It's weird because the VPN industry is usually portrayed as having high margins (and it makes sense, considering how much money is spent on marketing by various VPN services).
Is it a case of "winners take all", with smaller players having little revenue and profit? But then again, everyone seems to offer their own vpn now (adguard, blokada, protonmail, etc). Is it just profitable if you offer a bare minimum, almost white labeled service?
(I guess I have always wondered how and why VPN offering seem to have exploded recently, and how tons of them seem to be able to afford lavish ad spend even with little VC money)
I'm seeing it more going the other way. Over the past few years so many services have been bought by bigger corps or even media companies. These bigger companies seem to be able to undercut the competition. Causing things like this I guess.
Though it's anyone's guess what has happened as service over time had deteriorated quite drastically.
The barrier to entry is also pretty low. It's basically a marketing game to see who can attract customers at the best rate of return. I'm guessing there are tons of VPN startups that never get large enough to keep going and the ones that do grow probably get acquired by the bigger ones.
Yeah seems to be the case. Express VPN's parent corp acquired CyberGhost, Zenmate, Private Internet access over the last few years.
They also paid as much as several of these put together for the marketing/affiliate websites Webselence, VPNmentor, Safety Detectives. Which shows how much money must be in these affiliate programs.
Sounds like a hard business for small VPN providers, getting squeezed between the cat and mouse game with content providers blocking them on one side, and users abusing the service on the other side. Same work whatever size, so better be big, or white label a big name.
Those marketing costs need to be included in the margins - put concretely, it means cost of customer acquisition is very high. If you're spending two dollars to bring in one dollar, you're going to fail.
Consolidation is an attempt to bring those costs down by reducing the number of players bidding for customers.
Consumer VPN industry is a shit show, especially in the last 3-5 years. The parasitic "VPN review" industry is making all the money, as the "big VPNs" are paying ridiculously high CPA rates (think gambling CPA rates of $50-$100). Most "review" sites rank VPNs based on a single metric - who pays the most. This is why vpnmentor (a review site) was acquired for more money than PrivateInternetAccess (a "major VPN). Hilariously, by the same company, Kape technologies which used used to make adware (as Crossrider), and then decided to go all in on "privacy".
Then there are influencers and Youtubers, all of them peddling VPNs of the highest bidder, reading off a script and making impossible / bullshit claims about capabilities of VPNs. This outright causes harm to the industry.
VPNs that don't participate in these BS schemes (or can't pay $100/signup, and wait for ROI 3 years later), have only 1 way to grow: word of mouth, based on the merits of the product. This is very difficult to do given the massive ad spend of the "big VPNs", and false advertising they engage in.
This reminds me of Web hosting and the review industry around it 20 years back and I worked for a large web hosting provider.
The founder was really open about it. And back then hosting had ~$100 CPA and we had instances where we wouldn't turn a profit on a customer who purchased a shared hosting account UNLESS they renewed after 2 years given the cost to acquire.
To this day, when I see lists reviewing services providers, I'm always skeptical of them and steer away from letting them influence my decision on a service provider.
We kind of got lumped into the VPN segment back in the day, despite being a hardware product. The cutthroat nature of the existing media agreements (NordVPN and Express VPN mainly) along with the sky high CPMs they were paying made it impossible for us to acquire customers and keep them long enough to pay our bills.
Pretty smart tactic... if you're them. Quite bad for the consumer though.
Wow. Even though you are self-interested, or maybe because of it, I hope this honesty and naked emporer approach serves you well. I have no use (?) for a VPN but I just bought the pro plan with "cool badge" sticker anyway because I like the cut of your jib.
Thanks for the support, glad you enjoyed the COOL BADGE. Windscribe is full of Easter eggs and quirks, as we don't take ourselves too seriously when it comes to PR and coms (check out our Youtube). Perhaps to our detriment in some cases...
As for Mullvad, I think it's a solid service. If one needs a VPN, and doesn't want to use Windscribe for whatever reason, I always recommend IVPN or Mullvad. Windscribe is spiritually based on IVPN (I used it for many years before WS existed). No advertising, no affiliate program, no BS claims.
