Hacker News Reader

Comment by abcd_f | Hacker News Reader

A company that sold itself to a Chinese consortium for $600M announces a free VPN service.

That's some high quality humor.

No American company is to be trusted either - not with shadow courts ordering companies to hand them data and install backdoors and not tell anyone about it.

Won't even download or think twice about now. Thanks for the reminder.

shhhh Data Gathering service is the best VPN service.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170518204556/http://coxit.net/...

SurfEasy, which was an Opera VPN company, collected logs and sold it.

If it's free then you are the product

On the new internet, this tired adage is already outdated. You're still the product even if you're paying.

In this case, the user is fuel for the product.

"If it's free then you are the product"

BINGO! http://crimeflare.net:83/cfs.html

Well, a free tier loss leader for paid services is much different than what people are generally referring to.

Unless it's under the GPL.

I would rather the Chinese have my pr0n logs and such than Google / Facebook / NSA

Preferably nobody would have it.

I assume American VPN providers are all gathering data for the NSA. Russians for Russia, China for China.

At least it's free humor.

Someone is paying

Why's that supposed to be humorous?

The Chineese apple store got purged of all its VPN apps last year. If this one is approved by the party, it has to be quite good!

I'd rather be surveilled by the Chinese government than Google/Facebook and other FAGMAN companies.

At least I don't live in the Chinese jurisdiction, while the tech giants do whatever they can to slip their tentacles into every website you visit, even if you don't do any business with them and actively fight their spyware. The Chinese government doesn't want to sell me anything either.

Id rather be surveiled by neither, and a VPN does very little to prevent stuff like browser fingerprinting.

Just block scripts and randomize the useragent, here's your new fingerprint every minute.

> Just block scripts

And make the web nigh-unusable.

and be the one very strong signal from $VPN_IPRANGE that has a random wacky user agent, along with disabled scripting (and a quite comprehensive CSS fingerprint to boot).

My fingerprint is different every minute. That "very strong signal" is discarded by every surveillance engine as useless noise.

you don't know that.

There are like three dozen factors in a web user's fingerprint, of which the user agent is just one. And no, the rest aren't all controlled by JS.

just don’t do anything that they can blackmail you for...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19590585

Reply on news.ycombinator.com