Can we get a server in Poland? They seem to like freedom of speech.

[bayoumedic 2]

Poland protects their citizens from social media censorship. 

https://worthypolitics.com/we-need-this-in-u-s-every-time-facebook-or-twitter-censor-free-speech-in-poland-they-will-face-2-2-million-fine/

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

Poland does not protect their citizens from ideological/government censorship, which is by far the greater threat there.
https://rsf.org/en/poland
https://rsf.org/en/news/poland-about-censor-privately-owned-media-its-hungarian-ally

It is important to note that this is a double-edged sword which will definitely be used against people, even if implemented with good intentions. The underlying question is: What justifies removing a piece of information? A post about EU wanting to make Poland pay for some wall in the south against the waves of refugees will be a candidate since it's in fact wrong, and the problem is that an article about the govt. replacing "inconvenient" judges and journalists will be, too, being an inconvenient truth that will inevitably divide people.
Exposing everyone in the world to this nonsense is a very, very bad idea. Which is why a Poland server is… improbable.

[bayoumedic 2]

Ah.  Thank you. 

[kbps 29]

On 12/25/2020 at 9:52 PM, OpenSourcerer said:

Poland does not protect their citizens from ideological/government censorship, which is by far the greater threat there.
https://rsf.org/en/poland
https://rsf.org/en/news/poland-about-censor-privately-owned-media-its-hungarian-ally
 

Useful website.  Did not know about it.  It will be good for making decisions about services that I use in the future.

https://rsf.org/en/ranking


Good to see that Air has servers in nearly half of the top 14.

1. Norway - Yes
2. Finland - No
3. Denmark - No
4. Sweden - Yes
5. Netherlands - Yes
6. Jamica - No
7. Costa Rica - No
8. Switzerland - Yes
9. New Zealand - No
10. Portugal - No
11. Germany - Yes
12. Belgium - Yes
13. Ireland - No
14. Estonia - Yes

Would be good to see at least one server in each of these locations.  Could be a good marketing angle.  I understand that geographically some countries are neighbours such as Norway and Finland so probably would not improve latency.  However it would be nice to see somewhere like New Zealand or Costa Rica, primarily for latency reasons for people in or near those regions. Edited ... by kbps
update Estonia server to Yes

[Staff 9973]

10 minutes ago, kbps said:

Good to see that Air has servers in nearly half of the top 14.
Estonia - No [YES! Staff]
Would be good to see at least one server in each of these locations.  Could be a good marketing angle.  I understand that geographically some countries are neighbors such as Norway and Finland so probably would not improve latency.  However it would be nice to see somewhere like New Zealand or Costa Rica, primarily for latency reasons for people in or near those regions.

Hello!

You can add Estonia and update the list: we have a 1 Gbit/s server in Tallinn, Estonia: https://airvpn.org/servers/Alruba/

New Zealand would be great, especially when you consider the infamous and outrageous anti-encryption law which prevents us from operating in Australia: we have been and we are struggling to find the right infrastructure. We'll keep searching.

Kind regards


 

[kbps 29]

3 hours ago, Staff said:

Hello!

You can add Estonia and update the list: we have a 1 Gbit/s server in Tallinn, Estonia: https://airvpn.org/servers/Alruba/

New Zealand would be great, especially when you consider the infamous and outrageous anti-encryption law which prevents us from operating in Australia: we have been and we are struggling to find the right infrastructure. We'll keep searching.

Kind regards


 

Sorry Air, I must have missed Estonia.  List updated.

New Zealand would be good.  Mega.nz is based there.  As far as I am aware their data centers are all in NZ.  The speeds for their servers are very impressive.  Yes I am aware of potential privacy issues in that they are closed source, I am using them as an example of a privacy orientated large company that is based in NZ.

[Staff 9973]

@kbps

Hello!

However, mega.nz operates servers in Luxembourg (at least from what we can see on the web site). We think that New Zealand poses no privacy problems at all. The issue is just finding a suitable datacenter.

Kind regards
 

[macovo8168 0]

Worth noting that 4 out of 5 (Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Netherlands) in the top 5 from rfs.org are monarchies which all grant great powers to a small group of people (families), i.e. dictatorship although this is not recognized by the EU or US. 

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

18 hours ago, macovo8168 said:

Worth noting that 4 out of 5 (Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Netherlands) in the top 5 from rfs.org are monarchies which all grant great powers to a small group of people (families), i.e. dictatorship although this is not recognized by the EU or US. 

I suggest you do some research first, especially the definition of a constitutional monarchy and why it's blatantly wrong that a small group of people hold all the power. As Wikipedia puts it:

Quote

In all six monarchies that are in the EU, the monarch is legally prohibited from using political power, or the monarch does not utilise the political powers vested in the office by convention.

If it were a dictatorship, how do you explain the political party system in place in such countries, with parties across the whole political spectrum? It's kind of a paradox for a ruler to let different opinions roam free in such a system.

[gelode7150 0]

They have constitutional power and sign laws into effect. They are immune for the law. They get money for doing nothing. The same families have ruled hundreds of years - some of them longer than the U.S have existed. You are very naive thinking that they are just for show - if this was the case, then why do they hold these powers in the constitution? 

Regarding wikipedia you can read here why I don't use them as a source (OP is me): Don't support Wikipedia - here's why

But here's from wikipedia on dictatorship: 

Quote

A dictatorship is a form of government characterized by a single leader or group of leaders and little or no toleration for political pluralism or independent media.^[2] According to other definitions, democracies are a form of government in which "those who govern are selected through contested elections"; therefore, dictatorships are "not democracies".

A monarchy is a single leader. Although they don't make the laws, they are still there and just sitting, waiting. 

The coming king of Denmark meeting with top officials in the military: Bliver kronprins Frederik indviet i forsvarshemmeligheder ...

