I know multiple people who worked / working at Mullvad and they take their business, security and privacy _very_ seriously. Not surprised to see them shine here.
I'm a bit curious about how that works. I love Mullvad but routinely I find sites like Reddit completely block it. Even yesterday someone posted a Debian wiki link[0] and I was blocked. It's not all of them but Reddit is a big killer. So I thought China would block all of them (aren't they known?)
Use the Tor Onion Service [1] for Reddit instead. You never leave Tor so you don't have to deal with the usual exit node problems. No need for a commercial VPN.
Reddit blocks basically everything - since the 2023 API meltdown it's gone full 1984 censorship and opinion manipulation mode. There are two target audiences for Reddit: propagandists (who are given moderator status, even in subreddits they didn't create) and targets of propaganda (only if Reddit can verify their physical location). You're not in the first group and you don't want to be in the second.
The Tor service does not work. It's been unmaintained for years.
I've found the "visit anonymously" functionality offered by Startpage gets around the problem in a pinch. It tends to break the site you're visiting a little, but masks your IP, allowing you access without shutting down your VPN.
I'd also like to ask people not to block this way. It creates LOTS of false positives. There's much better ways to handle bots and this tactic seems particularly dumb for Reddit given they want users from places like China or elsewhere where a VPN might be required. Not to mention people using public WiFi. It's not like VPNs are uncommon these days.
If you must ban IPa then do so with a timeout and easing function. So that each hit results in a longer ban time. Bots want to move fast so even a few seconds ban time will make them switch IPs while not impacting most users (who will refresh)
Any proof or articles you could link to backup that claim seems unlikely given their size/reputation also would be surprised they’d get blocked this often using botnet traffic
There's a corollary to that question: why would China choose not to block Mullvad? We know every large nation with a capable online force maintains a fleet of ORBs, so maybe they consider Mullvad more useful for them as a functioning system?
Some of their own contractors may well depend on Mullvad. Perhaps as long as the overall "civilian" volume and user count remains acceptably low, the cost-benefit estimate may well be in favour of letting it slip by. (And for the civilians that do use a working variant, subject their connections to fine-grained traffic analysis.)
When they wrote that 3 providers were honest about all locations I have to admit my first thought was "Mullvad, and who would the other two be?"
With their reputation and trackrecord they really can't do any shady tricks. Imagine if they weren't among the 3 honest providers? That would be HN frontpage news.
While I pay for Mullvad directly through my bank, their account number approach built a lot of trust for me. "Here's your number, use whatever to fund it. 5 euro a month, no sales."
At risk of sounding sale pitch'y. Mullvad is the only VPN the longer I use the more I like it. I've tried MANY competitors first and all the other ones so far seem to only get worse over time.
I love that I can pay directly with a crypto wallet and have true anonymity.
I do really wish they still provided port forwarding, I understand why they don't but that was really useful and the only competitors that seem to don't exactly seem trustworthy to me.
That depends how you obtained the crypto in the first place.
In any case, its certainly better than visa, but if you dont trust your vpn provider the real issue is they have your IP address and at best just a pinky-promise they dont log.
I went in on Monero (which Mullvad accepts for now...)the only early crypto that had a viable usage plan from the beginning. That was of course before I realized that crypto would of course just be turned into a massive scam wheelhouse and any coin with real utility value to challenge fiat currency would of course be regulated against. (not salt its still worth a lot)
I am aware most crypto is not anon without extra effort.
Has anyone else from Europe noticed how Mullvad's speeds and latency have becoming worse and worse during peak times in the recent months? I now have to change servers regularly, which was never the case ~2 years ago.
> Mullvad ... security and privacy _very_ seriously. Not surprised to see them shine here.
? TFA reflects on dishonest marketing on part of public VPN providers more than privacy / security.
That said, VPNs don't add much security, though, they are useful for geo unblocking content and (at some level) anti-censorship. In my experience, the mainstream public VPNs don't really match up to dedicated censorship-resistant networks run by Psiphon, Lantern, Tor (and possibly others).
Advertising a VPN endpoint in country A which in reality is in country B is a security concern for users trying to reduce their visibility to country B’s authorities. You’re right about the more fit to purpose tools, of course, but they’re more of an impediment to normal internet usage.
> Advertising a VPN endpoint in country A which in reality is in country B is a security concern for users trying to reduce their visibility to country B’s authorities.
Mullvad in their Terms of Service say they'll abide by Swedish and EU laws. This, among other things, means a VPN is in no way going to save your bacon from "authorities".
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Sadly, this is the 3rd time everything is down when we're about to go live.
It's great that pages are still being served - but we are currently blocked by not being able to access our dashboard, configuring / prepping for a launch.
And we are enterprise customers - and I am not finding a way to reach out to customer support since .. the site is down.
The user definitely is not AI but I think they may've misread something or fell for a meme/joke they saw.
There indeed is absolutely no planned sequel to or continuation of Andor, nor currently any known plans for the creator of it to create anything else in this franchise. I'd sure like it if he did, though.
It's a separate writeup by a separate author though, and with 500+ comments, it still seems relevant. From #1 on HN to completely disappeared. Bring it back, I say.
On HN, dupeness is more a question of whether the underlying story is substantively the same or not—or, to put it slightly differently, whether the follow-up submission is able to support a substantively different discussion or not.
In this case, the answers appear to be yes, it's substantively the same story, and no, it can't support a substantively different discussion than the previous major thread. That's why we'd treat the follow-up submission as a dupe.
This is in no way passing judgment about the importance of the story! It's just that if we weren't careful and proactive about moderating HN in this way, the frontpage would rapidly fill up with variations on the hottest stories of the moment, and avoiding repetition is a core principle here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
I wrote a long explanation about exactly this the other day—if you (or anyone) is willing to take a look at that (assuming you have the stamina) and still have a question that isn't already answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43738815.
p.s. The current case is unfortunate because the follow-up/duplicate post came a week later than the original thread. If it were hours later, or a day or two later, as is more typical, we would merge the threads and in this way avoid a split discussion. But 7 days is too wide a chasm to merge across.
I suppose it's just a bit frustrating that HN is one of the few places left on the internet where we can have a mostly civilized discussion about politics. I had missed the discussion from 7 days ago so this was news to me (and I'm sure most of the other commenters). If you miss the one chance to discuss that one topic, it can never be discussed again on HN.
I'm not opposed to this rule for moderation, and I understand the reasoning behind it. But it seems like we're just watching the country burn and when stories like this get suppressed to make room for a new rust package manager, it makes me all nihilistic.
Your argument is likely not with their beliefs or preferences, but the embodied practices of HN moderation. Which can themselves be problematic as they have a strong status quo bias, as I've pointed out repeatedly:
For what it's worth: if it's one of the few places you can still have a civilized discussion about politics, that's at least in part because we don't talk about politics very often here. Every time we do, some of the civility of the site chips away. Since the whole premise of the site is to investigate how long we can stave off Eternal September, this seems an important consideration.
We were about to to buy a Bambu Lab printer but then learnt there will be new printers coming out in Q1 so naturally wanted to wait.
I need to educate myself on this a bit more on this issue, but it feels like the rest of the printer industry is just catching up with the X1C (looking at Creality K2 Plus)..
Do I wait for next-gen printers from Bambu Labs which I imagine will be quite revolutionary, or do I buy we buy a Creality K2 Plus, which basically is a X1C.
I watched this movie a couple of days ago and it really touched me. Might be that we just got a cute little cat. But the story-telling, visuals, animations.. It was just so very beautiful.
