they were all owned by the same company and sold to Kape, which has ties to the Israeli intelligence service, a few years back.
The issue is who he sold it to -- the notorious creator of some pernicious data-huffing ad-ware, Crossrider. The UK-based company was cofounded by an ex-Israeli surveillance agent and a billionaire previously convicted of insider trading who was later named in the Panama Papers. It produced software which previously allowed third-party developers to hijack users' browsers via malware injection, redirect traffic to advertisers and slurp up private data.
I personally use perfect-privacy, which didn't turn up any red flags when I did research a few years ago. it's a little lacking in features but openvpn isn't that hard to set up on linux & android. no clue how well their desktop app works.
I'm sure they still spy on my torrents but this is why I don't use any vendor provided apps or software for VPN shit (or anything else without a very compelling reason tbh), it's practically guaranteed to be adware or spyware
I guess it's time to check if my provider is on this list though
I don't know the situation on Windows but the network manager VPN integration on Gnome is actually pretty amazing. Just have my VPN set to auto connect and it just works and comes right back up without any drama when the system wakes from sleep or switches access appints etc. definitely +1 for not using the vendor apps.
Huh I've been using that same integration for years with ubuntu, and now pop os, and haven't seen an option to auto-connect... Not sure I'd want to anyhow for this particular device since I have a bunch of different vpns configured but wondering where you set that? Maybe it's just Pop that doesn't have that in the UI? I'm sure I can toggle it in nmcli
The old Pop! shell (I assume you're using the old one since last I checked the new one written in rust isn't ready to daily yet, hopefully soon though...) hasn't gotten any love in a long time, but I'm surprised you don't see it in Ubuntu. Here's what it looks like for me on Fedora:
what's weird is I see that on wifi connections but not VPN. On VPN I only get "Make available to other users". Maybe it's the openvpn integration specifically, as opposed to wireguard. I haven't checked ubuntu recently but I don't thiiiink I had it on 18.04/20.04
Oh that could be, I'll set up an openVPN connection later and see if it's any different.