Tell us your opinion about what matters for a VPN

[Staff 9972]

In your opinion, what are the most important features of a VPN service for citizens?

Don't be shy, tell us!

Kind regards

AirVPN

[nvu 0]

I think anonymity is the most important feature of a VPN also the use of strong encryption.

[Domino 0]

Anonymity--hide my location.

Protection from snoopers (e.g. Firesheep)

Access to country-specific sites (e.g. Hulu or BBC)

[Guest]

I agree with all the above and I would add speed and reliability.Yes,you need to have more servers in different locations not only for specific users,but for descentralization of your network as well as for geo-restricted services.Very important is the speed of your servers,it is very frustrating to visit websites or watch videos/TV online with constant buffering,especially if you paid for it.

The 4 Key qualities of a succesful VPN service are :

- Speed,with no buffering when you watch TV,this is very annoying

-Reliability,if your servers are offline most of the time you will lose your users

-Anonymity,especially for heavy censorship countries,you need to offer all kind of encryption-PPTP/L2TP/SSTP/SSL etc.

-Multiple payment plans and methods

P.S. Last but not least it is very important to offer good support for your users and treat them with respect.You may have the best service,if you don' care about your users,but only to fill your pockets,sooner or later you will go out of business...for good.That includes not to discriminate users in any way.You need to be trustworthy.

[Staff 9972]

Thank you for your feedback! Please continue!

Some considerations after the first suggestions and thoughts...

Security and anonymity

We offer OpenVPN with certificates and keys, symmetrical AES-256-CBC and RSA 2048 bit. We avoid PPTP because we don't think it is sufficiently robust to protect people in a hostile country/environment (see PPTP serious vulnerabilities, link at the end). This implies also impenetrable shield against snooping, including Firesheep. Moreover, certificates and keys are sent to the customer via SSL protection, and we have a valid SSL certificate for the website issued by a recognized authority. We also avoid data retention for added security. Finally, we don't transmit, not even in an aggregated, anonymized form, customers' data to anyone.

Buffering

No slow-down streaming buffering, on the contrary optimization with LZO compression.

Care for customers

We comply with the recommendations of prominent EU consumers' defense associations and European Commission DG Health & Consumers (for example full refunds, no questions asked, within 30 days, very clear terms of use and privacy policy).

Reliability

We have learned the lesson we had concentrating all the servers in one provider, which caused 4 days downtime. Decentralization now is one of our priorities, we are building a constellation of nodes located in different datacenters owned by different providers, and also keeping "sleeping" backup nodes which can be activated in a very short time if necessary.

Against geo-discriminations

Currently we offer nodes in Holland, Germany and the USA in order to grant access to geo-discriminatory services. American Hulu, Pandora, CBS, NBC, Netflix etc. are now accessible, as well as all services in Germany and Holland. Future plans include France and UK (BBC). Any recommendation? Which geo-discriminatory services would you like to access?

Why we don't like PPTP very much:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pptp#Security_of_the_PPTP_protocol

Keep writing your ideas, opinions and suggestions!

Kind regards

AirVPN admins

[Guest]

"-Multiple payment plans and methods"

Thats what is really an issue for me not joining the premium membership. I just have no options! Paypal is so tight in India.

[Staff 9972]

jj_alukkas wrote:

"-Multiple payment plans and methods"

Thats what is really an issue for me not joining the premium membership. I just have no options! Paypal is so tight in India.

Hello!

Yes, you are right. However, you can use AlertPay from India. Since february 2010 AlertPay has enabled all operations from and to India [EDIT: except fund transfer from AlertPay account to India's banks accounts]. You can pay through AlertPay even if you don't have an account with them, by receiving a payment request from us. Just contact us, if you wish, and we will send you all instructions via e-mail (menu "Support"-->"Contact us").

Kind regards

AirVPN admins

[tommy83 2]

Perhaps I'm not on topic, but I think that my question regarding privacy, too.

When one pays for a Premium account by Paypal, aren't his personal data trasmitted?

So in theory there is possible to trace people by Paypal transactions... or am I wrong?

Hoping to be wrong, of course :laugh:

[Staff 9972]

tommy83 wrote:

Perhaps I'm not on topic, but I think that my question regarding privacy, too.

When one pays for a Premium account by Paypal, aren't his personal data trasmitted?

So in theory there is possible to trace people by Paypal transactions... or am I wrong?

Hoping to be wrong, of course :laugh:

Hello!

You are definately on-topic. Thank you for pointing out this important issue.

We keep account data and payment data strictly separated and unrelated. However, an (international) court order may force PayPal or AlertPay to reveal transactions and with a deep investigation a correlation is, although difficult, theoretically not impossible. Such orders are issued for serious crimes. We don't want, obviously, aid such crimes.

In particular, referring to our Terms of Service, any violation of the European Convention on Human Rights is strictly forbidden and we will cooperate with competent authorities in case of such violations, should we become aware of them as a consequence of competent authorities warning - significant examples are human trafficking and child abuse material dissemination.

That said, we must however keep in mind some grim considerations, according to which big corporations or repressive governments may bring on legal or illegal actions in order to suffucate freedom of expression and the right to access and disseminate knowledge, culture and information. Although such actions may hardly win after a fair and due process, they could cause consequences out of the control of any proper judicial overview (just imagine, for example, retaliations of repressive regimes or organized crime against a blogger or against any source of information whose identity is disclosed).

One of the aims of our service is to protect our customers and more in general the citizens of the world from those threats.

Therefore, we have been studying various systems. Unfortunately the forms of payments that we have been evaluating have unacceptable conditions for us.

Now, we have found something which promises to meet both our expectations and privacy requirements, BitCoin. http://www.bitcoin.org

We wish to experiment with it. We have just prepared a limited amount of 3-months activations reserved to BitCoin payments. Those who don't want to make a transaction with PayPal or AlertPay can have 3 months premium membership for 26 BitCoins.

If there is interest and if everything works swiftly on our side (there are no risks for the customers in this phase anyway) we will consider to put BitCoin as another payment method by default.

Do not hesitate to contact us in private for all the details (menu "Support"-->"Contact us").

Kind regards

AirVPN admins

[tommy83 2]

Glad to hear that my question was appropriate.

However I think that Bitcoin is a little tricky and definitely not simple and immediate as i.e. Paypal.

Nevertheless I think that separating account data and payment data will suffice for my concerns, and in general for p2p users.

We're no real criminals, but unfortunately there are cases of bad punishments for silly "crimes" as file sharing activity, even when it's very limited. Investigations are of course still possible, however I think it depends on how much people using the system too. If we Air users are 10 people, little can be made to protect our identification... if we are 10000 that is much more difficult.

Personally, I hate the fact that my adsl line can be sniffed by authority without any real right to do so.

Honest, normal, people have the rights to be protected.

I realize now that I didn't introduce myself to the forum... please accept my apologies, a big hello to everyone!