• 0 posts
  • 58 comments
Joined 2 months ago
Cake day: May 7th, 2026
  • I am not aware of any other vpn service that has been raided with a warrant for any information present and had the police come away completely empty handed.

    That raid I’m thinking of served two functions: one was to get any information available, the other was to investigate mullvads infrastructure in order to evaluate if it was possible to get a warrant to install logging capacity.

    While the inability to install wiretaps (logging capacity) has not been explicitly confirmed by law enforcement like the inability to get any data was, we can assume it was impossible because rather than pursue that direction, Interpol advised cdns and hosting providers to block mullvads endpoints instead.

    The reason we are able to assume a warrant for wiretapping was impossible is that the action taken, making mullvad unusable to the point that the company dropped port forwarding, has the effect of flushing the target out from the service which is not what you’d want if you were able to install a wiretap.

    It’s evidence of a type of trustworthiness borne out by the effects of actions surrounding the service, not just tests, audits or press releases. That is something unique and if it’s not I’d really like to know.

    That’s not just rhetoric, I’m truly interested in other VPNs whose impact with law enforcement left only cloud chamber evidence of their trustworthiness.

    Your idea that people should apply the strictest ethical scrutiny to their own purchases in the marketplace really seems like it’s based entirely on the liberal assumptions that the marketplace is frictionless and has many goods of equal quality on offer.

    It’s also, on another level, patently ridiculous that a person who is choosing a battle tested privacy and anonymity focused vpn should choose something they’re less sure about because they need to somehow avoid any microfraction of blame flowing to them through the market from the specific currency units they used in the transaction.

    It’s cool, I know the immigration police are kicking down our door, but at least I didn’t use the gross vpn associated with a person who donated to a fascist party.

    At some point you gotta recognize that not only does your reasoning not hold up to theoretical interrogation (how could blame for the effects of transactions flow down to the purchaser if everything solid melts into air, huh? Explain that lieberuls!) but is absurd in the very real life situations you bring up.

    It’s like some bizarre inversion of the old “they say the next drone bombs will be dropped by a black trans woman” joke.

  • Hey, what you are doing is harmful.

    A person who needs privacy and anonymity shouldn’t have to justify using the vpn service that has most definitely passed the highest bar when it comes to resisting governments.

    The mere presence of a service that advertises feature parity is no comparison to one that has passed the real world test of those offerings.

    It’s like believing someone’s claim of steel grade and processing without test marks on the surface. Sure it’ll probably be fine for a big tractor shed, but when you’re relying on the material to hold up an apartment building it’s not worth it to take those claims on faith.

    If you were living in a war zone and needed a gun to protect yourself or your family, would you turn down an ar-15 simply because of the rifles history? Of course not.

  • The reason air won’t sell accounts to Italians is because Italy has a law against using technology to view or share pirate soccer broadcasts and air doesn’t want to or can’t prevent people from doing that (also they’re positioned in the marketplace perfectly for piracy and just about nothing else).

    It’s not because they believe or follow the recommendation that a provider be outside the users country of residence. Which is advice that’s situational.

  • Here’s how you could have figured it out yourself:

    Boot something else, read the logs.

    Use a usb to boot some other operating system (or the same one) and access the logs of your system which will show where it’s failing and how.

    Another person put that you could add nofail to fstab, you could also do this by moving the devices or services to nonessential branches of systemd.

  • Stop reading this thread and buy this thing or something like it.

    There are at least three things in between the wall and what the os tries to do before you start fiddling around in the settings. Did the thing you changed take effect? Did it stay in effect? Is the cpu actually doing what you ask it? Can you even trust what the cpu is reporting back to you? The motherboard?

    Don’t just start fucking around with stuff before you put a watt meter in line. Everything else is just guesswork.

  • Yeah there’s a lot of questionable stuff in the vpn service security auditing “space”.

    That’s why I think it’s important to look at the raid outcome to see how their systems handle a real world situation (interpol tries to get logs and install logging in order to bust an alleged global csam ring using mulvads port forwarding, user privacy and anonymity protections to trade files over windows cifs (yes, network neighborhood, pedos apparently have a reputation for lack of opsec) sharing). The raid was unsuccessful because there were no logs and the police were unable to install logging capabilities.

    After that failed operation, Interpol began requesting cdns and hosts block mullvads endpoints by ip. The point of that operation was to either force mullvads compliance with the investigation, to get them to drop port forwarding, or to force them to close down.

    Because at the peak even cloudflare was blocking mullvad, it became very hard to use the service when browsing or for pretty much anything that relied on internet like rss or podcasts, shoutcast or even updating your computer.

    Mullvad dropped port forwarding after rotating servers for months to attempt to beat the block and giving users lots of warning.

    In the months after the block request was lifted, using the service for normal browsing went back to usual.

