Hacker News Reader

Comment by mosselman | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly the reason why I am always so disappointed by many in the tech community in discussions about VPNs:

In almost every discussion about VPNs people say something along the lines of: “you can’t trust the VPN provider more than your ISP”. This has always been a dumb argument and this completely proves it.

ISPs are the worst. There is now only one in the Netherlands that I might trust (Freedom), but even they are using the network of another untrustworthy one (KPN) so I doubt they’d be able to do anything about it if the network owner would start something like this.

A permanent VPN connection is becoming more and more logical as long as you trust the provider more than your ISP. I use Mullvad.

Please let’s stop perpetuating the “now you are just moving the trust from ISP to VPN-provider” as a counter argument to using a VPN and start using it as a main reason to use VPN. Sad maybe, but necessary.

View on HN

I disagree - VPNs are not a solution for this whole issue, but legislation is. The whole VPN business looks shady to me, maybe Mullvad is an outlier and a good citizen, but for how long?

Make data collection transparent, force companies to have opt-in for it and fine non-conforming companies.

Dt. Telekom and Vodafone recently lost their zero rating business (StreamOn or what it was called), they're in constant search for new sources of revenue.

If I understood correctly OP didn't say VPN was the only solution and stop there. Instead, the point was more along the lines of: ISPs showed us who they are, we should believe them. Don't trust them, use a VPN. Does that mean that you can't legislate? Of course not. But it seems that OP doesn't want to wait until that happens.

> Dt. Telekom and Vodafone recently lost their zero rating business

Which was always in violation of net neutrality, by the way.

They'll do anything we'll let them get away with, no matter how shady. And I think the DT CEO would admit that.

Looking at these offers I see in ads, I really wonder if not soon they won't be doing the same. The discounts are really weird. As it seems regular price is nowhere near where the costs are. Or then they are losing lot of money in customer acquisition which will soon lead to this kind of behaviour.

A VPN is also the only consistently good way to do ad-blocking on mobile. Mullvad, for instance, recently introduced ad-blocking, malware-blocking, and tracker-blocking in its mobile app. Previously I had to rely on the painfully poor ad-blockers that Apple allowed in its walled garden, and ads got through all the time. With the VPN, I am able to visit websites with virtually no ads appearing.

FWIW, my family, friends, and I have been using nextdns on idevices, consoles, “smart” tv to almost completely block ads and tracking via dns black holing. Pihole does the same if you prefer selfhosted. Recalcitrant apps like YouTube have no known solution because they take care of their own dns resolution. But for most other use cases (browser, telemetry, iOS apps) it works very well and I almost never see any ad anywhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com