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Comment by malfist | Hacker News Reader

Mullvard is behind the mozilla vpn. They're crazy good about privacy. You can mail them cash with account info and they'll set you up.

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https://www.ivpn.net/ also generates a random userid and also accepts cash in the mail (only for large purchases unfortunately). I wasn't able to get mullvad's multihop to work on Android, but iVPN Pro does the trick. iVPN also has a nice server status page that helps you optimize for speed (low load server) or anonymity (high load server) as appropriate: https://www.ivpn.net/status/ They have a weird "anti-marketing" homepage which devotes almost equal space to explaining why you should not buy their product :-P

Perfect Privacy accepts a gift card (more convenient than mailed cash IMO) and has a nifty "neurorouting" feature which aims to be better than standard multihop (claims of speed, at least, I can attest to). They do ask for an email address, sadly, unlike iVPN/Mullvad. Also I just saw this and it looks a bit worrisome https://www.security.org/privacy-guide/perfect-privacy/

Both iVPN and PP let you block various trackers / MANGA corps at the network level.

I like Mullvad but it seems good to support a diversity of providers. Curious if anyone has any dirt on either of those two, or if they can make more recommendations.

> You can mail them cash with account info and they'll set you up

If I wanted to self-host a VPN, I would still need to pay for a cloud provider.

Is there an equivalent cash (snail mail) offering for hosting?

nearlyfreespeech.net

NFSN allows you to host websites but last I checked they won't just give you a server for you to run whatever you like.

>I would still need to pay for a cloud provider.

both google and oracle offer small, perpetually free VM instances.

...in exchange for knowing who you are. (If they couldn't de-dup you via some kind of identity verification, they wouldn't be able to offer a free promo, as some asshole could then just come and generate a million free accounts and lash them together to run a botnet/crypto-mining-farm/etc on.)

I believe the GP's question is "is there any public-web hosting platform that I can use entirely anonymously; where they allow me to sign up using a VPN; and where I don't ever have to pass them anything / sign in through anything / link anything that could be linked back to my identity?"

And I believe the answer to that question is "no."

(Well, okay, if you're fine with a static website, you could pin your data using FileCoin, and then set a domain up as a DNSLink pointer to [an IPFS gateway for] the relevant IPFS URN. That's how https://docs.ipfs.io works. But that's not quite what "web hosting" means to most people.)

The moment a service allows anonymous signup it inevitably gets abused the shit out of itself for spam, botnet C&C, DoS attacks and worse.

This is why I don't see how services like Mullvad can stay afloat forever.

You still have to pay for bandwidth. Free tier provides only 1Gb egress.

Mullvad accepts cash as well. In what way are they behind?

Mullvad is the service provider, Moz just resells their service

Behind in the "controlling or responsible for (an event or plan)" sense was meant, perhaps?

Misunderstanding. The Mozilla VPN is Mullvad (rebranded).

Ohhh, I see. I did not know that, thanks.

As in they power Mozilla's VPN:

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2019/12/3/mullvad-partnerships-p...

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