    I remember all these details so clearly because I was a user of mullvad then and it was a relatively high profile and well publicized test of a vpn services’ capability to withstand government pressure.

    As it turns out, even having no logs and no ability to add logging into your system doesn’t stop government from telling everyone else to make your system unusable.

    It’s also pretty much the best possible outcome someone could expect of a service.

    The point of this long ass reply is not to defend a company, although I think a person who was doing so could be forgiven for it in this case, the point is to help you understand what happened to make users of that service put their trust in it and why people like me are saying “maybe consider not ditching mullvad” when you ask what to use instead.

  • Mullvad has been audited over and over again and found to not be logging.

    Before they dropped port forwarding a police raid famously found nothing and confirmed that they were not recording any user information and operating as advertised, that is to say, operating in a way that not only didn’t log, but precluded the possibility of logging.

    A raid where they get nothing is like an audit but it’s the real thing.

    They dropped port forwarding because, in concert with an Interpol investigation, all the big content delivery networks and lots of websites to boot started blocking their endpoints.

    There is not any vpn I’m aware of that has been physically raided by cops with a court warrant in hand and shown to have nothing and also dropped their possibly most popular service, port forwarding, in order to not have to comply with an investigation.

    I used ivpn in the past and see it as basically an untested mullvad from ten years ago. Who knows how its people and technology would respond under the same circumstances? Could be good, could be bad.

  • It might be worthwhile to take a look at the nras argumentation against a firearms owners registry to better understand the recent history of searchable digital systems.

    Information has not decayed over time for both our lives except on a scale that can be described as absolutely geologic.

    As before, I am not making fun of you, but describing roads I have personally been down.

    As I said above, the point is to help you understand that you approach the concerns you’ve voiced by recognizing that when you are in public you are being observed and clearly communicating privacy concerns to people around you.

    As said way up above, I’m not trying to fight you, I’m trying to help you understand your own concerns in a broader context that has existed for hundreds of years rather than a scant decade because the context and history opens up more opportunities for you to take action than when you only consider the time that the flock camera system has been in operation.

  • Almost all my replies to you have been some kind of reference to anarchist thought in order to fish out what specific part of the big tent you consider yourself.

    Allow me to be clear: both you and I are living in a fascist world where all of our needs are mediated through the hierarchy of the market or fascist government or some other organization.

    To have our needs met outside those frameworks we would have to create the networks of support that fulfill them and forego anything not available within that alternative.

    If either one of us were to start foaming at the mouth and deploying our secret Catalonian martial arts to kill every person we meet who gives support to the fascist governments across the world, we would be quickly overwhelmed and taken into custody.

    Violence is not something to be flippantly suggested in a public forum. We are both so far within the belly of the beast that unconsidered struggle will prompt the formation of a cystic growth around us, insulating us from further effective action.

  • Of course noticing stuff will tell you about relationships. If I always stop at the same gas station at 12:30 and then lean on my truck eating a moon pie and drinking a coke a person can infer that I’m eating my lunch there.

    Just like your example: if I always go to a specific house an observer is gonna reasonably assume I have a relationship to keep up in that house, even if it’s just making sure the last renters of the b&b turned off the gas.

    You can’t stop living your life just because people might learn that you’re doing it. Actually you can but that’s a sign of mental illness. I’m not trying to make you feel bad here, if you are developing those types of tendencies please seek help.

    You have a right and expectation of privacy when you’re (at least in the United States) on private property and out of plain view (except for the non-visible spectrum component of your presence) or on public property in a courtroom, bath, locker or changing room. When you’re on someone else’s private property and you recognize your rights are being violated somehow the expectation is generally that you will leave.

    Cops and spooks have known for years and years how bad robot vacuums for example are but they havent wanted to use them as evidence because of how quickly and easily they could be excluded due to 4a violation. All they need is for the owner to testify that they never intended for the roomba to turn over information about their residence to law enforcement and the Eula is shredded.

    To give you something to consider, there’s a sci fi book that describes people who take on the role of holding cameras and microphones in public as “gargoyles”. I think it’s Stephenson. Nowadays there are people who hold cameras and microphones in public who call themselves auditors.

    Back in my day, there was a boom in the ownership of instant film cameras. Everyone attributed it to nostalgia and for sure in the present there are imitation Polaroids everywhere for sale marketed to that nostalgic feeling that now parents conjure up when using them, but they became parents because they were taking naked pictures of each other with instamatics because the trust they had put in each other wasn’t immediately mediated by an inscrutable, unpredictable device.

    The point of that isn’t to get you into instants, but to help make it clear that the way you handle not knowing when you’re being watched or where something is going is by communicating with the people around you. Maybe it’s a phones in the fridge type conversation, you won’t know till you ask. The way you handle public interaction is by assuming it’s all being recorded.