What would be the advantages/disadvantages of a VPN architecture that allowed you to choose your entry point and exit point. With most VPNs you choose your exit location and connect to that node directly as an entry point as well. The proposed method would allow you to choose an entry point close to you and then route traffic internally to the closest exit point to your destination. Trust would be required in the provider that they aren’t logging or reporting your traffic at some point along the way, but that’s required with traditional VPN connections anyway. I feel like it may confer some bandwidth advantages since the VPN provider could optomize the path between source and destination, but would that come at the cost of additional latency? I also think this architecture would be vulnerable to the legal restrictions at both ends, instead of just the chosen destination. Is this currently implemented by any VPN providers, and if not, what are all the ways I’m not thinking of that this is a terrible idea?
Mullvad and iVPN both allow this with their multihop settings.
Nice, thank you.
go for ivpn if you don’t want to sponsor assholes
maybe i should have just wrote “racism” instead of “assholes”?
Does IVPN support port forwarding?
It seems no VPNs support it these days…
I recommend you don’t choose ivpn over mullvad.
The apps are worse if you end up using the apps, the config file generator has more limitations(that I found) if you use config files, there are more ways to screw up and leave pii lying around in the user account, there are in general more little errors you can make if you’re not careful managing your ivpn account, it’s significantly slower and higher latency than mullvad with fewer servers in fewer locations and has not been tested by law enforcement to the extent that mullvad has.
I am replying to you and not the person who said to choose ivpn because I don’t want to fight anyone about this and only want to pass along my experience with both services to a person trying to make a choice.
The problem with Mullvad is that your money will be funneled to a far-right white supremacist organization.
In the case that my safety relied on a vpn I would accept the fraction of my $5 per month that could be traced to insane Europeans.
Every person is different. I consider alternatives to mullvad to be unacceptable in terms of operation, simplicity, functionality, reliability and of course track record.
It’s perfectly fine with me if someone chooses to use a different vpn than I do, but I want people to understand that they aren’t all the same.
As a broad parallel example to illustrate my thought process, I own firearms, cars and many other things manufactured or marketed by companies whose executives hold and materially support right wing politics.
I mean, every person is different, but you kind of left the whole thing out of your initial recommendation and didn’t let others who might care know about it.
My other, non-moral concern, is that it might also mean that Mullvad’s owner is more willing to share user data with other far right governments in the future. Governments like my own, non European one. A gun generally doesn’t phone home or have the capability to expose your private communications.
That’s true. I left it out because I think even bringing it up in the context of safety equipment is harmful. If the cat brand of tourniquet was associated with a reprehensible political movement I wouldn’t tell people to find other windlass tourniquets, I would recommend the widely available type with many training materials that are easily accessable.
My focus was first and foremost to help people find the safest vpn and that is absolutely mullvad by every measure.
Even suggesting “if you can tolerate how one of the founders spends his money” is an off ramp from making the right choice.
I believe your non-moral concern is ill founded. The company famously chose to drop one of if not its single most popular feature (port forwarding) in order to protect users allegedly sharing csam from an international police investigation and a physical raid that not only found nothing, but found no way to effectively surveil their system.
It is a stretch to suggest that the company with the best software, simplest no kyc or pii metadata system and a proven track record of defending users even when their actions are reprehensible to the point of discontinuing a well loved feature and taking the revenue hit in cancellations is just going to decide to share data.
A more likely scenario (and one that we’re seeing happen in real time) is that nations mobilize to take real power over signals entering their borders and even create standards and systems unique to their own networks. China has already done this and Russia is in process. In the world we are presently approaching there is a possibility that a user who needs to appear as someone coming from outside the border of their zone needs to navigate services intended specifically for that purpose as opposed to relying on a general purpose privacy service like mullvad.
It’s already like that for Chinese endpoints.
While a gun doesn’t phone home (yet!), cars do. Cell phones do. Computer operating systems do.
Mullvad protects users from the latter two which we know for a fact are happening over a purposefully installed lawful intercept backdoor built into the communications network which was reported exploited by non le actors about a year and a half ago and aside from an interestingly timed east coast Verizon outage earlier this year there is no indication has been patched.
It is for the above reasons I do not think entertaining the possibility of mullvad of all service providers simply deciding to comply with governments is a helpful, useful or safe thing to do.
I appreciate your considerate and thoughtful replies. It’s real easy to go hyperbolic in this world awash with cortisol and I admire your restraint.
Mullvads multi hop is often automatically used when a person wants their anti dpi (daita) feature but has chosen a server without that functionality.
Multihop is a useful tool when trying to access geofenced content, often my own.
The problem is that there are more ways for it to fail. Jurisdictions aren’t a huge deal if the provider has a well tested system. Bear in mind that almost everywhere in the world kyc data can be ordered to be given up by a judge. A provider with less knowledge of who you are is safer in any jurisdiction than one with a whiz bang system who has your pii. Use cash.
