I’m not convinced the VPNs actually make financial sense, I kinda wonder if there is someone funding them. They market so aggressively, and are priced so cheaply it doesnt quite make sense to me.
I used to work for PIA. The best users are the occasional user, and there’s a lot of them. They cost little bandwidth, they pop on every now and then and off fairly quickly. Andrew also got pretty lucky, riding both the Bitcoin and Snowden waves. It probably did ultimately run at a loss at some point, but all the big ones could ride on their crypto payments rapidly increasing in value, and the hardcore privacy people were very happy to pay in crypto.
You can easily cram ~1000-5000 active users on a 10 Gbps server because you can assume that most people are far from reaching gigabit on their own (OpenVPN limitations helped a lot there). Even at just a dollar a year per users you’ve still got 5 grands which more than pays for the server which really only needs a good NIC and a bunch of IPs. But remember, most of those are idle or not connected at all, so you can have many more users than there is bandwidth available. And at that scale you get bulk discounts on the servers as you fill up a good rack or two.
I have to imagine at this point the market is incredibly saturated though, I left a bit over 6 years ago.
What I wonder is… how?! A quick search shows that half of people in the USA use Chrome, another 30% Safari, 8% use Edge, and only 5% Firefox. This study was done by Ghostery so perhaps they chose a biased subset of the population? It just seems weird to me to think that more than half of average users use ad-blocking, these days.
My mom knows nothing about adblock, and is still blocking ads. You better believe all of the kids having to fix their relative’s computers will set up some free antivirus and ad blocking right away.
Can’t comment on the sample size though, Ghostery might indeed be somehow biased and measure devices where their software is installed vs. total number of internet users or something? But users of ghostery are more likely to be tech savvy, so there’s a higher chance of them having more devices that are equally sanitized.
I’d have to dig through the study and see if the sampling mechanism is made public.
will set up some free antivirus and ad blocking right away.
Those mfs have got a way to go if they’re setting up free antiviruses. Free anti-virsus will hurt your system probably more on average than actual viruses
I have an inherent distrust to all things Microsoft. And their firewall is so terrible that I don’t want to find out they were as negligent when it came to developing their antivirus.
Some years ago, the Windows Defender certainly was a joke, but currently is very capable with an detection quote of 100%. A cause that Windows, as the most used OS was always also the most atacked by malware, but the devs of MS at least had made a good job. Windows is certainly an privacy nightmare, at least if used in default settings, but in question of security is currently maybe the best protected with safe boot, a good sandbox system and Defender, and, well, the Firewall is good, but sometimes overreacting with the need to whitelist some downloads and apps. But at all, there isn’t anymor need for 3rd party AVs.
The better option is not to use windows at all, but if you are, I don’t think disabling windows defender will stop them from getting whatever they want anyway.
Here we are spaking about that this Spyware is pretty resistant against all kind of malware, not about that it’s needed to gut it from all kind of telemetries, bloatware and not needed services before the first use, that is another thing.
Kaspersky Free is top grade stuff. Bitdefender Free is good but has false positives. Defender is a joke against ransomware and without internet connection. Rest are bad.
According to statistics on my server, it’s 57% Chrome, 14% Safari and 12% Firefox. Also 10% use Linux. I’m not hosting anything tech related though.
Anyways, adblocking is kind of essential. Even the boomers ask what’s wrong when ads start showing. The only people I’ve seen browsing without adblock are Apple users.
Good. Ad blocking is security and anyone that tells you different both doesn’t care about your computer security, and also wants to sell you something.
That 2/3 to 3/4 of computer programmers, computer security experts and advertisers seems low. I feel like that should be closer to 90%
I do like the point about encouraging the major distros to combine their efforts on kernel versions. Everyone would benefit from that (which is why they don’t do it, not when they’re making money off of extended LTS services)
Personally I think it would be of great benefit if Enterprise vendors just stopped doing that extremely long term support. It just enables the people who want to pretend they can stop the world around them and those people are bad for everyone, especially in a security context but also because they pretend that “stability” is achieved by using old versions.
I hope that the community at large can wrestle kernel livepatching away from the commercial distros. No reason the big names should have a monopoly on that.