At the end of the day, it tunnels your friggen packets to a remote endpoint, nothing more. That alone has virtually zero impact on privacy (safe a few exceptions, like Linux ISO torrenting). The additional/optional bells and whistles we have DO make it more of a privacy suite, but that's only one small part of the big picture.
We actually are if you're a network engineer or SRE. Even if you're not, we have room on pretty much every team (backend, web, QA) for like-minded individuals with a particular skill set. Feel free to drop me a line at yegor@windscribe.com
Woah! thanks for your reply! Exactly the type of insight I was looking for when I wrote my comment :). Does the very high CPA indicate that the core vpn service by itself is fairly inexpensive to run, meaning that a vast majority of the costs are related to marketing and customer acquisition? Was it a "better" business to run a few years ago when competition was less cutthroat?
It's certainly a lot more competitive now. There is very little customer loyalty in the industry, especially for the average joe. "Why would I pay $x/month when I can get lifetime account with NAME_GOES_HERE VPN". We did sell Lifetime accounts for a bit, 4+ years ago, they sold like hot cakes, but if you keep doing it, you're screwed long term.
For us, biggest cost (no surprise) is infrastructure and staff, which is split ~50/50. Our ad budget is $0, however the same is not true for the big snakeoil sellers out there. They burn CRAZY cash on ads, which is why the renewal terms in fine print (at least for Nord) would make American telcos salivate with jealousy. "Buy X years for price Y, get Z months free" - you don't get any "free" months (basically a lie), and it renews at 2.5x the price, if you read the fine print.
I'll take a look at your product. FWIW as a casual observer of consumer VPN recently, I will tell you two companies I have used and so far liked:
Mullvad, it performs well and I feel that the ability to pay cash/crypto, the lack of subscription both are tangible signals that they are real about anonymity.
Proton, with their Secure Core features is pretty nifty and I like that they have other products that shoehorn into "getting away from being spied on" by providing mail/calendar/drive storage as an alternative to Google. Their drive product could use some work but overall I'm really happy to pay $10/mo for VPN+custom domain mail+500GB of available cold storage.
I'm personally puzzled by Proton. Their "pedigree" is nothing to snuff at, however being a privacy oriented service and then getting consumers to tunnel all their traffic through you, use your email, cloud storage, and calendar (basically all your personal info) is an odd proposition. Same goes for Nord, who also has a password manager on top of all of this.
"We store no logs for your privacy", all whole literally storing your entire life under the umbrella of one company. Why not just stick with Google at that point? At least they're a public company and heavily regulated.
Sure if someone had a certain threat model they would want to scatter their service providers more. It does go on trust a bit that Proton is doing what they say, considering you can't "prove" they don't keep logs and that I never personally loaded a public key onto a server for them to encrypt with; they kind of hand-wave it and I assume my password is used to unlock a key that decrypts content client-side.
Proton is overrated on most aspects; Fastmail is a better alternative to Proton Mail. Dropbox better than Proton Drive. (I understand you are paranoid about it, but just mentioning it is still better technically).
and you seem to provide wireguard-configs! (which for me is the #1 criterion for a sensible VPN: provide me a hop on the road which I can use however I like it; bonus-points for Mullvads cash-top-up, it works!)
We do, but for most people we suggest to use our apps. They're open source (https://github.com/Windscribe/Desktop-App), have a LOT of neat features (split tunneling, MAC spoofing, firewall, TCP socket termination, running a local proxy server, and (as of the next update) DOH/DOT support with split horizon DNS).
You can also import your own WG and OpenVPN configs into the app, and use your own servers and benefit from all of the above mentioned features. Hell, you can even use the app without a WS account, solely for this purpose.
>VPNs that don't participate in these BS schemes (or can't pay $100/signup, and wait for ROI 3 years later), have only 1 way to grow: word of mouth, based on the merits of the product. This is very difficult to do given the massive ad spend of the "big VPNs", and false advertising they engage in.
Highly agree with this statement.
That's why from my experience of using PIA, windscribe, keepsolid, Nord and mullvad.
I keep recommending mullvad VPN to collegues, acquittances and online friend (on a down side their IP reputation sucks badly, too much of captchas)
I don't know much about VPNs but that statement is one of my red flags: when a VPN provider is vague about ip reputation migrations I assume they're buying residential proxys.
