NordVPN Teams quietly relocated to the US:
NordVPN has decided to move its business VPN solution, NordVPN Teams, to the US in an effort to better fulfill the requirements of enterprise users.
The company and many other VPN providers such as ExpressVPN, are incorporated outside of the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and other Western countries in order to avoid being under the jurisdiction of the Fourteen Eyes[*] intelligence sharing pact. The reason for this is that members of this agreement could potentially use its terms to circumvent the laws that prohibit the surveillance of citizens.
If a VPN company's operations are located in a country that is part of the Fourteen Eyes agreement, it could be forced into sharing information about its users with that country's government.
[...] While NordVPN Teams has moved to the US, a spokesperson for NordVPN assured TechRadar Pro in an email that its consumer VPN solution will stay under the jurisdiction of Panama where there are no mandatory data retention laws, thus keeping the online activities of its customers away from prying eyes.
Wikipedia entry on Fourteen Eyes.
What, if any, VPN do use? Would you recommend it? Why or why not?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 11 2020, @01:36PM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#9_Eyes,_14_Eyes,_and_other_third_parties [wikipedia.org]
I know that I was aware of the Five Eyes long before that - about 1990 maybe. Was openly discussing it on the internet by 1998. We didn't know who all of the other eyes belonged to, but we could make some intelligent guesses based on various news stories.
Maybe the secret was a lot less secret than everyone hoped?
That is a surprising bit. I always assumed that Israel was party to all of the Five Eyes and beyond.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Sunday October 11 2020, @04:07PM
In 1990 not many of us were on the internet. That was a small slice of the population that was much more knowledgeable than the rest, and most of us had the knowledge to *suspect* something like that was happening.
But it wasn't admitted publicly till 2005, and the general public remains woefully ignorant, even of things that have been proven and admitted to.
"I always assumed that Israel was party to all of the Five Eyes and beyond."
Nah, at least until recently they only had political control of one, and the others would have reacted negatively to any attempt to bring them in. That may have changed, but they also have been getting all the benefits with none of the costs as is, so why would they change it?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MrGuy on Sunday October 11 2020, @01:39PM (4 children)
What, exactly, do you want a VPN for?
If you want something to completely anonymize your traffic, get Tor and have done with it. There's no VPN that can provide the level of indirection and some level of fingerprinting prevention.
If you want to share an apparent IP with a lot of strangers to semi-anonymize your traffic, I don't have a specific suggestion - there are a number of vendors who might work. But if you're looking for the "we don't ever share data, ever" as a guarantee, you only have their word for it, and the track record of companies in this space is not great. Also, VPN's in generally can't hide you from tracking cookies and browser fingerprinting.
If the main thing you're looking for is location indirection (e.g. to allow you to access geo-locked content), you have a different set of concerns. It's hard for those systems to look long-term, since eventually the major providers recognize the IP and block it. But look for someone who specifically specializes in this. You might be less concerned about the "no logging ever!" privacy claims if this is what you want.
Personally, the main thing I use VPN for is to provide safety from the local network I happen to be on - ESPECIALLY my cell phone provider. Phone providers (especially here in the US) can sell your clickstream without consent to dataminers. And if you use WiFi at various businesses, you don't necessarily know what the network provider is trying to track.
So, I use a personal VPN. I run OpenVPN on a DigitalOcean droplet, and tunnel from my phone to that VPN. It doesn't help at all with anonymity (my traffic isn't comingled with anyone else's), but it provides pretty good protection from the local WiFi and/or cell network. It also provides some level of location indirection (I get a ton of "local" ads for New Jersey, which isn't anywhere near where I live, and is a great way to spot lazy ad tageting). I've used it travelling overseas to access US content, but I had to move to a new IP every few days as my IP got blocked. And if I'm truly paranoid about someone getting my traffic logs, I can always destroy the droplet. Won't help at all with the server-side records, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 11 2020, @03:08PM
Thank you for a good review.
I have an additional need. I have bank accounts abroad. The banks are now required to actively look for and report all non locals to the US and European authorities. I use NordVPN to reasonably pretend that I am local for bank's scanning software. I am sure this will be gone as the US will get NordVPN to report.
Any suggestions short of running my own vpn at the jurisdictions in question?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by number11 on Sunday October 11 2020, @04:45PM (1 child)
That's true, sort of. But keep in mind that there have historically been a few bugs in Tor software that leaked data, and some unknown number of Tor nodes are run by various governments. So there is some (perhaps small) chance of failure, as well as generally wretched connection speeds. As to fingerprinting prevention, proper browsers have a way to poison canvas data and (sometimes via an add-on) fake user agent.
