S there room for a VPN with zero Five Eyes servers and RAM-only infrastructure? | Hacker News Reader

S there room for a VPN with zero Five Eyes servers and RAM-only infrastructure?

7 pointsyanbinette4 comments

I've been building on AWS for years and got deep into privacy/networking recently. The more I learned, the more I realized most VPN providers are theatre.

The problem I see: "no-logs" is meaningless if your servers are physically in the US, UK, Canada or Australia. A warrant is a warrant. Even providers I respect like Mullvad and Proton have servers in Five Eyes countries.

What I'm thinking: - Servers only in Iceland, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Romania, Japan - RAM-only — no disk, no logs possible by design, reboot wipes everything - WireGuard - Open source, annual Cure53 audit - BTC/Monero, no account required

Break even is around 200-300 customers. Infrastructure to start is maybe $500-1000/month.

Honest question: does Mullvad already own this positioning well enough that there's no room? Or is "zero Five Eyes + provably no logs" a real differentiator for a specific segment?

Also curious if anyone has experience running infrastructure businesses in Iceland or Luxembourg specifically.

I am running a self hosted Wireguard for my academy with ~15k student devices connected... Even during high disk IO, it's all RAM only and it never goes down. Once our NVME got bad blocks and was working degraded - but ... Wire guard is in-memory and bloody stable! Its the backbone of our academy for several years for students to access their cloud labs and connected devices.

1 Static IP, A linux machine onprem with necessary redundancy. Working like a clockwork.

It doesn't matter how many eyes. Focusing on "eyes", is a 2013 mentality.

https://windscribe.com/blog/i-doesnt-matter-how-many-eyes-yo...

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/5-9-or-14-eyes-your-vpn-actually...

https://mullvad.net/en/vpn/laws-that-matter

Host your own VPN with WireGuard

https://www.wireguard.com/

Tailscale is a commercial solution with centrally managed clusters based on WireGuards point to point tunneling

https://tailscale.com/

NordVPN is based in Lithuania.

https://nordvpn.com

Any provider can absolutely claim "no logs" if they have an API that allows real time monitoring or summary of access in ram for law enforcement or something to that effect. Technically there are no logs. Word games for the win.

There are no providers in the United States of America or any of its allies of significant size that do not have a way for law enforcement to monitor people. Anyone suggesting otherwise just does not know any better or they are being misleading or playing word games even if they are an employee or founder. The US government can make it impossible for any organization or business of any size to operate. Search for the history of Lavabit for just one example. Companies or individuals talk tough to make sales and win allegiance but at the end of the day they want to make money and not get locked up for obstruction.

As for your questions/suggestions talk to a few lawyers before considering such operations. Don't stop at the first lawyer that gives the answer you were hoping for.

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