We do use those for geo-unblocking, but they're not used for anti-CAPTCHA mitigations. We own and operate special purposes ASes and IP prefixes for that.
All of this can also be (verifiably) disabled by the end user in the web control panel.
My read of GP's reply is: they use residential proxies to get around geo-blocking, and separately have special purpose ASs to avoid captchas. They're separate solutions serving separate needs; connecting to Netflix gets you the residential IP, regular browsing would get you the other one.
I implemented the SOCKS5 proxy, and I hardly get any. Shifted from ProtonVPN to Mullvad; rock solid connection; great app. Totally worth the investment. ProtonVPN's app is clunky, and I am not happy with it. Besides, zero Linux support despite the premium charge. I am not affiliated with Mullvad, but this represents an excellent value for money. I still have to try Windscribe. I have heard good things about them.
Wow I had no idea those fake review sites were such a big money maker. As a technical person I would instantly discard them and look for comments from real users. Word of mouth is also how I ended up with Mullvad.
I thought this kind of thing didn't happen so much with VPNs as their target market is pretty technical and I would expect those people not to fall for 'review' or comparison site scams.
Clearly I was completely wrong. I'm sorry to hear your industry is basically being blackmailed by these scammers (I consider a site pretending to give advice or comparisons but instead offering the highest bidder a total scam)
Everything is fake on MOST (I'm talking 99%) review sites. The comments are fake/cherry picked too, to make the "best" VPN look best.
We did some tests years ago by commenting positive things on "best" VPNs, and negative ones on "not best" ones. These get published every time. Do the same in reverse, only a small fraction gets posted.
Most of these "reviews" are written by SEO blog spammers, as most review sites are owned by marketing agencies or people with marketing backgrounds.
I recognize that this isn't fair, and apologize for this, but the consumer VPN industry is so obviously full of scammers and nonsense that I wouldn't go with any of the providers at all.
I have no way of knowing with anything approaching confidence which ones are decent and which ones aren't.
Actually, you're selling it very well. Speaking frankly is the first step towards gaining trust -- even if that frank speech appears not to be flattering.
I don't know much about the industry, but I'm a bit surprised to hear about them having high margins.
I'd have thought that maintaining infrastructure would be kind of a pain. You need to have outgoing access points all over the place. I assume that they mostly just rent them, but still, that's just a bunch of egress fees. And I'm sure that their customers love to stream movies through their VPN.
I suppose the fact that I hear about VPNs mostly through commercials means that the margins must be high, or they wouldn't spend so much on acquisition. But it seems like an unpleasant business to be in, with a lot of overhead and customer handholding.
> how and why VPN offering seem to have exploded recently, and how tons of them seem to be able to afford lavish ad spend even with little VC money)
This is entirely conspiracy theory, but I suspect state sponsorship.
Looking at our access logs over the same amount of time, we'd have our domestic users doing normal things, and then oddball traffic from Russia and China (and wherever else) trying to bruteforce credentials and probe for vulnerabilities.
Then we started seeing our domestic users logging in from oddball places ("Bob doesn't live or work in ___..."), and these would turn out to be legit-- they'd be using ExpressVPN or whatever. Not ideal, but ok.
But the vulnerability scans and spray-and-prays stopped coming in from foreign countries, and started coming in from known VPN ASNs-- the same ones as our legit users coming in from the same sources. While there used to be some divide between the really scummy providers and the more-sortof-legit ones, this problem has gotten even worse as these services consolidate. Now everybody's coming in from something M247-owned and that's that.
These days, enough of our users have been enticed by the promises of the VPN industry that we can't really tell who's who anymore based on IP address, and the same thing is starting to happen with useragents and mail clients. I suspect a lot of our users are simply handing over credentials to foreign agencies running some of these apps at this point. Then said agency logs in over the VPN whenever they please and we don't even notice because they're coming in from the same location as the user themselves-- there's just no such thing as "normal" anymore.
We can't ban the VPNs because inevitably some exec who thinks VPN will prevent his spouse from discovering his Grindr account will complain that he can't connect anymore, so it all gets enabled again.
