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Comment by Kaveren | Hacker News Reader

What are you referring to? The situation I found bits and pieces about didn't seem to amount to much of anthing. ProtonVPN was able to explain what happened to what I thought was a satisfactory degree [1].

I definitely don't trust NordVPN in particular, they advertise their "military grade encryption", and I have no clue who runs it.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/protonvpn...

What other VPN would you trust? Mullvad, absolutely no clue who runs it. Private Internet Access had claims about logs proven in federal court at some point in the past, but I really still don't trust it.

Running your own VPN is one of the best options but you almost completely lose the relatively reasonable degree of anonymity that VPN providers serve to you. Depends on your objectives.

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> ProtonVPN was able to explain what happened to what I thought was a satisfactory degree

ProtonVPN's explanation was extremely hardly believable[1].

> Mullvad, absolutely no clue who runs it.

It's clearly stated on Mullvad's homepage[2]:

> The legal entity operating Mullvad is Amagicom AB. [...] Amagicom is 100% owned by founders Fredrik Strömberg and Daniel Berntsson who are actively involved in the company. The rest of the team includes Robin Lövgren, Simon Andersson, Linus, Richard Mitra, Sanny Mitra, David Marby, Odd, Andrej Mihajlov, Janito Ferreira Filho, Elad Yarom and Jan Jonsson.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17775554

[2] https://mullvad.net/en/

I thought the Reddit reply was thorough, though I can't speak to the claim by krn.

At the end of the day, I can't name many (if any) VPN providers that operate their own data center, which is extremely important since they all (including ProtonVPN) lease from the same companies. ProtonVPN does provide Secure Core though (routing traffic through certain countries to attempt to mitigate exit node threats), too.

I wasn't aware about Mullvad, thank you for pointing that out. I still have little clue who those people are, while Andy Yen has given a TED talk, so he has some public presence. I'm personally more inclined to trust them.

Actually, ProtonVPN does own the physical hardware and network for our secure core servers, which we fully operate and run ourselves. This is rather expensive to do, but it's the only way to be sure things are behaving as they should.

Why so? ProtonVPN explained the situation quite clearly though I don't understand why you wouldn't trust NordVPN. Just because they are advertising? Or 'military-grade encryption'? They aren't misleading really, even if it is a marketing gimmick. And who runs it... Well, it is a caveat with most of the VPNs. Because of the delicate nature of them (cybersecurity service, various jurisdictions and such), you don't really know. It is a matter of trust, more than anything. I know that I trust them more than my ISP, that's for sure.

Running your own VPN doesn't really anonymize you though. And like you said, depends what you want from the VPN really.

You should know who runs a VPN in my opinion if you're going to trust them. Private Internet Access you at least have a name at London Trust Media, but Andy Yen has a public presence.

I don't trust anyone who uses "military grade encryption", period, even though it is just a marketing ploy.

ProtonVPN has their own data center of some sort in Switzerland. All VPNs are leasing the same servers from Leaseweb and friends (even ProtonVPN). They say it's in an underground retired army bunker, which sounds good for physical security assuming that's really the case. You never know for sure, but it's better than the alternatives.

VPN companies are notoriously shady, and I only trust ProtonVPN. I believe their service in _some_ respects is a cut above the rest, and I am willing to deal with multi-day customer service responses, DDoS attacks, and the like because of that.

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