VPN Providers Remove Servers From India In Wake Of New Data Collection Laws:
VPN providers remain a primary target of governments around the world (authoritarian leaning and otherwise) that don't much like their citizens chatting privately or avoiding government surveillance. We watched it happen in Russia, where strict new data collection and retention rules resulted in a mass exodus of VPN providers (the ones that are actually dedicated to privacy and security, anyway).
VPN crackdowns are also occurring in purported democracies like India, after the government passed new cybersecurity rules requiring that VPN operators collect user names, email addresses and IP addresses, store it for five years, and furnish it to authorities on demand.
Since that defeats a major justification for even using a VPN and creates obvious legal headaches, VPN providers have been pulling their servers out of India over the last few months. This week they were joined by Proton VPN, which also says it's moving their India-based servers out of the country. They are, however, using smart routing servers to dole out Indian IP addresses:
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The Tor Project and Mullvad VPN have both announced collaboration on a privacy-oriented web browser. The joint browser, which is based on Firefox, has the features of the Tor Browser but operates over the Mullvad Virtual Private Network rather than Tor's onion routers. The collaboration has helped polish interface improvements and address several long standing issues.
Mullvad and the Tor Project have been part of the same community that is dedicated to developing technology that prioritizes protecting people's right to privacy for many years now. Mullvad contributes to the Tor Project at the highest level of membership, Shallot, and were a founding member of the Tor Project's Membership Program. They approached us to help them develop their browser because they wanted to leverage our expertise to create a product that is built on the same principles and with similar safety levels as the Tor Browser -- but that works independently of the Tor network. The result is the Mullvad Browser, a free, privacy-preserving web browser to challenge the all-too-prevalent business model of exploiting people's data for profit.
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"The mass surveillance of today is absurd. Both from commercial actors like big tech companies and from governments," says Jan Jonsson, CEO at Mullvad VPN. "We want to free the internet from mass surveillance and a VPN alone is not enough to achieve privacy. From our perspective there has been a gap in the market for those who want to run a privacy-focused browser as good as the Tor Project's but with a VPN instead of the Tor Network."
Mullvad has been an active member of the Tor project for years.
Oh, and one more thing, speaking of VPNs, buried in the actual text of Senate Bill S.686 - RESTRICT Act 118th Congress (2023-2024), hidden behind rhetoric about ByteDance and Tiktok is a ban on VPN usage.
Previously:
(2023) The 'Insanely Broad' RESTRICT Act Could Ban VPNs in the USA
(2022) Are Virtual Private Networks Actually Private?
(2022) VPN Providers Remove Servers From India in Wake of New Data Collection Laws
(2022) Tor Project Upgrades Network Speed Performance with New System
(2014) VPN Providers Response to Heartbleed
(Score: 2, Touché) by Username on Tuesday September 27 2022, @04:44PM (1 child)
Was democratically elected. Along with most other authoritarian leaders like Biden, etc. Not sure why they are using democracy as an antonym for authoritarian. You can elect all sorts of negative leaders. I think they should have used libertarian? Not familiar with Indian government.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Tuesday September 27 2022, @07:16PM
But Hitler's party did not have a majority of seats in the Reichstag, even though it was the largest party. In July 1932, Hitler's party got 37% of the vote, and in November 1932 it got 33% of the vote. The Communists got 14% in July 1932 and almost 17% in November 1932. As neither party would cooperate, no-one else could form a majority (coalition) government.
So while a large proportion of German voters did vote for Hitler's party, it was not a majority, but Hitler ended up getting power, aided greatly by politicking by Franz von Papen. The history of the Weimar Republic and the rise to power of Hitler is somewhat convoluted.
(Score: 3, Touché) by SomeGuy on Tuesday September 27 2022, @08:08PM
Seriously. With everyone else doing it, and so much getting centralized and locked down these days it seems almost inevitable.