Again, conspiracy theory, but if I were a state agency, normalizing abnormal behavior is what I'd do.
Local ISPs were either replaced or taken over by larger operators. But one had to show up and put cables. VPN is rather like FTP hosting of 2020s, global and anyone with WireGuard source anyone can fork clients and make VPN in a little time, even one dev business.
It's super weird that they've removed the founder's and CEO information from the site, and there is so little information about them on the Internet. Specially when WeVPN founder claims to "have been running" Private Internet Access for years, and there's a blog post saying that he used to be the President for PIA, and some other press releases saying he was the CEO.
The cache for their "about us" section [0]:
Jonathan Roudier
Founder
VPN Experience: 8 years
Jon has nearly a decade of working in the VPN industry originally in Marketing and later in leadership and senior management. With his years of insight and customer knowledge gained from running Private Internet Access®, one of the world's biggest VPN providers, Jon decided to build his own VPN to ensure that the moral and ethics which he holds true are upheld and to provide an industry leader in transparency and accountability. Outside of WeVPN, He enjoys spending time at the gym and watching movies.
Press release in PIA's blog for when they bought Cypherpunk VPN [1]:
Private Internet Access President Jon Roudier
Press release announcing CES sponsor [2]:
Jonathan Roudier, CEO of PIA, said “We, at Private Internet Access, are so thrilled..."
0: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LVfIvHK77E4J:https://wevpn.com/about-us&cd=2&hl=es&ct=clnk&gl=es
1: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/private-internet-access-london-trust-media-acquired-cypherpunk-vpn/
2: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151221005130/en/Private-Internet-Access-Top-Mobile-Sponsor-2016
> Jon decided to build his own VPN to ensure that the moral and ethics which he holds true are upheld and to provide an industry leader in transparency and accountability.
WeVPN indirectly approached us to "make their users whole" for the time that they had paid for. In the spirit of collaboration, and not further tainting the already murky image of the consumer VPN industry, we decided to comp every WeVPN users with free service for the duration of their remaining subscription.
This is a goodwill gesture only, we're not engaged in any official partnership with WeVPN, and are/were not affiliated with them in any way.
Just wanted to say I have been using your product for years and it’s been pretty great. I picked it up years ago for some lifetime vpn promotion on stack social that y’all ran. Been using it ever since and it’s been amazing.
This is great marketing. I checked you guys out and I'm in the market for a fast private VPN what's the BitTorrent story like with your VPN? I have gigabit fiber speeds, what kind of download max speed can I see with BitTorrent on windscribe?
No VPN is "the fastest" for everyone. There are many factors at play that dictate speeds, these include: your ISP, the ISP of the server location you connect to, protocol you use, 3rd party software installed (AV or firewalls are common speed reducers), etc. Most people think that one VPN oversells and runs severs at 95% NIC throughput, while another does not, and that's the only factor. Sure, some probably DO do this, but I'd wager most do not.
I recommend just trying it for yourself, there is free service available. Choose Wireguard as the protocol, and try the closest geographic location to you.
This page is rather outdated, the answer depends on the protocol you use. Our entire site is being overhauled right now, so this will be addressed part of that release.
However the RSA portion only applies to OpenVPN, and for compatibility reasons. Use WG (our default protocol) if you want modern algos and high throughput.
It is instantly (figuratively) broken by quantum computing, which is on the horizon. The industry is in the process of telling everyone to stop using old encryption schemes now - not later - and switch to "quantum-safe" methods instead, like lattice-based encryption.
Why? Because of the concept of "store now decrypt later." It is speculated that entities are mass logging encrypted data of interest now, so that they can decrypt and review it as soon as quantum computers are available.
I personally think it is feasible that a quantum computer will exist with enough qubits (the algorithm already exists: Shor's Algorithm) to break all of our current encryption in around 5-10 years.
WeVPN: No personal info exists in our database. We have a list of email hashes + expiry dates that were provided to us. When you enter your email into the box, we look for a hash of the provided email and see if there is a record for it, which is used to upgrade the Windscribe account.
