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Comment by davepeck | Hacker News Reader

Shameless plug: my new app and service, Cloak (https://www.getcloak.com/), is a zero-hassle VPN. It's currently in beta for OS X.

I'd love feedback from the HN community!

Grab the app, enter your Cloak credentials, and you're done. If Cloak sees you're on on a password-less wireless network, it automatically activates. Cloak's servers are cloud-hosted; the client selects the back-end server that will give the lowest latency. Under the hood, Cloak for OSX is built on industry-standard OpenVPN.

I expect Cloak will exit beta when the iPhone/iPad client is finished, probably in early September. But if you'd like to try it sooner, drop me a line [davepeck at getcloak dot com] and I'll send you a special HN invite code. Cheers!

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Another shameless plug here... We provide a cheap (39.95$/year) unmetered VPN service at https://www.privateinternetaccess.com

We support all devices (OpenVPN, PPTP, IPSEC/L2TP) and have servers in US west/midwest/east, UK, and Switzerland.

What is your logging policy?

We don't keep any logs.

None at all?

Hum, I see this on your privacy policy page:

INFO WE COLLECT

From Clients of our Service

Date and time you connect/disconnect to/from the service. Source IP you use to connect to the service. Bandwidth usage E-mail provided by Paypal. Paypal payment data.

And then this:

DISCLOSURE

If under subpoena, PrivateInternetAccess.com may release data in order to comply with legal obligations or in order to enforce the PrivateInternetAccess.com Terms of Service and/or other agreements.

PrivateInternetAccess.com may release data in order to protect the rights, property and/or safety of PrivateInternetAccess.com, its constituents, and/or other visitors and clients.

That's correct, we log connections TO our VPN but log absolutely nothing in terms of traffic sent THROUGH the VPN. So whatever you do while connected is not logged and therefore un-subpoena-able.

I'm intrigued, but one question: Who's Steve?

I tried this.sadly all servers are blocked at the ip level. One was working for a week but then that was blocked also. Im based in China.

Might be worth checking Rackspace's policies on hosting proxies - you want to make sure you're not responsible if users use your proxies for illegal activity.

Interesting. How do you plan to handle the GPL constraints on OpenVPN? Are you just using your own frontend running the compiled binaries or have you pulled the source in?

Yeah, it's a custom frontend on a vanilla OpenVPN binary, so no GPL issues. That said, I'm actually considering what would happen if I went ahead and open-sourced the client anyway. Probably the only truly interesting code there is the Obj-C code to talk to OpenVPN via its management port. The rest would seem specific to the Cloak service. But perhaps there are other useful bits too...

Will the iPhone/iPad version only work on jail broken devices? Because you can't access/change network settings on an non-jail broken iPhone/iPad from within a app.

Actually, you can create a provisioning profile and ask the user to install it.

http://support.apple.com/kb/dl851 http://support.apple.com/kb/dl926

Correct. Our iOS app is at its core a vector for generating and installing such profiles -- but with some niceties so you don't have to enter your credentials multiple times, etc.

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