate statements about their business practices in that thread, and couldn't deny any of the facts stated by the co-founder of PIA[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17262566

Which part of the world should any service be provided from to be trustworthy? Let me rephrase, which services are known to have never cooperated with any agency, nor ever being hacked by them?

... Facebook

> it was raised by a competitor, Private Internet Access

Focus on the facts. Not the messenger. Secondly, I admire your love of this discussion [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17497912

     1. You are the user in question that is a co-founder for PIA. 
     2. You are a direct competitor to Proton*
     3. "Messengers", especially in the position of founder of the competitor, have significant bias. 
     4. You have a fiduciary reason for them to fail.
     5. user protonmail has noted significant harassment regarding this issue

Im inclined to distrust both of you. I find that your arguments might have merit. But I also see you as a digital aggressor. I don't particularly like either.

Nothing you said here addressed the facts that were provided. Good luck!

I'm sure the poster was addressing "Focus on the facts. Not the messenger."

As was listed, there are plenty of good reasons to learn about the messenger, just like how looking up my comment history will show my propensity for calling this argument out. You know my ulterior motives and where I'm coming from.

Well one things certain: I'll never use Private Internet Access after this ridiculous comment from you[0] not even three months ago.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17261149 -- need to have "showdead" enabled in profile

I stand by that statement.

And I stand by mine that I'll never use or recommend Private Internet Access.

Those types of comments (yours and the general back-and-forth with ProtonMail) make the VPN industry look like it's full of sharks. It's hurting all of you. It makes you look unprofessional. Before seeing this I had a favourable impression of PIA, but not anymore.

EDIT: I'm sure the competition is intense and I'm not sure I would be able to rise above it myself but I think you need to be aware of what it looks like.

It may be full of sharks. Specifically, though, my issues are with the two companies who pretend they are privacy companies and aren’t.

They bring shame to our industry, and further, shame to our cause.

I will stand up against them everyday regardless of what kind of repercussions come to me. That’s what it means to protect people’s privacy.

Cheers!

> Im inclined to distrust both of you.

It's neither religion, nor politics. It's tech. You don't need to believe in anything you cannot verify yourself. I have checked most of the statements provided by the co-founder of PIA, and found none of them to be false, even if he sometimes crossed the line of a civil discussion.

I agree that people should read the linked comments. I did not find the the evidence to be as clear cut or damning as OP seems to think at all after reading through it. Most claims are also put forward by a co founder of Private Internet Access. A direct competitor.

This is exactly my thoughts as well. rasengan is the cofounder and thus is very biased against ProtonMail since they're a competitor.

ProtonVPN is no competitor to Private Internet Access in terms of the size and the number of users. If you were a co-founder of PIA, would you risk your reputation by publicly providing false accusations against a company 1/100 of the size of yours?

No but there's incentive to provide many small half-truths out of context to shape the narrative into one beneficial for yourself want.

That's the problem. I haven't found any of his statements, that would be only half-true. I even discovered a conference held in Lithuania in 2017, where one of the speakers was presented as the head of B2B sales at Tesonet, working on Oxylabs[1]. It is very unlikely, that ProtonMail was not aware of who it was partnering with on a free VPN service.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170909183904/https://salesclub...

Furthermore, after it was pointed out by the co-founder of PIA, that the CEO of Tesonet is the director of ProtonVPN UAB, the company was renamed multiple times in two months[1], with its director now hidden from the public view.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180818102535/https://rekvizita...

Finally, the IP blocks, which belonged to Tesonet and were used by ProtonVPN just a few months ago – despite the co-founders of ProtonMail publicly denying any technical partnership between the two[1] – now belong to ProtonVPN[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17260847

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20180818104256/https://bgpview.i...

ProtonMail's response is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/protonvpn...

> These stories were first fabricated by Private Internet Access, a competitor who has been feeling pressure from ProtonVPN lately.

This is a lie. Private Internet Access is probably the largest paid VPN provider in the world, and ProtonVPN (by Tesonet?) belongs to a short list of free VPN providers, such as Onavo VPN by Facebook[1] and Hola VPN by Luminati[2], most of which are subsidized by data mining companies. These are two completely different markets.

> We used the same legal address and nominee directors as our local partners because we still did not have our own office yet. For contractual reasons, these moves took some time. For example, ProtonLabs Skopje, our newest entity, only moved in November 2017.

ProtonVPN UAB has been founded in July 2016, and was still operated from Tesonet HQ in June 2018, when this fact was made public by the co-founder of PIA. The current ProtonVPN legal address in Vilnius, Lithuania can be used by any company, which agrees to pay for 1 work-place without any long-term obligations[3]. This means, that ProtonVPN might as well be still operating from Tesonet HQ.