If we believe the Windscribe words about only having hashes and an encryption key to compare, an email hash is still an unique identifier and may still break the GPDR policy depending of your country/state. Most emails hashes will be pretty weak to crack even with a 10 years old GPU and a few data sets. john.doe1990@gmail.com hash can be cracked in a matter of minutes although i guess j0h7jkajsdb@gmail.com is safe. It is pretty sad to see that a company like Windscribe and Yegor that has been blaming the VPN industry shady behaviours for years are now part of the gear by trying to hide a possible private agreement with a signed NDA to not make it public and turn it into a good samaritan offer. There was many ways to help all those customers that ended up without service, but this is probably one of the worst ones. Unfortunately we will never know what really happened since there was zero transparency with the WeVPN customers.
I don't personally see it so cynically but I get what you're trying to say.
However it's being handled though I think the gesture is pretty nice in general. A ton of WeVPN customers were about to lose their money and for some people in restricted countries losing VPN access can be a hell of a blow.
When in Shanghai for example being able to jump across like this would have been pretty handy. As opposed when one that I used went down I had massive issues trying to get back online as other VPNs were being super restricted.
I think nobody complained about the gesture to provide customers with at least access to a reliable VPN. WindScribe is a pretty good product, but they can't just break their own privacy policy with the excuse that someone could lose their money or no access due to the restrictions in their country. They have the whole customer email list if they have the hashes and nobody neither Wevpn or Windscribe asked the customer if they wanted to be migrated and grant the data access. Someone who purchase a VPN service is looking for data privacy, not only to bypass region restrictions.
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[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadIs it a case of "winners take all", with smaller players having little revenue and profit? But then again, everyone seems to offer their own vpn now (adguard, blokada, protonmail, etc). Is it just profitable if you offer a bare minimum, almost white labeled service?
(I guess I have always wondered how and why VPN offering seem to have exploded recently, and how tons of them seem to be able to afford lavish ad spend even with little VC money)
Though it's anyone's guess what has happened as service over time had deteriorated quite drastically.
They also paid as much as several of these put together for the marketing/affiliate websites Webselence, VPNmentor, Safety Detectives. Which shows how much money must be in these affiliate programs.
https://www.bitsight.com/blog/mylobot-investigating-proxy-bo...
Consolidation is an attempt to bring those costs down by reducing the number of players bidding for customers.
Consumer VPN industry is a shit show, especially in the last 3-5 years. The parasitic "VPN review" industry is making all the money, as the "big VPNs" are paying ridiculously high CPA rates (think gambling CPA rates of $50-$100). Most "review" sites rank VPNs based on a single metric - who pays the most. This is why vpnmentor (a review site) was acquired for more money than PrivateInternetAccess (a "major VPN). Hilariously, by the same company, Kape technologies which used used to make adware (as Crossrider), and then decided to go all in on "privacy".
Then there are influencers and Youtubers, all of them peddling VPNs of the highest bidder, reading off a script and making impossible / bullshit claims about capabilities of VPNs. This outright causes harm to the industry.
VPNs that don't participate in these BS schemes (or can't pay $100/signup, and wait for ROI 3 years later), have only 1 way to grow: word of mouth, based on the merits of the product. This is very difficult to do given the massive ad spend of the "big VPNs", and false advertising they engage in.
Don't even get me started on the consolidation.... https://blog.windscribe.com/consolidation-of-the-vpn-industr...
The founder was really open about it. And back then hosting had ~$100 CPA and we had instances where we wouldn't turn a profit on a customer who purchased a shared hosting account UNLESS they renewed after 2 years given the cost to acquire.
To this day, when I see lists reviewing services providers, I'm always skeptical of them and steer away from letting them influence my decision on a service provider.
We kind of got lumped into the VPN segment back in the day, despite being a hardware product. The cutthroat nature of the existing media agreements (NordVPN and Express VPN mainly) along with the sky high CPMs they were paying made it impossible for us to acquire customers and keep them long enough to pay our bills.
Pretty smart tactic... if you're them. Quite bad for the consumer though.
What say you about Mullvad?
As for Mullvad, I think it's a solid service. If one needs a VPN, and doesn't want to use Windscribe for whatever reason, I always recommend IVPN or Mullvad. Windscribe is spiritually based on IVPN (I used it for many years before WS existed). No advertising, no affiliate program, no BS claims.