Former government leader meeting with the Danish queen once per week: VIDEO Løkke om besøg på slottet: Ikke alt er ...

What else is going on that we don't know about? That's the thing - the constitution gives them great power and then use the argument that it is okay, because they don't use their power.

I have nothing against them - perhaps I would even contribute with a small amount each month because I like the culture surrounding them (like I do with the church even though I am not religous), but they are dictators in my opinion and it is very sad that these countries are enjoying the "envy" of the entire world for their so called freedom.
 

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

There are surely some similarities between the two systems, fair enough. And still you need to differentiate between them so that you don't spread FUD, the most dangerous kind of information in times of Trumpism everywhere.

• A dictatorship is characterized as a one-man political system. The best successor is believed to be the choice of that dictator.
• In a monarchy on the other hand, all power is in the hands of a family. The best successor is believed to be the descendant of a monarch.
• Here's a non-Wikipedia source for you. And another one. And another one.

Then you need to tell the "classical" hereditary monarchy, the ones depicted in history books and probably Game of Thrones or something, apart from a constitutional one. This one is a literal game changer, let me tell you, because in a constitutional monarchy a king/queen does only hold ceremonial power at best, which disqualifies the stated EU monarches as dictatorial, seeing as their political system is effectively a collection of mechanics from democracies, like a party system and the separation of powers (example Netherlands: parties like PvdA (social democrats) and 50PLUS (conservatives/senior focus) debating in the Tweede Kamer (= House of Representatives) about laws and regulations = the legislative, even though King Willem-Alexander is in fact king).

The closest thing to what you describe would be the absolute monarchy which is where I would agree with you that it can be strikingly similar. But we don't have those in the EU (save for Vatican City, maybe), and this is an objective fact. How you feel about this is unimportant.

Now, let's stop the off-topic. Should anyone want to discuss this further with me and others, post to the Off-Topic forum or write me a message.
---

[blueport26 11]

Hello,

I'd like to bump up this topic. Is the rsf.org report (mentioned by @OpenSourcerer) the only reason we cannot have a sever in Poland, or are there any other issues like: local law or lack of suitable server provider?
Comparing the countries from that report I can see that Ukraine is scored lower but Air has a server in Kyiv (Ukraine).
I would be grateful if @Staff could comment on this. Thanks!
The main problem for me is that some country level sites will restrict access based on IP location, and over time it's increasingly annoying to use VPN like that.

TL;DR;
Personally (you don't have to agree) I see the RSF report to be politically biased towards liberal/left side. I don't agree with the arguments that the author quotes. Poles as a people are typically conservative/nationalist (except big cities which are more liberal, I live in the countryside). I think it's like that because of wars that we've gone though, and that for many years our country wasn't existing on the maps. This mentality is not something that will change quickly. From 2015-today we have a gov that is conservative/nationalist. They might have done things that look bad in the report ('repolonisation' of media), but as far as I know they never crossed a red line of prosecuting/hunting journalists. I see it as a result of nepotism/corruption (which is undoubtedly bad) in the state owned companies but it's not something that will affect free access to information on the internet.
The people in Poland are privacy conscious and I think that current government understands that. For example, we had a huge manifestation when the ACTA was about to be passed into law (thanks to Anonymous and Polish Pirate Party) and they were forced to abandon the idea.
Sorry for a long post, I just wanted to vent off the pressure... 

[Staff 9973]

@blueport26

Hello!

First and foremost we must say that we have not updated our knowledge on Poland data retention legal framework. Our old information tells us that it's NOT compliant with the latest decisions of the CJEU which forbid Member States to put any obligation on any provider of service in the information society for pre-emptive, blanket, indiscriminate data retention. All that follows is therefore based on our not up-to-date knowledge. Feel free to point us to the relevant laws if we base our decision on no more valid knowledge.

Now, we can actually ignore the EU Member States legal frameworks on data retention where they clearly infringe the EU Court of Justice legally binding decisions, because in a casus belli we can challenge, or defend against, the rogue Member State with high likelihood of winning.

At the same time, we must carefully decide which legal battle fronts we want to open, because legal costs for cases which must be brought up to the highest courts may easily become very high. We are already challenging Spain legal framework on Data Retention, and, given AirVPN size, it's not wise to challenge multiple Member States simultaneously. That's the main reason we do not operate VPN servers in France and Italy, other Member States whose data retention framework is in flagrant violation of the legally binding decisions of the CJEU.

We're not like those marketing fluff based VPNs which lie to you and in reality perform Data Retention in the countries where  it is mandatory: you have plenty of examples from the press to prove what we claim here, when VPN customers identities and activities have been disclosed because of that very same data retention the VPN providers claimed not to perform. When we say we do not retain data and metadata of your traffic we really do it, that's why we must carefully evaluate the countries legal framework we plan to operate servers within.

Kind regards

P.S. Ukraine does not oblige dacenters and VPN providers to any data retention.
 

[blueport26 11]

Thanks for the response!
It's more clear to me now. So the problem in Poland are the data retention laws for which you could suffer process costs - if you'd challenge them based on CJEU ruling. Otherwise it's you or the datacenter that have to provide metadata upon request from legal entity.
I saw some other VPNs (located in EU) saying that they don't have to collect any data because they are not a internet service provider (and they have servers is Poland), but I don't know how this pertains to datacenter level collection. This may be a marketing trick/talk as you say.
Unfortunately, I'm not a lawyer so I cannot point you to a current paragraph in Polish law. I found this article that mentions new law that was passed in 2016 (link). I don't know if it's relevant to datacenters or VPNs but it says that the metadata retention period is 12 months.
And this (PDF) report, page 31.
I will try to post here if there find any news of this laws changing in the future

Best regards