Oh, I keep windscribe for general purpose unimportant stuff. They have servers all over the place. No clue how well they hold up, only ever used em for geofencing bypass with scripts.

They’re running a sale on whatever their pro service is and that gets you nz servers.

I can fire up their app in a little bit and see how it works, what distribution are you running?

Oh I meant that you seem to be concerned with the actual functionality of the tools and service from a safety perspective and need servers in place other than where the ppl who want to go stealth mode and load hacking tools are.

If you can tolerate using crypto instead of cash, ovpn has Singapore servers and that’s close.

If you could be careful with your account information and send cash you could probably make proton work, they got lots of servers where you need them. You’d have to resist the temptation to add some newfangled service though.

Ngl between your reply to me and others you sound like the kind of person who should stick with mullvad.

I only recently started using the mullvad application as opposed to configs and maybe it’s because I was on configs for so long or maybe it’s mullvads app quality being better than average but I’ve been impressed with it across all platforms.

Oh they can do cc and PayPal refunds. Probably monero and bitcoin too. Wire transfers you can’t usually reverse, cash you can’t either. Cooperative merchants can refund a wire transfer, but it’s not as cut and dry as the cc, PayPal or crypto process.

And it’s possible for a rep to decide a person is who they say they are and refunding the balance of an account somehow but that requires the person give up the shield of anonymity and who would do that.

That’s the whole point of paying cash. If your vpn account gets associated, just abandon it and move on. There’s no record of ongoing payment for an investigator to trace back.

The person talking about bufferbloat is making a good point and if your router can run even something like freshtomato then you can use cake aqm and make life better.

I have used ivpn in the past. I currently use air for port forwarding stuff.

There is nothing “wrong” with ivpn. You can, if you’re careful, avoid setting up an account, associating an email, choose a limited set of services and pay with cash and get, theoretically, what you get with mullvad.

The difference is that with mullvad it’s much harder to do something you didn’t know was a problem. That’s not a thing that’s “wrong” with i. Lots of people expect to be able to log in to their account and recover their password with an email and use a bunch of additional nice apps and services like what i offers. That’s not wrong.

I said theoretically above and above that because i has not been under the same degree of scrutiny as mullvad. So it’s kind of like the veteran choosing a dented shield over a newly built one because “i know this one has stopped a blow”.

Air is… a piracy vpn. An eagle eyed user is expected to read between the lines to understand that and understand what it means.

It’s less of an ingenuine offer issue and more of a “there’s a way to pay thats anonymous and untraceable” problem.

There’s no way to privately and anonymously confirm that the person who paid cash and is asking for a refund is who they say they are. If you have them do that then now you have a record of who they are and that can be used by the cops when they cleverly hit you with a subpoena the month after your big scandal broke.

So if you’re committed to protecting customers privacy you can’t do refunds on cash.

If it actually matters that you have privacy and anonymity it’s probably best to not switch.

You know what’s best for you, but the guilt of knowing one drop of your money goes to someone whom you find repugnant is preferable to losing life or safety.

If you’re looking for a replacement and don’t actually need the privacy/anonymity then ivpn might be a good choice. You can screw it up and set up an account that can’t possibly by as safe as mullvad but if you’re careful and know what you’re doing you can also get damn close to it. Theoretically.

But if it matters it’s probably time to reup mullvad with a new account id and cash through the mail instead of whatever they refunded you through.

That doesn’t help the cash in an envelope with no return address crowd. Mullvad also doesn’t have any way to associate an account with a person.

A datacenter on land that relies on water for cooling is using fresh water. Aside from the insane and undesirable use of fossil water or groundwater, fresh water has a much higher ratio of surface area exposed to air and volume than the ocean does.

That ratio is important because you can only evaporate off the surface, so the same volume of water would evaporate faster in a frying pan than it would in a saucepan given the same conditions.

Freshwater is also smaller than the ocean by many orders of magnitude. That’s important because a smaller body of water will heat up more than a larger one given the same conditions.

Freshwater is also generally speaking moving towards the ocean somehow in a complex process called the water cycle. It might flow down a hill into the ocean, it might drip through aquifers to the ocean and it might evaporate and fall as rain either in the ocean or somewhere else where it takes some other path towards sea level.

That last part is important because in America rivers like the ones in Colorado and California have been reduced in volume so much due to of a bunch of manmade events and earthworks that they now lose a higher portion of their volume to evaporation as opposed to flow. That’s a big deal because the Colorado for example flows south but water vapor that comes off of it is blown east. So now much more of the rivers water is going into the desert as opposed to reaching the ocean. The water cycle has been disrupted.

Freshwater is also comparatively super rare and necessary for life on land.

So if you were water cooling a datacenter it would be better to use the huge ocean with much lower surface area to volume ratio and much more volume than to use the rare freshwater that will get heated up much more by the same energy, evaporate faster, we already know can have its water cycle disrupted and all life on land relies on.

Now a person might ask “what about the sea life, doesn’t it matter?” Of course sea life matters, but the way that sea life handles an increase in temperature that’s localized to one specific area is to just go away from there, like it does when undersea magma vents pop up. When the freshwater gets too hot it all evaporates away, there’s no water and the land animals die.

A person might say: “well don’t animals die when the oceans get hot too?” And they’re right! An average increase of .5 degrees c in sea surface temperatures would lead to massive coral bleaching. But enough energy to raise the sea surface temperatures .5c is phenomenally huge. Like getting more sun huge. Because that’s what’s raising it, getting more sun. Datacenters produce so little heat energy in comparison to that level of power that it’s not a concern.