Even where those are concerned, it’s not a silver bullet for seamlessly jumping major kernel versions, but it’s a start.
I feel it was a direct reply to the comment above.
Dinosaurs don’t want to give up their extended LTS kernels because upgrading is a hassle and often requires rebooting, occasionally to a bad state.
So how can you bring your userbase forward so you don’t have to keep slapping security patches onto an ancient kernel?
I feel it was a direct reply to the comment above.
At no point did it mention livepatching.
Dinosaurs don’t want to give up their extended LTS kernels because upgrading is a hassle and often requires rebooting, occasionally to a bad state.
No, Dinosaurs want LTS because it’s stable; it’s in the name.
You can’t have your proprietary shitware kernel module in any kernel other than the ABI it’s made for. You can’t run your proprietary legacy service heap of crap on newer kernels where the kernel APIs function slightly differently.
how can you bring your userbase forward so you don’t have to keep slapping security patches onto an ancient kernel?
No, Dinosaurs want LTS because it’s stable; it’s in the name.
Mostly they want LTS because if they never upgrade nobody can blame them for the failures that are happening because “not doing things” is seen as less blame-worthy than “doing things”. Actual stability is not achieved by running ancient version numbers with backported fixes. Nor is it achieved by never rebooting and then wondering why nothing works when you are inevitably forced to reboot by some unpreventable external circumstance. Actual stability is achieved by testing updates before applying them and doing so frequently so increments are small and causes of problems thus easily identifiable and fixable.
I think Arch has FOSS support kernel live patchingNixos also has an open issue where they seem to be discussing an implementation they might consider.
With upstream support and kpatch being FOSS I think the willingness is just low to maintain patches at a distro level and announcing it as a thing you can do yourself has limited audience.
I agree its super cool though and with containers and some of systems work for system level reboots and portable services I see a lot of potential for high uptime systems (like my laptop lol).
Personally I think it would be of great benefit if Enterprise vendors just stopped doing that extremely long term support. It just enables the people who want to pretend they can stop the world around them and those people are bad for everyone, especially in a security context but also because they pretend that “stability” is achieved by using old versions.
This is how I know you need to learn more about the Enterprise, about long-term support, and stability. Everything you wrote sounds like “Smoke detectors and seat belts are for chumps”
I know a lot more about those topics than I ever wished I would.
Stability doesn’t magically appear because you leave the version number unchanged. Stability is the result of qualified people (hint: people backporting patches in 100s of projects they barely know aren’t very qualified in comparison to the main developers of those projects) making well-informed changes to a project and then testing them.
Old versions with backports are still new versions, just new versions with a smaller user base and less testing.
Stability is also much harder to achieve if you do certain tasks rarely, e.g. only every 10 years, since nobody will remember how to do them.
Upstream supports those old releases only begrudgingly because every feature that needs support across all versions in use is held back by those extremely long term support versions.
I am not objecting to the goal of stability, I am objecting to the snakeoil that pretends you can achieve it by using the same version number all the time basically with a forked branch of the code that contains cherry-picked changes.
Agreed at a certain point supporting an old enough ABI is just a practice in preservation and shouldn’t be where any serious work is done on.
There are still companies that treat software development as if they craving stone for future generations instead of living collections of logic, idioms, and ideas (that reasonbly should be expected to adapted or replaced as conditions change!)
It sure is convenient for law enforcement and others to have the ability to immediately get the IP addresses of all visitors to a specific URL. (They just need to circumvent the OHTTP by asking fastly and google to collude…)
I thought Fastly sounded familiar. They’re partnering with everybody these days, including Mozilla to push “private” shopping ads in their latest browser shopping feature, and Invisiv in their multi-hop VPN.
Agree, in Vivaldi was the first thing I desactivated in the settings. It’s nothing what an good ad/trackerblocker also do (uBO, or the inbuild one in Vivaldi, it also blocks the access to phising or badware pages)
I can only speak for me, not for others. I have put this information for users who use browsers where the Google “Save” Browsing API cannot be disabled and for those who use Google anyway. This way at least they know that they have one Spyware less, if this information is true (at least in the EU)
theregister.com
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