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Mozilla Encryption Privacy

'Mozilla VPN' Launches in Six Countries (mozilla.org) 69

Posted by EditorDavid from the no-user-data-logs dept.
"Starting today, there's a VPN on the market from a company you trust," Mozilla announced Wednesday.

Mozilla VPN is now officially available for Windows and Android in six countries: the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Singapore, Malaysia, and New Zealand, and it'll be coming to even more countries later this year, reports the Verge: The service is available for $4.99 a month, and, like other VPNs, it's designed to make your web-browsing more private and secure. As part of the move, the service is being rebranded from Firefox Private Network to Mozilla VPN, a change that was announced last month.

Mozilla argues that its VPN service has a couple of advantages over its many competitors. It says it should offer a faster browsing experience in many cases because it's based on a protocol with less than a third of the lines of code of an average VPN service provider. The company is also banking on the reputation it's built up with its privacy-focused browser, and it adds that it only collects the information it needs to run a service and doesn't keep user data logs.

The VPN's launch follows beta trials in the US, which also included tests of a VPN built directly into the Firefox browser. Last month, Mozilla announced that it would be testing asking users to pay $2.99 a month for unlimited usage of the extension, which is designed to mask your traffic within the browser rather than at a system-wide level.
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'Mozilla VPN' Launches in Six Countries More

'Mozilla VPN' Launches in Six Countries

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  • Seriously, try downloading something legitimate, like a linux distribution torrent. If you are in the US, you will soon find out what their version of "privacy" means. US VPN providers have been issuing warnings from Hollywood media companies and shutting down accounts for years. Our government is sticking its nose into our business, just like China.

  • based on a protocol with less than a third of the lines of code of an average VPN service provider

    Yes, but are those lines written in Rust? Inquiring minds demand to know.

  • Complete with Slashdot affiliate links to the signup pages.

    • Have you been here the past week? They obviously need the money.

    • Firefox is a good net citizen so I like to see them promoted and their intitiative get rooted in use so they will be there for me later.

      Now what is the likely speed impact of this. If there's almost none for normal browsing, then 2.99$ seems like a baragin expecially since it will be integrated in my browser not some additional third party I have to trust (i.e. i'm already trusting firefox so no extra trust needed)

      • not sure if VPNs do much there. they can still fingerprint me right?

      • Re:firefox gets a pass (Score:5, Interesting)

        by MrL0G1C ( 867445 ) on Sunday July 19, 2020 @01:55PM (#60308073) Journal

        Last time I used Firefox I had to go on an expedition into options and turn off a ton of stuff to get any privacy. Either Mozilla are stupid and don't understand what privacy means or they are dishonest, take your pick.

        If they really cared about privacy they would have better default settings or ask on a new install what level of privacy is wanted.

        Waterfox fork of Firefox has better privacy by default also Slimjet (chromium based) has better privacy options than Chrome.

        NornVPN supposedly stops WebRTC leaks, does MozillaVPN stop WebRTC leaks?

        Can the browser still easily be fingerprinted, that's one good privacy test that Mozilla took forever to do anything about.
        https://panopticlick.eff.org/ [eff.org]

        Mozilla does privacy wrong, they have a block-list rather than a pass-list which means that anyone who wants to fingerprint your browser can so long as Firefox hasn't stopped them in a pointless game of whack-a-mole. Point is if Mozilla doesn't know about a fingerprinting server then you are going to get fingerprinted because they don't block the actual fingerprinting.

        And they are US based, everyone knows you don't use US or five-eyes based countries for VPN, you might as well just ask the NSA what VPN services they have.

        • If your goal is to hide activity that would be criminal in the five eyes country, Mozilla VPN would be a terrible choice. On the other hand, if you are trying to hide *political* activity from some other government it may be a good choice (i.e. China). Of course my guess is that it will be blocked in China.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

            Governments love to spy on 'lefties', they're more concerned about politics than they are crime because they are paranoid politicians.

            With systems like echelon set up to spy on everything I wouldn't trust any five eyes country VPN to protect against criminal, political or corporate spying.

