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Showing content with the highest reputation on 01/07/23 in all areas

  1. 3 points
    Hello! The blocks you mention have nothing to do at all with torrenting or copyright notices. If they were, then yes, it would be trivial indeed to offer special servers with the aims you describe as exceptions to our mission. The main three factors causing black listing are spam e-mails, attacks to web servers via HTTP POST etc., and false positives (we include here the widespread blocks against entire IP ranges when only one IP address in that range is flagged). The first problem can be strongly mitigated, if not solved, by blocking outbound ports 465 and 587, the second problem can be resolved by blocking outbound ports 80 and 443, therefore making the server unusable to reach web sites and send out e-mail. It's easy to guess that this type of service wouldn't be used by anybody as without e-mail and the World Wide Web nobody would feel on the Internet for real, but we could add servers with this limitation for free to our customers, as a free and optional bonus outside the service (in order not to cause a contractual breach) just to test how many would use them and for which purposes (maybe something interesting will come out). Another form of mitigation would be deep packet inspection to discard any packet with malformed queries and potentially malicious purposes according to pre-defined algorithms, data set etc. (needless to say it would be a contractual breach even on a bonus server, so it's not realistic to think of it). Please note that, according to latest reports, about 1 out of 12 Windows machine in the world is infected, so in various (many?) cases the activity causing IP address black-listing is performed without the knowledge of the computer owner. Another approach, which is actually more realistic and followed by most providers, is monitoring the customer's traffic, identify the customer at least via IP address at each connection, block immediately the account when something suspicious goes on and report the customer's IP address to competent authorities (this last step becomes legally mandatory on most countries when a provider monitors the traffic and comes to know that a potential infringement has been committed).. Then it's all up to the competent authorities, end of the story for the provider. This type of service is surely possible (and in reality it has been followed in secret by several VPNs in the recent years, together with personal data harvesting) but (leaving aside our contractual breach this would cause) why then would you need a VPN? Since the traffic would be monitored anyway, most customers might just decide to let their ISP monitor their traffic, rather than shifting this "duty" to some VPN operating company or entity. Then there's another type of block (block enforced against anything that does not come from IP addresses assigned to residential ISPs - for example BBC follows a similar policy), but that's outside the scope of your complaint, we guess, since to bypass those blocks renting IP addresses assigned to residential ISPs become necessary. This is not impossible, but only in some specific countries, and we will be working on it. Kind regards
  2. 1 point
    This is becoming more and more of an issue because while hosting providers like M247 may be a perfect fit for AirVPN in that it can contractually agree to Air's strict NN requirements, from an actual user experience, it may be difficult to navigate the web as more and more sites may block these higher risk IP addresses. I don't know what type of activities most Air users make use of, but if defending 'NN, privacy, and censorship' (taken from the index page) are what is most important, then Air should consider blocking ports used for tormenting for some servers at least (non-M247) because let's not kid ourselves when looking at users on the scoreboard transferring terabytes a month. It surely isn't backups of Wikipedia and Linux ISO's. As someone who has been using Air for almost a decade, but truly only for privacy purposes, I'd really love to see more lower risk IP servers being added with stricter rules. There is a market for a 'no log VPN service that caters to users who simply want a slightly restricted port-wise private pipe on relatively clean servers'. Air could offer a different product tier for this or a spin-off service to separate it from its core brand. If things don't change where eventually it's picking a server on M247, Dedipath, Digital Ocean, or gosh forbid OVH, users like myself may have to look elsewhere.
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