What most of the 3 million users who currently use ExpressVPN probably weren't aware of when they signed up is that the service proves the point that hackers and government surveillance aren't mutually exclusive. On September 13th, ExpressVPN was sold to the Israeli-based company Kape Technologies in a $936 million cash and stock purchase. This acquisition added ExpressVPN to a catalog including several other VPN providers acquired by Kape Technologies since 2017.
The acquiring company touted its purchase as being integral to defining the next
generation in its fight for online privacy. However, the centralization the VPN services Kape Technologies owns and an examination of its history reveals the company's efforts to undermine that very cause as a distributor of malware with ties to US and Israeli intelligence operations.
My understanding is that VPN connections were supposed to be for people who, say, want to access their work network from home. Rather than running an extra cable from their place of work to their house they, instead, use the Internet but in a way that keeps the information private. As such, it was never intended to keep people private.
The other aspect is that instead of all your information being available to your ISP it is now also available to your VPN provider. So you now have many people who want to communicate privately all using the same system which means they can be easily identified. That makes VPN a kind of Internet honeypot.
If you really want privacy and anonymity, it is necessary to be be very selective about what types of traffic goes over your vpn. For example, if you send email through that pipe, any recipients (at least), if they know what they're doing, can trace that email back to your exit point, thus tying your exit point to your email address, with potentially your name, and any other infomation contained in email(s). Similarly, web cookies can associate your actual online identity (as known by various commercial sites, for example), with your endpoint. Then, this association can get glommed in with your social profile, as aggregated by various profile builders, who interchange data.
Two different things. The corp version keeps your sensitive corporate traffic from being seen by your ISP or hops in the middle. It's there to protect the company, not you... corp IT can still see the traffic after decrypt.
"Privacy" VPNs (really what we used to call a proxy) hide your traffic from your ISP and obfuscate where requests are coming from at the destination. Similar techniques, different purposes. It's only as trustworthy as the people running the headend.
Honestly you're better off spinning up a headend VM on AWS with a Vanilla Visa and burner account, then using something like OpenSwan or openvpn and burning it every couple days.
What most of the 3 million users who currently use ExpressVPN probably weren't aware of when they signed up is that the service proves the point that hackers and government surveillance aren't mutually exclusive. On September 13th, ExpressVPN was sold to the Israeli-based company Kape Technologies in a $936 million cash and stock purchase. This acquisition added ExpressVPN to a catalog including several other VPN providers acquired by Kape Technologies since 2017.
The acquiring company touted its purchase as being integral to defining the next generation in its fight for online privacy. However, the centralization the VPN services Kape Technologies owns and an examination of its history reveals the company's efforts to undermine that very cause as a distributor of malware with ties to US and Israeli intelligence operations.
My understanding is that VPN connections were supposed to be for people who, say, want to access their work network from home. Rather than running an extra cable from their place of work to their house they, instead, use the Internet but in a way that keeps the information private. As such, it was never intended to keep people private.
The other aspect is that instead of all your information being available to your ISP it is now also available to your VPN provider. So you now have many people who want to communicate privately all using the same system which means they can be easily identified. That makes VPN a kind of Internet honeypot.
Unless you roll your own.
Buy server time with bitcoin, and run an open source vpn server on it, use that as your exit point.
If you really want privacy and anonymity, it is necessary to be be very selective about what types of traffic goes over your vpn. For example, if you send email through that pipe, any recipients (at least), if they know what they're doing, can trace that email back to your exit point, thus tying your exit point to your email address, with potentially your name, and any other infomation contained in email(s). Similarly, web cookies can associate your actual online identity (as known by various commercial sites, for example), with your endpoint. Then, this association can get glommed in with your social profile, as aggregated by various profile builders, who interchange data.
I agree, my comment was pretty light on the actualities. The methods you mentioned can also tie you to your identify over Tor.
Best to keep a separate device with no other purpose than comms, using an o/s like Tails, although that might have trojans.
Yes
Two different things. The corp version keeps your sensitive corporate traffic from being seen by your ISP or hops in the middle. It's there to protect the company, not you... corp IT can still see the traffic after decrypt.
"Privacy" VPNs (really what we used to call a proxy) hide your traffic from your ISP and obfuscate where requests are coming from at the destination. Similar techniques, different purposes. It's only as trustworthy as the people running the headend.
Honestly you're better off spinning up a headend VM on AWS with a Vanilla Visa and burner account, then using something like OpenSwan or openvpn and burning it every couple days.