Whenever I don’t like the video or the person in it it’s ai.

The number one culprit of undesirable cornering behavior is incorrect tire pressure.

Why did you delete the post with system specs, @staircase@programming.dev?

That information would really help people to give you advice and your pc isn’t as unique as you think it is…

First things first: 👋😘

When i claimed what you are doing is harmful —and i know this is a weird concept but bear with me— i was talking about replies you already made, not replies you would make in the future.

When i just now called back to that part of our conversation it was to explicitly point out that you’re not here trying to help find a solution, you’re here pointing at the dictionary and moralizing at people.

When i broke it down you shifted your tone and started all this “oh, i never said what people should do, only what i would do.” nonsense.

You’re the hot dog costume man irl.

Hey, i make mistakes sometimes. Because of that i went back and re-read your comments to others and me and my replies. It’s not impossible that im wrong here, you know?

Except im not wrong even in the slightest.

You came in with a comparison to a fascist burger shop, which is facile in ways i find hard to articulate but here goes:

A person doesn’t need to eat burgers. Burgers are largely the same in flavor and nutritional content when compared against other foods. Burgers don’t keep you safe. Restaurants have much greater labor margins as compared to internet services.

I’m just gonna stop there because it’s clear you’re comparing apples and plutonium ingots.

As far as i can tell you were never claiming that it’s okay for some people who need it but a valid ethical consideration for others, you were saying that a person continuing to use it is a serious ethical or moral violation.

My position on your behavior is that it actively harms the people you claim to be concerned about (possible future victims of a fascism) because it frames the choice as being between being responsible for the owners actions and choosing safety.

The same arguments get trotted out when someone wants to buy a gun “oh, do you really need that?”, “more money for the murder industrial complex.”, etc.

The difference between what you’re doing and what you claim to be doing is that people who are actively talking about alternatives are sharing their experiences, you’re moralizing through metaphors aggressively at people.

If you really believe what you just wrote then make replies that help people figure out what kind of vpn they need and evaluate their safety instead of pulling out the dictionary.com to define fascism at them.

You don’t get that choice. Beans soak up the flavor of the broth, rocks get thrown out in the trash.

I’m not trying to be a jerk, but you literally have no control over what other people do and the whole point of a marketplace is to drill the social relationship down to cash.

A vpn service with a political angle like you suggested would immediately be targeted.

It’s why you can buy a che tee shirt but not actually ship oil to Cuba.

If you need the security of mullvad then i recommend you use it.

Now a communist vpn would be a great piece of political theater! Get one going then get black bagged over it, run a social media campaign to raise awareness, levitate the pentagon, it’d be fantastic!

You just said I made a strong case that mullvad has the best infrastructure then at the end said you wouldn’t fund it when alternatives exist. My whole point is that alternatives don’t exist.

A person who’s using proton is getting something fundamentally different (and in a lot of ways more featureful!) than mullvad.

I really cant even begin to address the moral/ethical angle you’re working from other than to simply call it absurd.

Oi! You got a loicense for that spending money in the marketplace without bearing the burden of others decisions?

Imagine for a second that you don’t like Donald trump. You have two neighbors, one of them is very wealthy and loves trump. Your wealthy neighbor runs the local supermarket and made a huge donation to the local campaign for trump. Your other neighbor is very poor and apolitical, well, you never heard them talk about politics. They don’t have a car and shop at the local supermarket. Trump wins your district and is elected and you find out your poor neighbor didn’t vote.

Who bears responsibility for the election of trump? Would it have been different if your poor neighbor voted?

I am not aware of any other vpn service that has been raided with a warrant for any information present and had the police come away completely empty handed.

That raid I’m thinking of served two functions: one was to get any information available, the other was to investigate mullvads infrastructure in order to evaluate if it was possible to get a warrant to install logging capacity.

While the inability to install wiretaps (logging capacity) has not been explicitly confirmed by law enforcement like the inability to get any data was, we can assume it was impossible because rather than pursue that direction, Interpol advised cdns and hosting providers to block mullvads endpoints instead.

The reason we are able to assume a warrant for wiretapping was impossible is that the action taken, making mullvad unusable to the point that the company dropped port forwarding, has the effect of flushing the target out from the service which is not what you’d want if you were able to install a wiretap.

It’s evidence of a type of trustworthiness borne out by the effects of actions surrounding the service, not just tests, audits or press releases. That is something unique and if it’s not I’d really like to know.

That’s not just rhetoric, I’m truly interested in other VPNs whose impact with law enforcement left only cloud chamber evidence of their trustworthiness.

Your idea that people should apply the strictest ethical scrutiny to their own purchases in the marketplace really seems like it’s based entirely on the liberal assumptions that the marketplace is frictionless and has many goods of equal quality on offer.

It’s also, on another level, patently ridiculous that a person who is choosing a battle tested privacy and anonymity focused vpn should choose something they’re less sure about because they need to somehow avoid any microfraction of blame flowing to them through the market from the specific currency units they used in the transaction.

It’s cool, I know the immigration police are kicking down our door, but at least I didn’t use the gross vpn associated with a person who donated to a fascist party.

At some point you gotta recognize that not only does your reasoning not hold up to theoretical interrogation (how could blame for the effects of transactions flow down to the purchaser if everything solid melts into air, huh? Explain that lieberuls!) but is absurd in the very real life situations you bring up.

It’s like some bizarre inversion of the old “they say the next drone bombs will be dropped by a black trans woman” joke.

I think two party consent will be broadly ruled unconstitutional if it ever gets that far up nowadays. It’s already not applicable to public recording.