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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

I'm not surprised, given that I received 140% cashback(!) on their 2 year plan a while ago. Unless the hope is that most users forget to cancel before it renews, I'm assuming that I'm paying with my personal information.

It still does the trick for accessing bank and other websites from abroad (that somehow consider a VPN IP more trustworthy than a residential ISP in a Western European country, but that's a different story), but I wouldn't use it for anything sensitive.

I also definitely wouldn't run their client locally, and their Wireguard configurations are annoyingly only valid for 15 minutes after creation. (Weirdly, there doesn't seem to be any limitation on IKEv2.)

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There are many VPNs on TopCashback offering 100%+ cashback. I assumed most of them were trying to build up user numbers in order to sell or get acquired, since I can't logically understand why a VPN would pay so much for an affiliate bonus.

Given what you said about not using it for anything sensitive, I'm assuming you're not actually logging into your bank... right?

Everything is TLS-encrypted anyway these days, so the primary concern is metadata privacy.

When it comes to that, I trust VPN providers about as much as ISPs (i.e. absolutely not).

VP.NET doesn't require any trust at all [1][2].

[1] https://vp.net/l/en-US/blog/Don%27t-Trust-Verify

[2] I work for VP.NET and can answer any questions regarding the technology as well!

Interesting! But "no trust required" is a strong statement; don't I need to trust at least Intel? :)

My advice is never to trust bad intel ;).

You do need to trust Intel as it relates to deterministic and verifiable SGX hardware. SGX has had issues, but these are fixed pretty quickly [1]. Creating the isolated layer like SGX gives you verification of what is running on VP.NET's servers though, and the code is available to review and compile yourself so you can verify it is the same [2].

From a defense in depth standpoint, the more layered and isolated securities, the better.

[1] https://sgx.fail

[2] https://github.com/vpdotnet/vpnetd-sgx

And VPN providers who ask you to install a CA root cert. (I don't think PureVPN does this from a casual search, but there are VPN providers that do.)

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