Just for my understanding when they boot such a server, where does it get it’s operating system from? Over the network from a different computer which has a hard drive or some read only ROM on the server or what?
This can be handled a few different ways.
- You can boot from a HDD and then just not ever write data back to it. This would be the most trivial solution, and it’s something people do with their Pi’s a lot to avoid SD card failure.
- You could network boot, pull the OS from the network at startup. Fun fact, this is how some rockets fly! No onboard persistent storage needed. Everything boots into and runs from ram the whole 10 ish minutes of operation.
- You COULD do a ROM as you suggested, but that’s a LOT of ROM. Seems odd to do imho.
Anyone pro-Mullvad that can explain to me how it’s better than PIA?
To my knowledge, which may be wrong, PIA has faster speeds and is also entirely RAM-based.
That said…I’d gladly switch if that’s untrue and Mullvad is better. On the outset, it sounds like Mullvad triggers search engine captchas less, which would be a nice win.
edit: Well, you all convinced me. Made the switch.
Does it make sense that a privacy VPN has 4 tracking scripts and 5 third party cookies on their website? https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=privateinternetaccess.com&device=mobile&location=us
Mullvad has 0.
https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=mullvad.net&device=mobile&location=us
Teddy Sagi > Kape Tech > PIA, Cyber Ghost and ZenMate.
As someone who works in enterprise ISP tech space I always keep the bigger picture in mind, especially with the latest “tech Fads”, VPNs are really easy to sell, especially when you already have other companies and even bigger shell companies.
Take the following scenario (it might be true it might also be conjecture):
person1 owns 2 shell companies that are big names in tech.
shell 1 starts out as a an ISP and soon grows to be a network transit provider.*
shell 2 starts out as a cyber sec company.
shell 1 get’s really big and becomes a tier 1 provider that sells transit to BBC and is now peering with the likes of Cogent, Lumen/CenturyLink and others.
shell 2 get so big it branches out into VPN carrier tech and purchases a well used VPN company that also stands out as having a no logging policy.*
shell 1 starts providing seriously detailed analytics to it peers on a subscription basis with discounts to peers that repeatedly hit the 95th percentile on billing cycles, all the peers love being able to see detailed info of the traffic flowing over their transit relationships.*
Shell 2 also purchases another company that deals with adware and advert injection tech.
later shell 2 becomes so financially liquid it is now breaking out in to gambling and lucrative AIM ventures.
In the scenario above I’ve marked points with a * that should be red flags to VPN users BUT they have something obvious when laid out in this manner that a user of a VPN would not know. That is that even though the VPN is sold as no-logging the wider company still gets your data as all the traffic is flowing over the wider network owned by shell 1 that you have no idea of the relationship between them.
All traffic/data can be monetised and ultimately with decent visibility of all comprising parts tied back to you or your account, VPNs are good but just be aware of forced perspective, look beyond T&C’s, look at the company and who owns it and what else they own.
You all got a hint at this with pirate bay, the feds couldn’t take 'em down so the went to the DC provider and the network transit providers, you should do the same if you value your trust and data so much that you need a VPN for every connection.
Finally, with or without a VPN, Your IP is only used for 20% of the connection(10% at the start and 10% to the final endpoint), when your data/traffic flows over provider networks it becomes an AS number, a layer tag and even a colour, all of these interchange until it becomes an IP again, hits a website and for the most part all of that is accounted for and can be connected to you.
PIA and Mullvad should have equal speeds because they both have 10gbps servers and wireguard. Both PIA and Mullvad use ram-only servers exclusively. As for search engine captchas, I never get them with Mullvad. The main issue with PIA is that they were bought by a questionable company that previously developed adware. You can read about that here. Personally, I would never use a privacy tool that is owned by an ad company, even if they claim to have changed. I used them up until the acquisition, then switched and have been extremely happy with Mullvad.
As for search engine captchas, I never get them with Mullvad.
That has nothing to do with VPNs, and everything to do with how your browser “leaks” your user behaviour history.
Captchas go through your browser behaviour history and examine the clicks and pages you have gone through, how long you were on each one and how you scrolled through each page. Stuff like that. If that browser behaviour history reaches a minimum threshold of “human-like behaviour”, there is no test to pass. If it doesn’t, or there is no history to go after, you get a test.
Longtime Mullvad user, always been happy. But when Mullvad was still a small service it was unusual to have any problems when browsing the web with their IPs.
Recently, many services can detect you’re on a VPN when using Mullvad and block or ban you, which means they’ve become successful enough that there are countrer-VPN databases including all of their IPs.
I’ve just come to accept that constant captchas are a fact of life for browsing on a VPN. Cost of doing business. Worth it for the privacy though imo (VPNs in general, I haven’t used Mullvad).
It’s the same with Nord. I have to pause my VPN any time I want to access Fextralife wikis
Ah, Fextralife. For when you want the top half of the screen taken up by a video advert, and the bottom half taken by a giant consent form.
The day we strayed from GameFAQs was a dark day indeed.
It’s pretty awful but it’s always the first search result for anything souls related. It’s bearable with an adblocker though
Pretty sure fextra just rips all their content from other wikis anyway, at least this was definitely my experience in the past. Just try scrolling past the first link in your search engine.
I can’t speak to the ripping of content, but you have to scroll pretty far depending on the subject to get a better result.
Searching “Soul of Cinder” on Google is all Fextralife, fandom, YouTube, reddit, ign/Gamespot/etc. Wikidot doesn’t show up until halfway down the first page and it doesn’t show up at all on duckduckgo.
The answer is probably to add specific sites names to my searches but I’m lazy
I hope IVPN and others starts using RAM only servers in the future.
PIA have been doing this for years, are there any others doing this already?
OVPN has been RAM only for a long time as well, the describe it on their website.
I wish Mullvad and IVPN kept port forwarding or find a way to bring it back without having too much legal trouble.
