- AndroTuxMaybe some college of theirs on HN recognized the story and shared it with them.
- You worked at an industry giant like Airbus? Cool.
- Welcome to the real world. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but this is what’s happened. That’s why everyone is doing AWS. To pretend this is a non-issue and can easily be fixed by investing a bit in development does not reflect reality.
- Yes. At an airbus scale, most definitely.
But to give you another example (from the article): Try migrating Google Workspace to an EU solution. Actually impossible. I tried it myself, and gave up. The closest you’ll get is Proton, which isn’t EU to begin with and doesn’t even have half of the features Google Workspace offers.
- None of these remotely come close to their US counterparts. Not by a long shot.
- “cannot contact port 25 on <remote host>” may very well be a configuration error. How should the program know?
- There are a lot of European “cloud” providers, but there’s not one that offers anything even close to AWS/GCP/Cloudflare. If you need more than compute and S3, you’re pretty much SOL.
- You know what? Adding another example from a "non oppressive dictatorship" country: Germany.
Every few years, Germany tries to push for [Vorratsdatenspeicherung](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorratsdatenspeicherung), which forces ISPs to store all connection data for later analysis by law enforcement. This is against the German constitution, so it gets overturned after a few years and the cycle starts again.
Point is, if you want your data to not be analyzed by law enforcement, and you live in Germany, you may want to use a VPN and connect to, for example, the Netherlands, where no such law exists.
Now, as we established, the VPN providers lie about it and maybe they don't have an exit point in the Netherlands, so they just let you exit in Germany again.
Same situation as before, but less extreme. Germany now will be able to put together metadata and find out what you were actually doing.
Are you going to jail for that? Maybe, if you did something highly illegal. You probably deserve it in this case.
But this isn't the point of discussions like these. It's always fine until something like Hitler happens and you happen to be jewish. You just can't know how the future will play out, and if your data is stored somewhere, it can be abused. VPNs promise to be a solution to this issue, and they apparently aren't. Which is a problem, even in a healthy democracy.
People like you pretending this isn't a problem, are a problem. It's the same argument as "I don't have anything to hide." Yes, maybe you don't have anything to hide today. Tomorrow? That might no longer be true. Take abortions in the US as a recent example.
- I really don't understand what you're not getting here. I'm not trying to be condescending, but I explained it as simple as possible. But let's break it down again:
1) You currently reside in Iran for whatever reason.
2) You download, or have downloaded previously, a VPN software that does not tell you where you exit truthfully.
3) You connect to Pakistan, because you want to spread information that is illegal in Iran, but legal in Pakistan. You choose Pakistan because it is near you, so you get better latency.
4) In reality, your VPN exits not in Pakistan, but in Iran. Because they lied.
5) Iran is now able to monitor both your connection traffic to the VPN, and your VPN's exit traffic.
6) You die.
Simple as that. I don't see why this is not a realistic use case in your mind? One very prominent selling point for VPN providers is exactly this. Allowing reporters and other minorities to still safely access the internet in areas in which it is not allowed by law. You don't have to be an Iranian for that. You can just be there, as an international correspondent, using a western VPN, for example. Or you're visiting family after purchasing that VPN in Europe somewhere.
> No VPN providers are accidentally routing into an oppressive dictatorship.
The entire point of this article is that you as the user can't know that. And almost every country is applying some kind of censorship that may or may not affect you. As I mentioned in my previous example, Snowden is a real life situation in which this exact thing would have mattered. He didn't live in an oppressive dictatorship, yet a VPN exiting in Canada vs. exiting in the U.S. would have made a significant difference in safety for him.
- China was just an example. Try to extrapolate on your own.
Take someone from Russia, Iran, wherever, trying to access information they aren't allowed to access, or sharing information they aren't allowed to share. They think they're connected to a neighboring country, but in reality are exiting from their own country. Therefore, the traffic gets analyzed and they fall out a window.
Imagine Snowden sharing information about the NSA while using a VPN that actually exited from the US. Things might have developed differently.
Yes, it won't matter for most services. But as soon as states or ISPs are involved, you're fucked if you get it wrong.
- Yes. Let’s take an extreme example: you think you exit in Japan, but you’re actually exiting in China. This means your traffic will be analyzed and censored by China.
The routers don’t care about where the provider says the IP comes from. If the packet travels through the router, it gets processed. So it very much matters if you do things that are legal in one country, but might not be in another. You know, one of the main reasons for using VPNs.
- No
- FIFA just had to pay for a little trophy
- I’m sure that decision will look real smart in 3 years time.
- Okay then, tell me a way to prevent this.
- Okay then, explain to me why this is only possible with NPM? Does it have a hidden "pwn" button that I don't know about?
- But your site will be down for 3 hours once every 3 years!!1
- Add to that, once an attacker has your server's IP (because it wasn't behind a CDN in the first place), it's basically impossible to fend off the attack unless the attacker is not very bright, or you swap your server's IP.
- Nadella is obviously a very smart and successful business leader. He achieved his goals and transformed Microsoft into a very successful, healthy company. This is why I personally think he isn’t just a bland idiot like for example Steve Ballmer.
However, it’s clear that Nadella’s goals are everything but noble. He doesn’t care about the product, and he really doesn’t care about the customer. He only cares about number go up.