- cross-posted to:
- privacyguides@lemmy.one
- privacy@lemmy.world
- mullvad@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- privacyguides@lemmy.one
- privacy@lemmy.world
- mullvad@lemmy.dbzer0.com
First I’m hearing of ObscuraVPN at least, but it does seem to be a very new player in the market. However from reading through their website and Github. This service does look very promising! Though it is slightly more expensive than Mullvad.
Anyone had the chance to test their service yet? Does it seem interesting to you? Let’s discuss.
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MacOS only at the moment.
I’m glad we have choices but be careful everyone, they’re new and we don’t know if they’re trust worthy.
It does seem interesting,
but I remain skeptical.This means putting your trust in Obscura, since they’re the 1st hop, receiving your data without additional encryption, a new player, who yet has to prove that they’re trustworthy.
Sure their Github may show great software, but that doesn’t mean we can see which software they might additionally install on their servers.
Meanwhile Mullvad has already been proven to be trustworthy through the best possible review any VPN company can receive, being: Server seized by the feds, but zero useful info retrieved by them.
Which proves they back up their claim of being a No-Log VPN.
Due to this I trust Mullvad,
and don’t have any issues with sending them my data.But I can’t put the same faith in Obscura yet, not before they receive a similar “review”.
Server seized by the feds, but zero useful info retrieved by them.
The gold standard.
Assuming they don’t log your perfectly trackable payments.
They don’t take xmr or cash?
I don’t see an option, a statement claiming so, or even just a mention of a future.
It’s strange that they’d partner with Mullvad but fail to adopt their payment methods. Even proton allows for cash to be mailed in.
They seem good, but they’re new and we can’t know just yet whether we can trust them or not.
As I understand it, the “first hop” in Obscura’s case would give them access to your IP address, but the identity of the destination server would be obscured until it was accepted by the second hop, Mullvad’s server. In contrast, Mullvad’s server would not see your IP address. (And, hoping you are visiting an HTTPS secured website, they would see the domain you are visiting but not the page contents.)
A helpful diagram is halfway down this page. I feel comfortable providing it, as this company is no longer in business AFAIK.
This means putting your trust in Obscura, since they’re the 1st hop, receiving your data without additional encryption, a new player, who yet has to prove that they’re trustworthy.
I’ve not checked but the whole claim is to use additional encryption, between you and the 2nd hop.
With our 2-party setup, Obscura operates the 1st hop, and we’re proud to partner with Mullvad who operates the 2nd (exit) hop. As the WireGuard packets are end-to-end encrypted to Mullvad’s servers, we never see any parts of your packet in plaintext (not even SNI). In fact, you can check your connected server’s public key in the Obscura App against those listed on Mullvad’s server page!
Can someone explain this to me? It seems like I’m sending stuff to obscura, so they can then send it to mullvad, which can then send it to the website? Like a two layer TOR?
Basically yes.
The USP here seems to be the traffic mangling used to disguise the connection. The client is open source, which is always good, but that means it’s probably easier for a bad actor to analyse and break that USP.
Very limited payment options and macOS only currently. Feels like they’ve made a pretty webpage & rushed launch, instead of polishing the product/product availability first.
Unfortunate that the term ‘Obscura’ is dominated by the band in search results.
I will stick with stuffing an envelope with cash and posting it to mullvad, but this is definitely one to watch.
Bullshit. If they’re joining Mullvad then how fucking long til they accept Monero?
They claim to accept privacy, so why don’t they accept the only real private cryptocurrency*?
*Don’t even start that here. Take it to Monero.town as your most social form of educating yourself but do just that.
They accept cash bruh.
What address are you mailing this lost cash from?
First time seeing a service support Nostr public keys instead of email.
It is interesting but it also does not inspire much confidence in this service since anyone who’s used Nostr knows exactly what and who it’s for.
Weirdo crypto bros?
Monero is pretty good tho.
They don’t accept that, that I see. Show me wrong.
And Raging angry right wingers. Though a lot of those are moving to mainstream services like Twitter and Facebook.
It’s swarmed by crypto content but it’s a nice, simple, distributed protocol. Run your own node; compared to any AP service, it’s astonishingly lightweight. Peer, or not; refuse to handle traffic from the crypto heavy nodes.
It’s a fantastic, well designed protocol. Read a few NIPS, then read the Activity Pub design and you tell me which one you think is more well-designed.
I won’t ignore that the majority of traffic was crypto stuff, but it’s slowly broadening out to more legitimate content, like porn.
Pretty sure it also has a decent amount of alt-right MAGA content as well.
The point I was trying to make is that there is no “it.” It’s a collection of specifications built around an extremely minimalist protocol for a distributed, federated system of nodes. The biggest network happens to be swarming with an array of people with questionable or outright objectionable ethics, but there’s no reason why an alternative network of connected nodes with different values can’t grow.
I really like Nostr for its simplicity and lightweight nature. It’s super easy to run a node, and can easily be done in a minimal VPS with almost no disk, memory, or compute. Messages are lightweight (not being based in a heavy container like XML), so even with message caching, it sips disk space. There are a bunch of useful extensions (and some that people are going to object to, light the cryptocurrency extension), but these are all optional and enabling them is nearly always a runtime configuration option if the server supports it.
There are dozens on servers, and as many clients. Interacting with it reminds me off early HTTP, when you could reasonably telnet in to a servers, type a couple of lines of a header, and get a response. It’s absolutely delightful.
The only thing we lack is a coordinated list of alt-nodes that don’t federate with the biggest node network containing the crypto and alt-right[1]. Maybe I should start a list; I dread having to curate it against trolls, though.
[1] I hate that crypto has become so closely associated with the alt-right, because there’s a lot of positive theory behind it. Cryptographically auditable public ledgers are a really useful tool. An alternative financial system owned by the participants and not by a single centralized regime is a great idea. It was a decentralized, federated financial system before “federation” became a movement, and it is ironic that the strongest criticisms come from proponents of decentralization and federation. Proof of work turned out to be a really poor design choice, but I don’t know why any leftist would argue that - in theory - a system that supports virtual trading tokens which is not under the control of a Central Bank is worse than our current surveillance-state, KYC financial system. And there are cryptocoins that use a consensus mechanism other than proof-of-work (2), and which consume less energy than all of the servers running federated systems like Lemmy and Mastodon.
Sorry about the crypto rant. The fact that crypto - which already had issues - has become associated with the alt-right really bothers me. The knee-jerk distain because of environmental impact was one thing, because although it’s not the whole story, most coins are based on POW and do have a horrible carbon footprint. And there’s a bunch of graft in the space; it has problems, but those are solvable. Well, you can’t “solve” graft, any more than you can “solve” CP on the internet; but the carbon footprint issue isn’t a fundamental component of cryptocoins - unfortunately just the most popular ones. But the lean to the right on the part of the broader crypto community celebrities is really disheartening.
I say, what are you implying sir? I use it for memes and talking to strangers.