> ProtonVPN/ProtonMail does not, and has never used any IPs or servers from Tesonet (this can be publicly verified)

This is a lie. ProtonMail admitted to using Tesonet IPs, when presented with Whois results in June 2018[4]. Those IP blocks were later assigned to ProtonVPN.

> Proton does not share any employees (or company directors) with Tesonet. This is also a verifiable fact.

This is a lie. It is no longer possible to verify, who is the director of ProtonVPN, because the company made the public record unavailable after changing its name multiple times in the last two months[5]. The last public record listed the CEO of Tesonet as the director of ProtonVPN[6], which was still true in early June 2018, when the co-founder of PIA made the fact public.

> There is little actual evidence that Tesonet does data-mining (in any case we have never used infrastructure from them).

This is a lie. There is plenty of actual evidence, that Tesonet is running a data mining company, called Oxylabs[7][8], which sells access to "10+ Million Mobile IPs in Every Country and Every City in the World".

[1] https://fossbytes.com/facebook-onavo-protect-feature-vpn-tra...

[2] https://www.techtimes.com/articles/56706/20150530/if-you-are...

[3] http://bc2000.lt/en/#ofisas

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17261243

[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20180818102535/https://rekvizita...

[6] https://web.archive.org/web/20171017093924/http://rekvizitai...

[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20180426151621/http://oxylabs.io...

[8] https://web.archive.org/web/20170909183904/https://salesclub...

They explained it quite clearly:

> We used Tesonet as a local partner before we had an official Lithuanian subsidiary, and rented office space from them. We don't share employees, infrastructure, etc. We have had a similar temporary arrangements with local companies when we opened offices in other jurisdictions where we didn't have an official presence yet.

This type of arrangement is common in the startup world.

The section from the "About" page of Tesonet (26 Apr 2018)[1], which got removed soon after that HN thread:

"For the latest project, Tesonet is working together with an international brand from Switzerland to create a security product that helps users protect their network traffic. As part of this technical partnership, we are collaborating on datacenter and network infrastructure that can easily supply 10 Gbps worth of bandwidth to users around the world. The product is developed using the latest authentication encryption methods and the best practices in the security world."

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180426161609/https://tesonet.c...

I strongly resent the implied concept that being "East European" by itself could be used as a valid argument to doubt the quality or integrity of a service.

Tesonet denies to its customers[1], that it is running both, a VPN service, NordVPN, and a data mining service, Oxylabs, from its HQ in Vilnius, Lithuania, even though both of these facts can be easily verified by anyone with the internet connection[2][3].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/VPNTorrents/comments/90jyoy/heres_w...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20180607165926/https://ui.awin.c...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20180426151621/http://oxylabs.io...

Cloud<everything> should not really be trusted for anything that requires privacy (unless you encrypt the data locally first using GPG or something similar).

This sort of racism is not acceptable.

Eastern Europe, from which ProtonVPN is operated as a legal entity without the knowledge of its users, is an entirely different jurisdiction from Switzerland in terms of privacy and data retention laws.

>Eastern Europe, from which ProtonVPN is operated as a legal entity without the knowledge of its users, is an entirely different jurisdiction from Switzerland in terms of privacy and data retention laws.

Eastern Europe is not a jurisdiction.

As a Eastern European myself, I chose not to single out Lithuania, because most of the region is now in the EU.

There is nothing wrong with data mining itself. It's completely neutral technology. You are just thrwoing shade with link flooding (those who read the links find out that they don't credibly confirm what you say).

Tesonet provides all kinds of services, like hosting, software development and cybersecurity for it's customers.

> There is nothing wrong with data mining itself. It's completely neutral technology.

Tesonet's Oxylabs offers "10+ Million Mobile IPs in Every Country and Every City in the World"[1], which might explain why ProtonVPN, whose Android app is signed by Tesonet[2], is a free service. This is how Luminati, Tesonet's largest competitor in Residential Proxies, operates: it provides a free VPN service, Hola VPN, and then connects its users into a botnet[3], which is used for data mining operations.

[1] https://oxylabs.io/proxies/residential-proxies

[2] http://apkforandroid.org/com.protonvpn.android/34007825-prot...

[3] http://fortune.com/2015/05/29/hola-luminati-vpn/

It turns out, that Luminati Networks Ltd sued UAB Tesonet over patent infringement in "Large-scale web data extraction products and services with residential proxy network (oxylabs.io)"[1] in July 2018.

[1] http://litigation.maxval-ip.com/Litigation/DetailView?CaseID...

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