Ricnvolved1956

Careful! They were bought out by a US-Govt linked private equity firm and the new guys they are bringing in are largely former/current intelligence agents or people with very close links to the intelligence and law enforcement. Coincidentally, the moment they brought in these spook-types they added 'amazing new cloud based technologies' to their product.. (err... Telemetry potential LOL)
 
Be safe, and realize with a UTM it has the potential to filter/monitor/log all of your activities and if you have suspicions about the company behind your UTM you should be careful. Given the recent backdoors in products like Juniper, Cisco and Fortinet, you can't be too safe. Also OpenSource doesn't guarantee you privacy/security, they can easily gather extensive telemetry under the guise of logging and protection(cloud) of their products/services.
 

So one-sided. You need a greater amount of "John Pilger"in your media diet Kepler. Here's an excerpt which challenges your views:
 
 
That's from one of the worlds most illustrious journalists too. It's not to say he's automatically right about everything - but if it spurs critical thought, then that's a good thing.
 
I don't disagree that privacy will probably be even more important under Trump. I just think the constant automatic anti-Trump "journalism" is boring and whatever delusions may be created because of it, dangerous as well. Besides, didn't rule 41 just pass into law? The one giving the FBI extended hacking mandates. To my knowledge, Trump didn't have anything to do with that. That developed under the Obama administration. I think the crucial difference, is that Trumps moves are "obvious" because he's a loud-mouth. Or at least made obvious by media. While Obama's aren't, in the same way.
 
One more from John:
 
 
I like this quote, from the bottom of this post:
 

Well, if you subscribe to the idea that Snowden is an American agent trying to build reputation with those who hate America, then it would actually be very detrimental to pardon him. But otherwise you are quite right. And I have no idea if Snowden is an American agent or not. Nor any concern if he is.
 
The one universal identifying trait of a politician is that they are all liars. Absolutely none are honest. And anyone who thinks any one of them is needs to take a really hard look at them for a while. Despite all efforts, truth cannot ever be fully suppressed. The best a practiced liar can do is make the truth indistinguishable from their lies.

Haha, I love it. Under Obama we got the least transparent government in history, pursuit of more whistle-blowers than under any other government, additions to NDAA that ensure anyone can be held indefinitely with no charge and with legal deniability to the family they even have the person, additions to the Patriot Act and a nightmare of a mass surveillance regime that suddenly got scary now that the Bamster is on his way out etc. Obama has been chipping away at liberty for eight years, and he seems to only lament that he didn't erode even more of it. Maybe it will continue under Trump, but at least this time it will be hilarious. There is no new insight gained, either - people still think Hillary would be less of a threat, thus gaining no understanding in the process. The silent erosion would continue under her, now media will whine with impotent rage - but they are already defeated. Let the journey towards nihilism continue, it's going to be one hell of a ride.
 
Edit: I will continue to stand for freedom just like I have under eight years of the Obama nightmare, whose latest claim to fame is to literally lie and say he can't pardon Snowden, which he absolutely can. What a useless idiot that dunce turned out to be.

Reading the PIA URL makes any VPN user and security/privacy aware person see themselves as a potential target. One response would be to always enable GPS location on the mobile, and never use a VPN or proxy - kind of like the police won't think I am a drug dealer if I always leave the windows open with no curtains, and the doors unlocked when I go out, and never lock the car.
 
One thought without researching the debate is that this may dovetail with efforts to force US based suppliers of hardware and software, from Oracle databases to various apps in the Google Play Store or Apple App Store, to Windows and Android and Apple operating systems, to include backdoors in ALL their products without concern about violating US laws or constitution.
 
Part of the reaction globally would be to avoid US products, many might feel that a Huawei phone with Chinese spyware was less of a worry than US spyware.
And suppliers such as Siemans (Germany) and Ericsson (Sweden) might reenter the mobile/device market as more trusted or less threatening.
And governments and commerce would want open source databases and Linux, partly due to the NSA mission including commercial advantage for the USA and its corporations.

Back in the mid 1980s (1984?) I worked as a contractor for a US banking support corp called NCR for a bank client to use Data Encryption Standard for secure communications from PCs to central corporate applications when the mobility and flexibility of PCs using 1200 bps modems on voice phone lines or 9600 bps modems on special carrier supplied lines was a wildly exciting and popular productive new capability.
 
