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Comment by eightails | Hacker News Reader

They tried to promote the launch of this service on a bunch of linux-related subreddits 6 months ago, and I wasn't much of a fan of the concept or the way they advertised it, in skipping over the p2p nature of the system.

Their answer to the question of 'what happens when a bad actor has their illegal activity routed through my connection' seemed illogical. They claimed that as more people signed up, the proportion of bad actors would decrease [0], which makes no sense to me.

Also, I'm not entirely sure what methods they have taken to stop a bad actor from collecting packets from other users that are routed through the bad actors exit node.

The worst thing IMO is the way it's being presented and marketed. The impression the website gives is that its just like all other VPNs but free, which is very misleading.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/f5y6qg/update_launc...

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The main page copy seems misleading bordering on malicious:

> No bandwidth caps. No throttling. Stream all day, and download away.

Yes, no caps on the tunneled connection. But it will happily use up your home connection data caps with both your own and other people's traffic.

Then once you run an exit for long enough, your home network will get tor-like treatment from many CAPTCHAs and you'll be blocked from anything on cloudflare.

> FreePN never logs your IP or tracks your activity. (...) FreePN shields your data from prying eyes, giving you peace of mind.

FreePN doesn't log. But anyone running FreePN is welcome to do just that.

It's a perfect tool for that monitoring too. Tor browser at least has lots of extra protections. This one does not, so settig up a tunnel-to-tunnel routing node means you can listen to a lot of interesting things. (Without the liability of being a true exit node)

> Then once you run an exit for long enough, your home network will get tor-like treatment from many CAPTCHAs and you'll be blocked from anything on cloudflare.

That'll take a matter of minutes. It doesn't take much to get on googles shitlist as soon as you do any sort of bot activity against their services. I manage to get on it by just searching humanly!

> your home network will get tor-like treatment from many CAPTCHAs and you'll be blocked from anything on cloudflare

That will happen if you use any VPN,so that's expected.

The point is that it'll happen for your non-VPN traffic, because you are a VPN server for others.

I don't see any scenario where you would provide VPN services for others without using a VPN yourself.

One person on one device in the household using it doesn't mean all other devices have it.

Hi eightails -

Our posts a few months back were largely exploratory posts - seeing if there was actually demand for the product (or at least enough to pursue the project!).

Since FreePN is such a technical product, we've been iterating a lot on our messaging. We are still in very early stages, but we do have some mechanisms planned to mitigate the effect of bad actors on the network:

- we plan to build in something similar to HTTPS Everywhere to the product, to automatically upgrade connections (and we only route traffic on ports 80 / 443 (optionally 53)). - we also plan to build in the ability to allow peers to block certain categories of traffic from going over their connection (using blocklists similar to those used by Fortiguard -- so you could block all torrenting sites, as an example).

Early days still, but much to come!

> They claimed that as more people signed up, the proportion of bad actors would decrease

I can see the reasoning here: bad actors will be the first to jump on such a service. They actively search for new services that they might be able to use to pipe their traffic through. Awareness amongst the wider population will grow more slowly, as they aren't for the most part actively looking for it, so as that awareness spreads the ratio of good-to-bad will likely improve.

Though the absolute number of bad actors I expect is enough for me to dismiss ever knowingly installing something like this on any device I own (or allowing it on any network I have some responsibility for), no matter what the good/bad ratio is like.

Indeed, there is no plausible deniability in someone viewing child porn using your connection, in the same way you are responsible for securing your wifi connection.

This is no different than that shady p2p VPN product that was shipped as a browser extension.

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