Atlas VPN To Shut Down, Transfers Paid Subscribers To NordVPN 39
Atlas VPN informed customers on Monday that it will discontinue its services on April 24, citing technological demands, market competition, and escalating costs as key factors in the decision. The company said it will transfer its paid subscribers to its sister company, NordVPN, for the remainder of their subscription period to ensure uninterrupted VPN services.
No link to Announcement? (Score:4, Informative)
https://atlasvpn.com/blog/announcement
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click and go [atlasvpn.com] Thanks for the link.
Who trusts these VPN companies? (Score:2, Informative)
It's a scareware legacy industry from before HTTPS/TLS was used universally. Their marketing is technically inaccurate and plain deceitful. Why woul
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These days I'd say the killer app for VPNs is for people who live in states with stupid porn age verification laws.
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In 2024, I think for 99.9% of use cases No VPN is as good as VPN.
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I think most folks nowadays use it not to avoid tracking or to preserve their privacy, but to circumvent geofenced streaming content by appearing to reside in a different place than they actually do.
Sure, the advertising is super offputting by claiming to protect your privacy and provide for 'safe banking' or similar stupid stuff, but folks know what is really the deal, even if the providers have to play ignorant about the real utility of obscuring your origin.
Re: Who trusts these VPN companies? (Score:1)
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I spent ten minutes disabusing them of this notion that it protects them on public WiFi.
Obviously, you were trying to hack them, nice try!
I suppose there are some things which might still suggest a VPN toward an end other than streaming content:
-Misbehaving DNS (though you could *just* do the DNS without the rest of the networking being affected)
-Your local provider blacklisting certain network addresses/address ranges
-You want to obscure what sites you are visiting from your local provider (knowing the IP address is usually still enough to know exactly what you are up to). Your local provider
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-Misbehaving DNS (though you could *just* do the DNS without the rest of the networking being affected) -Your local provider blacklisting certain network addresses/address ranges -You want to obscure what sites you are visiting from your local provider (knowing the IP address is usually still enough to know exactly what you are up to). Your local provider might be your employer that cares about you visiting content they don't like, even if perfectly legal, while the VPN provider doesn't have a horse in the race.
DNS attacks using ARPSpoof and SSLStrip MiTM techniques have not worked in the last decade due to widespread use of HSTS. One can also just set their DNS to 1.1.1.1 using TLS to ensure it can't be tampered with.
If your employer is just monitoring network traffic via IP of sites visited for HTTP requests, they're doing it wrong. I've never seen a system that does this for content filtering withou
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It's really odd for people to need a dedicated commercial provider (NordVPN) IP address to access some type of corporate resource -- usually, they'll setup a corporate-controlled VPN concentr
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Re:Who trusts these VPN companies? (Score:4, Interesting)
"VPN encryption of data is redundant thanks to the use of TLS and HSTS on most web sites" There's more to the internet than just websites...
Yep, and pretty much all of it is encrypted with TLS at this point..at least, I hope you're logging in via SSH and not telnet in 2024. What are you using that's plaintext?
I agree this is probably not a typical use case for the average user, but it useful for me. For example, consulting for a company that does not want to "onboard" me fully.
For that case, an OpenVPN concentrator at a cloud provider should do the trick without paying NordVPN, probably fits in AWS free tier.
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I use a VPN when travelling, because a lot of networks still don't provide IPv6 and i have a large number of IPv6-only resources that i need to access.
The cost of getting legacy IP for all those resources (some of which are outside of my control) would be MUCH higher than the cost of connecting to a VPN.
Re:Who trusts these VPN companies? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's "The Truth" (all the things they say a VPN is good for) and the truth (it's there to hide your BitTorrent traffic from your ISP)
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Perhaps you are correct, but having one did prove convenient a few years ago. I worked at a Wal-Mart, and net connections were spotty inside the store. The store did provide a wireless network, but they blocked some political websites I liked to visit. A VPN let me go to them.
Necessary or lifesaving? No. Convenient, yes. ::shrug::
Oh yeah, it also helped me access some Japanese porn sites that didn't allow logins from the US.
Re: Who trusts these VPN companies? (Score:3)
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Well duh, because that nice YouTuber on the internet told me to.
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Also my router at home advertise as the only DNS server, intercept every DNS request in case it's hardcoded, and is using DoT/dnssec to resolve. I can be anywhere even connected to public WiFi and check with DNS check tools [dnscheck.tools] that my DNS is secure and using cloudfare/quad9.
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They have one use: They can make you look like you're located somewhere else. This is particularly useful when you want to access something that will block you if you use a local IP address. Granted, this is a rather overcomplicated way to get a proxy address, but it's the easiest way to do it for a lot of people.
Re: Who trusts these VPN companies? (Score:2)
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Access things at your workplace=> Use your employer's VPN
Access things at your home=> Use your own VPN
Access geofenced streaming=> Use a VPN Service
Circumvent local censorship laws=> Use a VPN Service
Security in a coffee shop?
They would have to fake the ssl/tls key
So I think that means it's a site you haven't been to or at least don't have the key cached?
But then.. they would have to fake the certificate provider right?
And communication with that would go back to a key that is built into your br
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Cloudflare's free DNS service is pretty effective for Coffee Shop MiTM attacks.
The content filtering for the Wifi on my local train service seems to think that every exchange server (including both my own, and the Microsoft 365 ones), are phishing sites. It does the MiTM thing to redirect to a blocking notification page. The SSL picks that up and displays an error message, or rather one error message for each of the email accounts I have set up on the phone, which gets annoying real fast.
If I set up Cloudfl
VPNs useless these days (Score:2)
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Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: Your signature (Score:2)
There is no indication that Franklin ever said that, or anything like it. The earliest known version [quoteinvestigator.com] (with ages of 25 and 60) is from 1925, some 135 years after Franklin died, and was attributed to orator G.E. Marchand. The earliest attribution was a mention in 1987, but it contained no reference to any of his works.
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You're welcome. I've taken to checking every quote I use against Quote Investigator to start, and then trying to find it elsewhere if they haven't done it. I've gone down some rabbit holes until I find a random letter written in 1787 that ties it conclusively to an author, but I think it's better that effort than getting the attribution wrong.
YouTube Sponsors (Score:3)
Ouch. They sponsored probably half the YouTube videos I watch. They must have dumped a ton of money on those sponsorships. Who's going to fund all those channels now?
(Well, maybe not half, but I did see them mentioned often, though only when watching something just posted, as Sponsor Block skips over those sections most of the time.)
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makes sense now. was curious why a lot of channels stopped advertising them. Ground News seems to have stepped in to a good chunk of them.
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That's true. I see Ground News advertising all over the place now. At least what they sell doesn't appear to be exactly the same as a dozen other companies.
well that's unfortunate (Score:1)
although Nord may not hold logs.. they do weirdly have access to data that can trace back to your account, IP, and activities over the tunnel, including all the sessions you open...
which to me was a reason to never use them again, nor to suggest others to use them... we don't store logs of your sessions, but we do have all this data on them from our "machine" algorithm that also reviews them for ToS violations... which apparently can be violated when you open too many sessions too often which can happen wh