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The Mullvad founder gave millions to extremist far right party (mastodon.social)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.world
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The IT company Mullvad’s founder Daniel Berntsson is behind a giant donation to the populist Örebro Party, which advocates “comprehensive re-immigration” from Sweden. “It’s sad that it’s needed,” he told Flamman.

~ https://www.flamman.se/techprofil-ger-miljoner-till-orebropartiet/

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[–] 20 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

You can totally self-host your own VPN, a lot of folks will do that so that they can access their home lab remotely (without having to open ports or set up a reverse proxy).

That said, self-hosting kind of defeats the purpose of using a VPN service if the goal is to anonymise web traffic or bypass regional restrictions/ content blocks.*

* Technically you could use a hosting service and host your own VPN in another region, but it's probably not going to be cheap, and it's kind of a stretch of the self part of self hosting.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (3 children)

    Could one use onion routing to self host and bypass the disadvantages?

    Also, thanks for a succinct and straightforward answer.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    Mmm, there's nuance with a bit of ambiguity here and I'm not deeply familiar with onion routing (security isn't my specialty, I know enough to say that I'm very out of my depth).

    Let's back up to what a VPN does: it's effectively a detour for your network traffic. Instead of traffic going from your client (I'm grouping computer/ phone and routers tougher, because you can do VPN routing at either level) and to whatever you were trying to go, the VPN server acts as a middleman. (Assuming secure traffic ssl/ https) A VPN masks your traffic from your ISP (because they just see you connecting to the VPN instead of your destination) and from your destination (because they see the request as coming from the VPN server*).

    As I understand it, onion routing conceptually similar to chaining multiple VPN hops together, such that each hop is only aware of where to go next. (I think technically, each packet is sent along a different random path).

    So. There're a couple of ways to answer your question, depending on how you interpret it or how you layer technologies.

    1. Onion routing on its own would theoretically already have the privacy advantages of a VPN- because of the way requests are bounced and split up, the receiving end doesn't know where the call came from. That assumes that whatever the client is trying to talk to accepts onion traffic and can talk back over the same protocol.
    2. Otherwise, you have to have a client on the other end of the onion route to accept your traffic, make a call to whenever you were trying to go and send it back to you. At that point you've more or less made a VPN.
    3. You could go through a VPN first and then onion route, effectively this would decouple your machine from the onion network, but it does put you back at 1 or 2 for actually getting the data you want.

    All that said, the major downside to onion routing is speed, it's incredibly slow to break your request apart, bounce it around the network a bunch of times, reassemble it on the other end, and then turn around and do it again for the return trip.

    * That also means that some sites, like reddit (fuck u/spez), will block traffic from VPN servers because multiple people's traffic all coming from the same place looks a lot like spam.

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