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.

    • 7bicycles [he/him]
      ·
      10 months ago

      glad to see another fan of the "it all has backdoors, but opposing governenments can do a lot less harm with it" approach to cybersecurity

      • SerLava [he/him]
        ·
        10 months ago

        Literally insane, just don't move to Russia idiots

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]
      ·
      10 months ago

      Westerners don’t want to admit this, but the only safe VPNs are made by their enemies lol. And this isn’t even “tankie” propaganda. If you were Russian or Chinese it’d be your best interest to use western VPNs. Maybe not American ones unless you want to end up like burned Iranian CIA assets

    • farting_weedman [none/use name]
      ·
      10 months ago

      Kaspersky was at least at one point a resold version of hotspot.

      here’s an article that has a lot of details.

      Hotspot isn’t exactly in the best situation to be a vpn you’d trust if you were worried about law enforcement.

        • farting_weedman [none/use name]
          ·
          10 months ago

          That’s a good way to evaluate lots of stuff.

          One way that kaspersky might not be safe enough for you, if it’s still a rebrand of hotspot which I haven’t confirmed, is that hotspot has offices in states where they can be compelled to install equipment and software to monitor throughput without notifying customers. That’s no big deal for Russians and Syrians because they’re still protected from those states actions by a bunch of layers of international law and whatnot. If you aren’t safe from, for example, the us government because you, for example, live in the us then it might not be the protection appropriate for you and your uses.

          It’s one of those circumstances where at the very least a warrant canary would be good, but would also only provide certain assurances and would rely on the users awareness to function.

    • moondog [he/him]
      ·
      10 months ago

      Kaspersky:

      Server speeds of up to 10 Gbps keep your devices running fast

      Does this mean I have to browse through them at 10Gbps instead of the typical 100Gbps I get from my ISP? Seems a bit painful