Original page on the clearweb: http://vpnscam.com/tesonet-data-mining-company-owns-nordvpn-protonmail-protonvpn/
Offline archive (READ NOTES BELOW ON HOW TO OPEN): https://i.imgtc.com/FSzFXt6.png
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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coinphrase ago
This seems like astroturfing folks. Nobody is curious why a wordpress site is the only source. In true fake news fashion refers to itself as proof and hackernews, which is notoriously liberal, worse than reddit imo? If you go to the post on hackernews you can see that this claim was refuted and is definitely not proven.
Read the hackernews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258203 [http://archive.is/yrtp1]
alele-opathic ago
Classic misdirection. The site refers to four business registries in 3 countries (which you can verify yourself), the official APK data (which you can also verify yourself), a few whois lookups, and the CEO's own misdirection in a comment thread.
If you actually went to the thread, you'd see the guy is talking through his teeth, contradicting himself multiple times ("we don't work with Tesonet" -> "we only outsourced some HR tasks" [poor excuse] -> "we outsource everywhere" -> both companies have the same CEO). The whole exchange is enough to break any credibility the companies had.
Your response seems like weak damage control.