Virtual Private Networks

• VPN-Vergleich

Nein, wirklich. Du liest das sicher, weil Du dich gefragt hast:

• welchen VPN-Service soll ich nutzen?
• was ist ein guter VPN-Anbieter?

Die Antwort auf diese Fragen ist in der Regel: Nein. Du sollst keine VPN-Anbieter nutzen, da diese nicht das liefern können, was sie versprechen.

alles ab hier ist englisch! Übersetzen.

Because a VPN in this sense is just a glorified proxy. The VPN provider can see all your traffic, and do with it what they want - including logging.

There is no way for you to verify that, and of course this is what a malicious VPN provider would claim as well. In short: the only safe assumption is that every VPN provider logs.

And remember that it is in a VPN provider's best interest to log their users - it lets them deflect blame to the customer, if they ever were to get into legal trouble. The $10/month that you're paying for your VPN service doesn't even pay for the lawyer's coffee, so expect them to hand you over.

I'll believe that when HideMyAss goes out of business. They gave up their users years ago, and this was widely publicized. The reality is that most of their customers will either not care or not even be aware of it.

Doesn't matter. You're still connecting to their service from your own IP, and they can log that.

VPNs don't provide security. They are just a glorified proxy.

VPNs don't provide privacy, with a few exceptions (detailed below). They are just a proxy. If somebody wants to tap your connection, they can still do so - they just have to do so at a different point (ie. when your traffic leaves the VPN server).

Use SSL/TLS and HTTPS (for centralized services), or end-to-end encryption (for social or P2P applications). VPNs can't magically encrypt your traffic - it's simply not technically possible. If the endpoint expects plaintext, there is nothing you can do about that.

When using a VPN, the only encrypted part of the connection is from you to the VPN provider. From the VPN provider onwards, it is the same as it would have been without a VPN. And remember, the VPN provider can see and mess with all your traffic.

Your IP address is a largely irrelevant metric in modern tracking systems. Marketers have gotten wise to these kind of tactics, and combined with increased adoption of CGNAT and an ever-increasing amount of devices per household, it just isn't a reliable data point anymore.

Marketers will almost always use some kind of other metric to identify and distinguish you. That can be anything from a useragent to a fingerprinting profile. A VPN cannot prevent this.

There are roughly two usecases where you might want to use a VPN:

1. You are on a known-hostile network (eg. a public airport WiFi access point, or an ISP that is known to use MITM), and you want to work around that.
2. You want to hide your IP from a very specific set of non-government-sanctioned adversaries - for example, circumventing a ban in a chatroom or preventing anti-piracy scareletters.

In the second case, you'd probably just want a regular proxy specifically for that traffic - sending all of your traffic over a VPN provider (like is the default with almost every VPN client) will still result in the provider being able to snoop on and mess with your traffic.

However, in practice, just don't use a VPN provider at all, even for these cases.

If you absolutely need a VPN, and you understand what its limitations are, purchase a VPS and set up your own (either using something like Streisand or manually - I recommend using Wireguard). I will not recommend any specific providers (diversity is good!), but there are plenty of cheap ones to be found on LowEndTalk.

A VPN provider specifically seeks out those who are looking for privacy, and who may thus have interesting traffic. Statistically speaking, it is more likely that a VPN provider will be malicious or a honeypot, than that an arbitrary generic VPS provider will be.

Die Anbieter verdienen damit einen Haufen Geld. Du setzt einfach OpenVPN und Co. auf ein paar Servern auf, schreibst ein nettes Webinterface, bietest deine Dienste zur besseren Auslastung (Zeitzonen!) weltweit an und fängst quasi an, einfach Bandbreite weiterzuverkaufen – mit einer riesigen Marge.

Du kannst deinen Kunden alles versprechen, weil niemand deine Behauptungen verifizieren kann. Du musst nicht einmal wissen, was du da genau tust, weil dir niemand über die Schulter schauen kann. Technisch versierte Nutzer werden aus den genannten Gründen keine Kunden bei Dir, weil sie sich selbst Server aufsetzen können, und kritisieren Dein Angebot daher auch selten.

Ja, VPN-Dienste haben einen Sinn und Zweck. Allerdings eher als Produkt für den Anbieter, nicht für die Kunden.

• UFO VPN exposed millions of log files about users of its service, including their account passwords and IP addresses, despite claiming that it keeps no logs. (comparitech, 7/2020)