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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oc_taov 6.6 years ago

tl;dr: i avoid "the cloud" as much as possible and try to limit my options to foss.

i come from the position of not trusting anybody. i try to avoid corporations and businesses with corporate ties. i don't use email for anything but work, financials, and junk mail. i constantly push client to client messaging on my contacts. i use a vpn when necessary. seedboxes may be useful for me if i can find the right host and want to pony up for the cost. i try not to leave a trail, be it, handles, emails, ip addy, etc. i like the approach of adnaseum and trackmenot that spams big brother, though i'm not sure of the effectiveness.

without these, i use gray man theory and blend in.

i2p and zeronet or something similar would be a more anonymous internet but the entry-level is higher than opening a browser. they offer similar services but they must remain in their respective networks to keep their level of anonymity. also, because they are p2p, the speeds vary depending on the traffic and your ip addy might be at risk. also, there isn't much activity on these networks yet.

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