The DES C code became available from various sources and could be utilised by software development companies for various client custom applications. So the needs and requirements for network security have been similar through to the general availability of OpenVPN interoperability at present. But the encryption algorithms have improved immensely.
 
Another milepost on the road to VPNs was the development of Secure Sockets Layer in the mid 90s, to provide a standard API and interoperability over IP networks.  Largely from the Netscape precursor to Mozilla Firefox as an early developer of the World Wide Web, HTTPS, HTML etc.
 
But the need and development of anonymity has been driven by hostile governments as much as commercial/criminal espionage.

I first became aware of commercial vpns about mid 90s. There was a Canada based one, forget the name, that had poor reliability and went out of business within a few years. Anonymizer started about the same time frame. Still there, but U.S. based and limited service. 
 
They started for the same reasons as current vpns, people wanted privacy and anonymity. But at that time the internet was much smaller and the number of people who knew about or cared about privacy was much smaller. Pretty Good Privacy from Zimmerman did a lot to facilitate and publicize email privacy/encryption. Still until Snowden, there was a much smaller set of internet users who used vpns. Usage has exploded now. I'd like to see everyone use vpn, encrypted email, messaging, phones, social media, and all websites be encrypted. Sadly the vast majority of people are still complacent about the importance of privacy.

Serenacat-- The U.S is a diseased state and it's going to get worse. A LOT worse. And I'm not referring to Trump, though that's bad enough. I'm referring to the NSA/CIA/FBI/State Dept./corporate "intelligence" black hole. Take a look at Rodrigo Duterte of The Phillippines recently telling Amerika to go f*ck itself. He won't be the only national leader to do that. Other countries are getting tired of Amerikan hegemony and bossiness.
 
Make no mistake about it, folks-- There is a resurgence of McCarthyism at work here in the U.S and it's being practiced by both sides of the political spectrum. The liberal left is in a full blown self delusional hysteria over the election result. "Alt right" and "fake news" have become extremely shrill buzz phrases. Russia, Vladimir Putin, RT/Sputnik are oh-so-convenient whipping boys. They delude themselves by thinking their collective hysteria projects strength and resolve when all it really does is prove their weakness and insecurity. Those of us on the left who chose to buck the prevailing party/ideological orthodoxy and not vote for Clinton are being demonized with incredible bared-fangs ferocity. But it's okay, I can take it. I used to think it was only the insane, lunatic, conservative right wing that lived in a political echo chamber. Trump's election is proving that the liberal left has it's own political echo chamber. Many liberal commentators I used to genuinely admire and hold in high regard I have now lost all faith and trust in. It's depressing, it's discouraging.
 
There is a quote by George Orwell in the signature of another poster here in the forum (I apologize for not remembering who it is) I had not heard before. The quote has been on my mind quite a bit since becoming aware of the liberal left hysteria and I humbly provide it here-- The further a society drifts from truth, the more it hates those who speak it.
 
(Sorry if this is too far off the topic of this thread, but serenacat's post prompted me to extend her thoughts on (what I hope is) a relative tangent.)

The countries whose computers end up getting hacked are very unlikely to consider such actions legal, regardless of what US law says.

"hack an unknown number of computers located in an unknown part of the world"
It goes beyond just Apple and Microsoft PCs and Linux servers, "computers" includes all the mobile phones which are deliberately deprived by vendors or carriers of any security updates for well known or dark web traded N day exploits, and the unprotected routers used in recent DDoS breakdowns of financial functions.
 
Mobile phones are now more likely to be useful for identity theft, blackmail, revenge by planting "evidence", personnel selection and monitoring, etc. In general, governments seem more concerned with monitoring and possibly disrupting and setting up citizens than protecting them from government corruption and factionalism, Turkish style purges, competitive corporate espionage, criminal fraud, vendetta using mercenaries, etc.
 
The USA is just one of the "diseased states" spreading the contagion. The antidote may become the breakup of any global market for US software or Chinese phones into defensive quarantined fragments.
 

*YAWWWWN* The $hillary bots are never going to accept the reality of a sh***y candidate who then ran an even sh***ier campaign. And the cry babies have the democratic party insiders and queen makers to thank for that.
 
