TL;DR for those of you who won't bother reading:

NordVPN and Protonmail share a CEO. They claim to operate in Panama/Switzerland, but both companies are shell companies, owned fully by PROTONVPN LT, UAB, which is located in Lithuania, which has a law requiring 6 months of data retention (this matters, because, even though they tell you they keep no logs, they are legally required to maintain them). Finally, the headquarters of PROTONVPN LT, UAB, is in the very same building as TesoNet, a Lithuanian data mining service. ProtonVPN claims that the colocation is just happenstance, and they don't actually work with TesoNet, but researchers found NordVPN using privacy certificates signed by TesoNet in their official app binaries.

This also applies to DuckDuckGo as well, who was started by (((Gabriel Weinberg))) to capitalize on all of those wanting to jump ship from google, and does track clicks and links (though it claims not to). An article by the timesOfIsreal on Weinberg's site, which didn't have any traffic worth speaking of until the Snowden limited hangout, which pushed everyone even mildy privacy-aware straight into the dragnet.

Notes on "stealth archives": The archive is a zip file of the page as retrieved a few days ago by me via wget, renamed as a png so the imagehost would accept it. Rename to a zip file to view, or, if on linux, 7z can open it as is.

I call them "stealth archives" because the image host can't tell a download to view the content apart from a download by a browser to display the page, the ISP can only see the DNS resolves to an image host (which gives no hints), and it bypasses the (((internet Wayback Machine))), which watches who is interested in what sites and when, and will memoryhole 'dangerous' sites.

BTW, if the owner of imggoat sees this, your site crashes, showing a traceback, when uploading a not-png named as a png. Could be a security vulnerability, just throwing that out there.

Shoutout to @BloodAndHonour, whose recent recommendation of NordVPN prompted this post.

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alele-opathic 6.2 years ago

It's also worth pointing out that the growth of both Proton/VPN and DDG can be attributed to very successful astroturfing campaigns. Very little conventional marketing was used - it was mainly shills sitting on imageboards/forums/social media that would respond to "are there any good VPNs/Emails/Search engines?" with "Idk, but my buddy has NordVPN/ProtonMail/DDG and he says its pretty good". After some time, an artificial reputation is built that is indistinguishable from companies actually having a good reputation.

In other words, don't ask questions like these - they are flawed in a way that makes it impossible for you to tell whether or not you are getting genuine information back, especially considering astroturfing shills specifically target questions like this. The only way is to do the research yourself (or at least parts of it).

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SearchVoatBot 5.9 years ago

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Empire_of_the_mind 6.2 years ago

this was the single biggest red flag - ALWAYS pay attention to this. if it's a household name, chances are it's crap.

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