There are no guarantees in life. Some VPN companies have a better record on data retention than others. http://torrentfreak.com/ [torrentfreak.com] and https://thatoneprivacysite.net/ [thatoneprivacysite.net] are good sources of info, though VPNs can definitely lie. (But it's probably a business death knell to get caught lying.) As to tracking cookies, some VPNs will block, and you've certainly got browser settings and add-ons to do that as well. Re fingerprinting, see above.
(And WTF is the problem, that I log in and soylent can't remember that? Preview shows this as an AC post, though I logged in a few minutes ago.)
If all you need is local (ISP) protection, your solution works well, though just about any VPN company works as well, whether or not they log, and they're far more user-friendly.
(Score: 2) by number11 on Monday October 12 2020, @05:15PM
(Figured out what my login problem was, an obsolete browser add-on. Replaced with a different one and all is well.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2020, @10:44PM
Fifteen years ago.
That is to say it might buy you some casual pseudonymity from actors of similar competence level to the average mom or dad trying to see what little timmy is up to, but for everyone else, corporate, criminal, or nation-state, you're fucked.
To make matters even worse, what was left of the cryptoanarchist movement has more or less died out, and a lot of the 'new' crypto-cliques are leaning pro-authoritarian either strongly left or strongly right by American standards, with the desire to either suppress hate speach, or suppress anti-hate speech, with each having a rather 'liberal' concept of what each kind of offensive speech is to them, and wanting those people doxxed, even if meant compromising the security of the network for everyone else.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 11 2020, @01:58PM (1 child)
1. Privacy.
2. USA.
You can only take one.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday October 11 2020, @02:32PM
The whole point of FVEY is that you get neither wherever you may be on Earth.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday October 11 2020, @02:30PM (4 children)
If you have nothing to worry about, surveillance shouldn't concern you.
Also, NordVPN has relocated to Oceania, not the USA.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday October 11 2020, @02:53PM (2 children)
Since when was Oceania a country?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 11 2020, @03:10PM (1 child)
Ever since it went to war with Eurasia.
(Score: 4, Funny) by MrGuy on Sunday October 11 2020, @04:13PM
But we have ALWAYS been at war with Eurasia
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2020, @12:03PM
(Score: 2) by legont on Sunday October 11 2020, @02:51PM (3 children)
I am a long time client and still have more than a year on 3 years purchase. Any recommendations?
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday October 11 2020, @03:01PM (1 child)
Depends if you value your privacy more than one year of subscription.
(Score: 2) by legont on Sunday October 11 2020, @11:28PM
I consider switching to surfshark. Any thoughts are very welcome...
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 11 2020, @09:59PM
Same. I've been with NordVPN for years now.
Only the business side is moving. The personal VPN is still okay. According to TFA.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday October 11 2020, @03:46PM
I purchased a 3 year subscription to Private Internet Access, then found they got bought by Kape Technologies ( https://www.cnet.com/news/what-is-kape-technologies-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-parent-company-of-cyberghost-vpn/) [cnet.com]
I've had good luck with them so far, sets up nicely with Linux, works well, no problems so far.
It seems they were in court (before they got bought by Kape) and said "We can't help, we don't keep logs", so ......there?
I'll keep with them, i guess, unless i hear something better comes along or that they get bad press......
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 11 2020, @05:41PM
For some use cases, Cloudflare's Warp works well. They already handle something like 70% of web traffic via their CDN, so they already know what sites you are visiting, if you don't use a VPN at all. And, since it is based on wireguard, you can use Warp without their official client (which I believe only runs on Android and iOS).
This is good enough to keep your ISP from snooping on your traffic, and adding a layer of indirection between you and web sites that use your IP as one of the data-points they use to track you.
Another benefit is that your traffic is part of a huge group of clients, so it is less likely to be blocked like smaller VPNs or self-hosted VPNs running on random "cloud" VMs. But, if you use Warp with a non-mobile user agent, you will be easy to fingerprint (until Warp officially supports non-mobile clients).
If you want a VPN to further anonymize you, not retain logs, etc.-- where e.g., law enforcement will have issues tracking you down for your activities, then look elsewhere.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 11 2020, @06:28PM (1 child)
https://thatoneprivacysite.net/ [thatoneprivacysite.net]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 11 2020, @06:44PM
NordVPN is one of the best on that list, along with BolehVPN.