A good friend was pretty despondent with the election results. Like me, he voted Sanders in our state primary. Unlike me, he voted (quite unenthusiastically) for Clinton in the general election whereas I voted for Stein. I knew he didn't agree with my complacency about the result and asked if I really thought Sanders would've won had he been the democratic candidate. My response was that we'll never know for sure, but there was an even bigger question than if Sanders would've won-- Did Clinton win?
 
I'm going to try to make it clear one more time-- I have no love for Trump. At all. But after how the Clinton and party mafia treated Sanders and his supporters... well, all I can say is they got exactly what they deserve.

Yep, this amendment is extreme and some senators are making a last-ditch effort to delay it six months, the goal obviously being to stop it completely within that time. They have introduced a bill called Review the Rule Act of 2016 for this purpose and it can be found here: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/hr6341 Here is a press release where some of its supporters' arguments are covered: http://www.lee.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2016/11/bipartisan-bicameral-bill-would-delay-changes-to-government-hacking-powers
 
Edit: Noticed the links were goofed up, so I fixed them.

Soon the law enforcement agencies will be legally allowed to hack an unknown number of computers located in an unknown part of the world with a single warren. Its true that the FBI has already done this type of hacking before but coming December 1st they will be legally allowed and as a result the information will be admissible in court. Worst of all this rule change didn't require congresses approval and shows how much the judicial branch is willing to over step there bounds. It is to late for congress to stop this rule from going into effect because there all off for the holidays but that doesn't mean there is nothing we can do. If you live in the US you can still call your representatives and ask them to support the stop mass hacking or tell them to halt the rule change. The amendment to rule 41 affects everyone on the internet but especially those who use a VPN or tor. If you live in the US and you don't know who your representatives are the EFF can help you.
 
I value my privacy and with all of these new laws and rule changes I feel its impossible to keep anything a secret from the large eye of the government. Sometimes I feel like curling up in a ball in the corner of my house after burning all my devices because at least then I can mutter to myself without someone listening. 

Britain’s Terrifying New Surveillance Laws – “Nothing to do with Fighting Terrorism”http://truepublica.org.uk/united-kingdom/britains-new-surveillance-laws-nothing-to-do-with-fighting-terrorism/
 
a quote of the above mentioned article:
 
"The government and their agencies have access to everything you do from the second your alarm clock wakes you (if you use a mobile phone) to the time you go to sleep. Every website, every app, what subscriptions you pay for, how much you earn, what you spend it on, any personal suspicions you may have about your health, relationships, working environment, your friends and family and acquaintances. They don’t need your passwords. It gets worse though.
If you search google for an embarrassing health issue or join the 3 million who called the NHS 111 service, the government knows. It knows if you, a friend or an acquaintance of yours has joined a protest group objecting to say, fracking. You are implicated by your friends. Facebook tried to sell on-line lenders credit scores by ‘judging’ American borrowers’ creditworthiness. Thankfully, it failed, but not for trying. What do you think the government will attempt to do assisted by these ubiquitous and often nefarious corporations whoring themselves as they do today for a buck?"
 
And: "Welcome to the panopticon, you deserve everything you didn’t bother fighting for. Your grandparents did though and so did theirs. Wake up for god’s sake!"
(I am a grandparent, born in the difficult years shortly after WW2. And for those in the UK, for god's sake SIGN THE PETITION!)
 
UK is blacklisted in EDDIE since i am AIRvpn'er, so is the USA (because of GCHQ and NSA). But with this snooper law now it comes realy serieus!
 
Me to, i hope they will.

I personally feel it is not safe to pass traffic though the UK but, from what I've read, Air provides internal routing options effectively giving two hop connections. If air only provides user certificate data to the first hop and has that server use its own cert to authenticate with the final hop (preventing the final hop from having the users cert and effectively knowing the user), then it may be ok to use a fully monitored server. Keep in mind, this is assuming that the final hope vpn server is actually compromised because only the server can definitively provide who is doing what from a server with a number of simultaneous users (assuming its just doing passive ip logging, not timing and traffic correlation attacks). This is similar to how tor operates (never trusting the exit node) but using tor to connect directly to a compromised vpn server will not protect you because the vpn would still know your cert which can be correlated with your account or at the very least activity across multiple days. Again, I do not think using a UK server is a good idea but a compromise may be for air to forcefully or strongly suggest a two hop connection for any user wanting to exit though a UK server.   