            • Yes, if you are a Chinese user, the US government might *spy* on you but they are unlikely to report you to the Chinese government unless you are planning something criminal. (i.e. the US told Russia about an impending terrorist attack and got nothing in return). Its not clear that the US government would be interested in helping China track down political dissidents just for fun. Once you start planning to blow things up, the situation changes.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

                Most governments spy on everybody as much as they can get away with and afford to. The US govt is likely for instance recording all telephone calls permanently because they can do that and store the data easily. It's naive to think governments don't spy on their citizens.

                • I didn't say the US government wouldn't spy. I said that they have no interest in turning over information about run-of-the-mill dissidents to the Chinese government!

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

                PS:
                "Created in the late 1960s to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War, the ECHELON project became formally established in 1971.[5][6]

                By the end of the 20th century, the system referred to as "ECHELON" had evolved beyond its military and diplomatic origins into "a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications" (mass surveillance and industrial espionage).[7] "

                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

                "In 19

          • You don't need a vpn in China. There are connections that are totally unobfuscated. You just have to know.

    • Complete with Slashdot affiliate links to the signup pages.

      Not seeing any affiliate info in any of the links.

      There is a campaign variable of mozilla-vpn-v1-0-announcement but that seems pretty generic.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Toad-san ( 64810 )

      Well hell, that goes without saying!

      I don't know why I'd need any security, really. My internet browsing is fairly innocuous ... other than the serious research on long rifles and scopes, noise suppressors, Kevlar-penetrating ammo, availability of hotel rooms and tall trees near the White House and Trump golf courses. You know, stuff like that. Oh, and bombs of course: one can never learn enough about bombs. [waves to monitors]

  • So many dodgy VPN providers out there, who knows who to trust. This is a good move by Mozilla.

    • Friend, when we're living in a country where the DHS sends the Secret Police to Portland, Oregon to snatch people off the street into unmarked vans to do who-knows-what to them, I'm not sure anything or anyone can be trusted anymore.

      We're Mozilla, trust us!
      (hands the government all your data under the table)

      How can you know?

    • Hmm, for $5 a month, you can rent your own server at Linnode and run a SSH proxy.
      • ...and Linnode wont rat you out for anything, ever? Wont ever try to make more than $5/mo off of you?

        Nice world you live in.

        • Depends what you want the vpn/ssh tunnel for, doesn't it? It's not only to hide nefarious activities... just fixing the Internet is my main reason for using one. ISPs can really screw with stuff.

  • If you're so paranoid that you feel the need to use a VPN, then how can you trust any VPN provider ?

    • "Paranoid" . . .

      Did you fall out of a time before the Snowden leaks or something?

      Put you head back in the sand and go back to sleep. Pay no attention to your five inch anus hole. All is well. --.--

    • If you're so paranoid that you feel the need to use a VPN, then how can you trust any VPN provider ?

      I see your point, and it is valid, can you have your eyes open these days and NOT be paranoid? What we used to call paranoia has simply become reasonable and necessary caution. This applies whether you have something nefarious to hide or not. Perhaps you can't truly trust that any VPN will hide your ass in all circumstances, but it's better to have that layer protection than not.

      It's safer to be a faceless, nameless, anonymous apparition than a celebrity with an entourage, at least most of the time. I may

      • You are not paranoid if they really are after you, in which case, you should probably use your own servers and not random servers on the net.

  • You think we trust "you"? (Score:3)

    by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Sunday July 19, 2020 @12:24PM (#60307771)

    Who are you even?
    Random contributors from around the world?

    No, Firefox is acceptable, because it is verifiable*.

    Which is most likely not the case for your VPN or servers. (And I don't mean the code. I mean inspecting the actual running instance and server!)

    Yeah, you're more worthy of trust than say Google, or HideMyAss etc.

    But still not above the "Will be in the news in a few years for having logged everying and sold it off to spies." line.

    Besides: I got my own VPN. Which is not exactly hard nowadays. And DNS. Which you deliberately put a leak in by circumventing it in Firefox with DoH (pronounced like Homer would). Thanks, assholes!

    And yeah, I offer it to friends too. You know, because that's where actual trust is actually possible, because we know who we are!

    _ _ _ _
    * Note: It is most definitely not actually verified, or even directly verifiable by a human, due to being a disguised abimination of an entire bells-and-whistles consumer OS.

