Where does Mullvad get all this money? I've seen physical ads in different places in the world, audits, etc.
I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, but is the VPN business that good? Are they funded by a privacy group?
I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, but is the VPN business that good? Are they funded by a privacy group?
One of my use cases for VPN is to watch free, legal anime on YouTube from Muse-Asia. I use a VPN to connect to Indonesia, which allows me to watch anime like Dandadan. a US IP won't show anything on their Youtube page. I'm using Mullvad VPN.
Obviously, this stuff is merely geo-locked. There's nothing illegal about using a VPN to get around stupid geo-locking restrictions.
You are probably aware of the "Great Firewall of China" that blocks access from mainland China to Google, Meta, etc... Which means that if you are a westerner in China and want to access the internet as you know it, or if you are Chinese and access the rest of the world, then you need some kind of VPN to bypass the restrictions.
The Great Firewall is quite advanced, and you need some layers of stealth not to be detected and blocked. Furthermore, they actively search for VPN endpoints and block their IP addresses. It limits your choice of VPNs, and Mullvad is one of the good ones for that purpose, along with Astrill and LetsVPN.
When I was in China I would use my own VPN using ec2 and the now defunct Streisand (which uses stunnel). First few requests were always fast but as you use more bandwidth your requests would start to slow down considerably.
Oddly a foreign sim gets uncensored internet, so that's what I've recommended to travelers, but haven't been back since COVID so that might be outdated info.
And knowing that mullvad doesn’t come close to the mainstream marketing others (well in essence one) VPN providers, your comment comes of as malicious.
You need a minute on their website to see that they have a very simple approach to funding their business. No "life time subscription" exclusive offers, no BS privacy claims...
Also this is HN, not a comment section on something like Yahoo news, really hard to consider people commenting here as being detached from tech trends and news.
If the person above frequents certain torrent trackers, reads Torrent Freak, or travels in other small VPN adjacent circles then it's no stretch to imagine they have seen Mullvad mentioned a great deal, both through ads and through unsponsered forum members ranking Mullvad high on their HOWTO safely do {X} guides.
So, not Mullvad ads being blocked but actual Mullvad themed content positioned as of direct interest to the target demographic.
I've only seen VPN ads from one company actually plastered in metro stations and inside subway cars: Mullvad. I've never seen physical ads for any other VPN provider.
I've seen lots of horribly annoying ads (or "sponsor segments") from various other VPNs, and I'm sure I've blocked orders of magnitude more of them by using SponsorBlock. But for real, in-person ads? Only Mullvad.
I'm not criticizing Mullvad here. In fact, this is probably a smart strategy on their part: if you're too clueless to use an ad-blocker online, you're not going to see other VPN providers' ads very much. But if you're highly privacy-focused, you'll already be using an ad-blocker and probably SponsorBlock too if you watch YouTube videos, so you really won't see other companies online ads much. But you can't miss physical ads on your subway ride. Their ads are also cute and clever, pointing out that a piece of paper stuck to the wall isn't tracking you the way most internet advertising does.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
But, it's not white label. White label implies it would be Tailscale VPN (or similar) with no reference to Mullvalad in their docs or marketing. But that's not what is happening with their offering.
From their customers.