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posted by takyon on Wednesday September 05 2018, @01:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the eyerim dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

NordVPN Responds to Privacy Sensitive Allegations

Over the past several weeks there have been repeated efforts to place NordVPN is a bad light. The company is being linked to Tesonet, one of Lithuania's largest tech companies, which runs data mining and residential proxy services. NordVPN says that these activities have nothing to do with their company and have retained a large auditing firm to back this up.

[...] The situation didn't improve when Tesonet was sued by Luminati, the company behind the "not so private" VPN service Hola. The complaint accuses Tesonet of infringing Luminati's proxy patents and NordVPN is listed is the suit as well, with the claim that it had a business relationship with Hola. TorrentFreak previously asked NordVPN about the allegations and the company said that they are operated by the Panamese company Tefincom, which also has the NordVPN trademark. Tesonet is closely related to the company, but it doesn't legally own and never owned NordVPN.

NordVPN initially opted not to comment publicly but that changed when a new storm of mostly 'fake' Twitter accounts (many of which were created years ago but have only tweeted on this particular issue) made themselves heard over the past days. "We realized that remaining silent is no longer an option and we must respond for the sake of our reputation," NordVPN wrote in a recent blog post.

NordVPN responds to several claims including that they are operating the same way as Hola, by selling users' bandwidth. This is something anyone can verify independently, they say, by monitoring their traffic via a network monitoring application. "Anyone with Wireshark (or any other similar app) and some networking knowledge can perform a network scan, check all requests made by the NordVPN application, and verify their destinations. The results will prove that the web scraping accusations are false," the company writes.

Here's a 2015 story about Hola.

Also at VPN Compare.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by linkdude64 on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:40PM (1 child)

    by linkdude64 (5482) on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:40PM (#730890)

    First red flag was "P2P traffic is not allowed" on their network - I try it anyway and I'm disconnected almost immediately.
    "Ok, so I'll just encrypt that traffic." Chugs right along, hits a few hundred GB in a month with no issues, then after a few months of that, after I hit ~250GB upload my connection drops and I have to move to a different server location. "Ok, I'll just swap between a few."
    I start limiting my bandwidth within the client and things stay stable, but I got greedy and removed the caps again later and the client started disconnecting itself again - and then I couldn't log into my account whatsoever. Un/reinstall client/network driver, even a clean install on a different computer didn't work. Escalated to tech support three times, and they seemed to genuinely be trying to help me - wasn't a driver issue, not a "restart your modem" issue, then they just stopped responding after connecting to their VPN servers through a 3rd party client (OpenVPN) using my credentials didn't work. I suspect they were DPI'ing my traffic and they banned me from their service. I am not saying I did not deserve to be banned, I am saying I have had no problems whatsoever with my new VPN client, whom I will not name in this particular post. If you're curious who my new client is, I will answer, but that's my experience with Nord. I won't ever go back.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:21PM (#730936)

    I'm sick of "this company sucks!" posts which don't name the company and break the invisible hand's fingers.