    • Ok, so how do you set up your own VPN? I assume you are renting a cloud server or colocating your own? How do you know the company providing you with Internet access there won't sell your info and IP address? Even if you pay with cryptocurrency they might log IP addresses of your traffic.

      It's really hard to be really anonymous online.

  • }} The company is also banking on the reputation it's built up with its privacy-focused browser {{ --- Does Mozilla mean the browser that installed and enabled a tracking task in Windows without telling the user? And re-enabled that task if a user happened to discover it and disable it? ( https://blog.mozilla.org/data/... [mozilla.org] )
  • If this is like Firefox Send, can we expect the service to just indefinitely shut down when it doesn't meet their security aspirations? Did they threat model this one, or is their model to figure out the threat model after dumping the product?

  • It can't come soon enough. In countries like Venezuela, Iran, China, Belarus and others, the internet is heavily controlled, and the government/state/regime embarks in Spying and/or Censoring on a country wide scale. (In Venezuela is country wide censoring, but I guess in other countries could be country wide spying).

    I perosnally use ProtonVPN via TunnelBlick on Mac, but let's face it, many users are not able to configure a(ny) VPN app on windows (the easiest use case), nor to choose a reliable VPN provider (Yesterday it made it to the front page of lashdot that a bunch of "no log" VPNs were keeping and leaking logs).

    Having a tool like this will enable a big chunk of the population (that are not PIPs*) to bypass censoring, loging and spying.

    * PIP = Politically Important Person. For those people, a Browser Only Mozilla VPN will not do. They will need stronger measures, probably TAILS and such.

    PS: I do have a TAILS iso and VM, and know how to use it, in preparation for a time when it is needed, even if I am not a PIP. But for the time being, the VPN is enough.

    • I mentioned this in another comment but might be more appropriate here. My original thought was that this would be a technically superior choice for those living in these regimes but it would also probably get blocked?

      • I mentioned this in another comment but might be more appropriate here. My original thought was that this would be a technically superior choice for those living in these regimes but it would also probably get blocked?

        Actually, is a technically inferior solution, in part because is easy to block, and in part because it only covers your activity in the browser. Anything else (say skype, zoom, that app that the resistance crafted for ultrasecret communications) is not protected.

        But, for normal "run of the mill/salt of the earth" people, while technically inferior,. if better than no protection at all because you are not technicall enough to set the protection up propperly, or choose a non-back-stabbing provider.

  • How long until their logs (or evidence of their existence) leak? Lime many others, I tend to trust Mozilla, and would like to, but how many other VPN providers have claimed "no logs" and then been proven to be liars?

  • Mozilla can't even handle private life maturely (Score:4, Insightful)

    by xavdeman ( 946931 ) on Sunday July 19, 2020 @02:26PM (#60308145)

    Brendan Eich, who developped JavaScript, was pushed out (ahem, pressured to resign) in 2014 when it was revealed he privately supported a political cause back in 2008 (!).

    https://www.bbc.com/news/techn... [bbc.com]

    "The chief executive of Mozilla - the company best known for its Firefox browser - has stepped down.

    Brendan Eich was appointed just last month but came in for heavy criticism for his views on same-sex marriage.

    Mozilla's executive chairwoman Mitchell Baker announced the decision in a blog post.

    "Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn't live up to it," she wrote.

    (...)

    Mr Eich, who co-founded Mozilla and was also the creator of the JavaScript scripting language, made a $1,000 (£600) donation in 2008 in support of Californian anti-gay marriage law Proposition 8."

    And now they want us to trust them with routing all our traffic through their VPN? Just know that if you press Like on something politically incorrect, blue haired feminists will get you fired from your job 5 years later.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • The company is also banking on the reputation it's built up with its privacy-focused browser, and it adds that it only collects the information it needs to run a service and doesn't keep user data logs.

    I thought providers in the U.S. were required by federal law to keep logs.

    • It's all in the way it's said, isn't it? If U.S. laws needs logs to be kept, then Mozilla "only collects the information it needs to run the service", which in the U.S. would include collecting logs.

    • Yup, I would not trust any servers in the USA. They're worse than China, by a long way.

  • There was an article about this yesterday. There are 2 types of VPN providers - those that keep logs, and those that lie about not keeping logs.

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