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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

I'm still very disappointed with the discontinuation of port forwarding and wish they would be more transparent about their reasoning.

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They explained it:

> Regrettably individuals have frequently used this feature to host undesirable content and malicious services from ports that are forwarded from our VPN servers. This has led to law enforcement contacting us, our IPs getting blacklisted, and hosting providers cancelling us.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/29/removing-the-support-f...

I've seen that but I still have questions. Which hosts? Who are the IP blacklisters (at least the big names)? What kind of undesirable content was the last straw? Copyrighted material, CSAM, terrorists, or worse?

Only needs to be one or two. Spam filters pull from a buncha sources, so pissing off Spamhaus or SORBS or whatever once is enough to get burned everywhere. Ditto for a lot of other sites.

The specific content doesn't really matter, tripping the sensors for enough sites could potentially get entire IP blocks flagged.

They may not also be able to reveal specifics if it is an ongoing investigation.

It's pretty much a content-free statement.

Prompt: Give me a single sentence technical reasoning a VPN company could use to discontinue port forwarding feature.

GPT4: "Due to the increased security risks and potential for exploitation associated with port forwarding, we have decided to discontinue this feature to enhance the privacy and security of our VPN services."

They explained it pretty well...People were abusing it which I totally believe lol. If I need something quick and easy for my illegally hacked server to callback to, I will just use a VPN server that allows me to port forward

Is it content-free? I can see content fine. I don't know why abuse isn't a good enough reason for you, and there must be ulterior motives.

Yours is content free, theirs isn't.

It was communicated transparently: it was abused too often.

It's not a secret that a no-log policy also attracts abuse.

https://mullvad.net/de/blog/2023/5/29/removing-the-support-f...

Cool, I have 8 months prepaid for a service I can no longer use because they have a months notice they're removing a feature I need. And they refuse to refund crypto, the payment method they supposedly prefer.

What I get for trusting mullvad I guess.

What's the feature that's being removed that's making this unusable for you?

Seems like a way to curb costs..It is quite common that plex server enthusiasts will run their entire piracy automation over good always-on VPN services and that requires port forwarding to do so. AirVPN still does it and I have had an account with them for far longer than any other VPN service.

Now that you mention it, I’m amazed that charging $5 a month is enough to cover unlimited bandwidth across a user pool with these kinds of high bandwidth usage patterns

Pretty sure the existence of VPNs like this demonstrates the low cost of bandwidth. Or more so, how ISPs overcharge for bandwidth.

yeah if only they made a blog post explaining exactly why they disabled port forwarding.

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