I suppose the important question is now that the UK has implemented this law, does it still fall under AirVPN's mission? Personally i do not think so. I know it's hard for them to shut servers down to protect their users privacy, but i feel leaving them on would be exempting the UK from the same rules other countries have had servers withdrawn for. But as users its our responsibility whether or not we take that risk regardless of what AirVPN decides. 

Believe me, i have scoured the vast amount of VPN's out there. AirVPN is the sole oasis in a desert of fake no logging claims, server seizures and fake servers and ip addresses and the selling of consumer data. 
 
There is simply no place i would rather be. But i won't and no one else should let their guard down because Air is the safest place to be.
 
I would never go to any other service, but i should be vigilant wherever i go. 

I'd definitely rather see them leave, than risk anything, if it comes to that. I'm staying with them regardless. Air is like water in a desert lol, you don't just give it up.

I understand that the UK is a popular location. But if this legislation violates their ethical mission, which i believe it will considering that VPN servers are unlikely to be exempt from this snooping; AirVPN might have to decide whether they hold to their code of ethics or stay in the UK anyway. I believe this would be counter intuitive for AirVPN as it prides itself on being strict to it's standards ( more users would likely appreciate them leaving for the right reasons than staying for the wrong reasons). But they do indeed have a year to decide, i just hope that they make a decision before the snooping is implemented. 

VPNuser172 - The charter doesn't come into effect until January 1, 2017 so there is still time for Air to make a decision on what they want to do. There is also a petition in the UK to force parliament to reconsider and they have already made the 100,000 signatures. Of course they can always use more, so if you live in the UK please sign it!

Then why haven't they? The "snooper" charter is clearly a threat to the privacy of UK citizens, and without a doubt any foreigners connecting in via VPN. Personally i would like to hear what Staff thoughts are regarding the new legislation instead of assuming the best in hopeful speculation. The legislation has put customers in doubt about the security of servers in the UK; it is only fit that if there is a reason to stay, AirVPN ought to state why. I honestly believe that the "snooper" charter is just as damning if not more so as any other legislative effort that has been cause for server withdraw; If the UK is the exception to AirVPN's ethical mission i think we have the right to know why. Even if AirVPN decides to stay it's our individual responsibilities to not use them if we think they are insecure. If recent events prove anything it's that AirVPN isn't always going to be there to close servers when dangerous laws come into play, they may close in France, but ignore bigger problems in the UK. 

First they came for the terrorists, then they came for the child molesters, then they came for the copyright avoiders, then they came for the porn fans, then ...
 
"As part of its mission creep, the government is also pushing for the BBFC regulator to have the power to tell ISPs to block content that isn't pornographic. It states:

The steps that may be specified or arrangements that may be put in place under subsection (2) © include steps or arrangements that will or may also have the effect of preventing persons in the United Kingdom from being able to access material other than the offending material using the service provided by the Internet service provider."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/isps-block-porn-sites-age-verification-digital-economy-bill/
 
"And the bill already makes it clear that the government wants to go after "infringing sites" by choking their access to payment providers such as Visa and PayPal, ..."
 
Not in the Brit livestock, but what China calls "internet sovereignty" is spreading. So prudent to be paid up for another year just in case payment monitoring or blocking of VPNs is added to the powers that be.

I am not a firm believer in the "nine eyes" and "fourteen eyes" thing, but the UKUSA agreement is very real and poses an active threat. 9/14 eyes countries simply work together, but not for the purpose of spying on each other. Netherlands and Sweden are both good choices and as you can see, Air has a lot of servers in these countries because of that.

Thoughts/opinions?
 
https://medium.com/@yegor/hypocrisy-plaguing-major-vpn-providers-b4613b82f795#.4innt55cw

I remember Edward Snowden saying that the UK monitors all incoming/outgoing connections to/from UK. The whole situation is very uncomforting
 
UK surveillance agencies illegally kept data on British citizens' communications, spying court finds