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Comment by jetpackjoe | Hacker News Reader

With the way these companies advertise, they make it seem like a silver bullet for internet anonymity. Almost every YouTube video I've seen recently seems to have one as a sponsor, and I am sure they are picking up many non-technical customers.

I don't think users of NordVPN, ExpressVPN, MullvadVPN et al. are as sophisticated as you think.

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The non-technical customers probably aren't running WSL2 either. In fact I think very few of them actually need a VPN. Those who torrent in litigious countries have a benefit from their VPN provider but I doubt most others don't know about the behaviour changes that need to take place to make a VPN effective.

I think VPNs can be a powerful tool for many people who would normally not be able to find out about their existence, but the predatory nature modern VPN ads have taken is quite sad.

This leads to some cases of Youtube fan bases angrily calling out shitty VPN ads while the video creators just want to pay their bills, a situation nobody wants.

The way Express VPN's ad copy reads it seems their own people don't understand the difference between encryption and traffic tunneling (much less encryption in transit versus encryption at rest).

If they're not that sophisticated they probably won't use WSL anyway though, so it's not a huge issue in that sense (unless some malware specifically installs WSL2 to get around it).

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