At the end of the day, it tunnels your friggen packets to a remote endpoint, nothing more. That alone has virtually zero impact on privacy (safe a few exceptions, like Linux ISO torrenting). The additional/optional bells and whistles we have DO make it more of a privacy suite, but that's only one small part of the big picture.
I'll be swapping from ExpressVPN shortly.
For us, biggest cost (no surprise) is infrastructure and staff, which is split ~50/50. Our ad budget is $0, however the same is not true for the big snakeoil sellers out there. They burn CRAZY cash on ads, which is why the renewal terms in fine print (at least for Nord) would make American telcos salivate with jealousy. "Buy X years for price Y, get Z months free" - you don't get any "free" months (basically a lie), and it renews at 2.5x the price, if you read the fine print.
It's really disgusting.
Mullvad, it performs well and I feel that the ability to pay cash/crypto, the lack of subscription both are tangible signals that they are real about anonymity.
Proton, with their Secure Core features is pretty nifty and I like that they have other products that shoehorn into "getting away from being spied on" by providing mail/calendar/drive storage as an alternative to Google. Their drive product could use some work but overall I'm really happy to pay $10/mo for VPN+custom domain mail+500GB of available cold storage.
Thanks for the background on the industry.
"We store no logs for your privacy", all whole literally storing your entire life under the umbrella of one company. Why not just stick with Google at that point? At least they're a public company and heavily regulated.
You can also import your own WG and OpenVPN configs into the app, and use your own servers and benefit from all of the above mentioned features. Hell, you can even use the app without a WS account, solely for this purpose.
Highly agree with this statement.
That's why from my experience of using PIA, windscribe, keepsolid, Nord and mullvad.
I keep recommending mullvad VPN to collegues, acquittances and online friend (on a down side their IP reputation sucks badly, too much of captchas)
I'd be surprised if this doesn't apply to ALL commercial VPNs.
All of this can also be (verifiably) disabled by the end user in the web control panel.
The part that seems shady to me is how you do this without being caught by the up database providers are marked as a non-residential ip.
What steps, if any, are you taking to make sure you are sourcing your residential proxies ethically? Honest question.
As soon as a service starts seeing a dozen users from a single IP, they're gonna start throwing CAPTCHAs on them more.
I thought this kind of thing didn't happen so much with VPNs as their target market is pretty technical and I would expect those people not to fall for 'review' or comparison site scams.
Clearly I was completely wrong. I'm sorry to hear your industry is basically being blackmailed by these scammers (I consider a site pretending to give advice or comparisons but instead offering the highest bidder a total scam)
We did some tests years ago by commenting positive things on "best" VPNs, and negative ones on "not best" ones. These get published every time. Do the same in reverse, only a small fraction gets posted.
Most of these "reviews" are written by SEO blog spammers, as most review sites are owned by marketing agencies or people with marketing backgrounds.
I have no way of knowing with anything approaching confidence which ones are decent and which ones aren't.
I'd have thought that maintaining infrastructure would be kind of a pain. You need to have outgoing access points all over the place. I assume that they mostly just rent them, but still, that's just a bunch of egress fees. And I'm sure that their customers love to stream movies through their VPN.
I suppose the fact that I hear about VPNs mostly through commercials means that the margins must be high, or they wouldn't spend so much on acquisition. But it seems like an unpleasant business to be in, with a lot of overhead and customer handholding.
This is entirely conspiracy theory, but I suspect state sponsorship.
Looking at our access logs over the same amount of time, we'd have our domestic users doing normal things, and then oddball traffic from Russia and China (and wherever else) trying to bruteforce credentials and probe for vulnerabilities.
Then we started seeing our domestic users logging in from oddball places ("Bob doesn't live or work in ___..."), and these would turn out to be legit-- they'd be using ExpressVPN or whatever. Not ideal, but ok.
But the vulnerability scans and spray-and-prays stopped coming in from foreign countries, and started coming in from known VPN ASNs-- the same ones as our legit users coming in from the same sources. While there used to be some divide between the really scummy providers and the more-sortof-legit ones, this problem has gotten even worse as these services consolidate. Now everybody's coming in from something M247-owned and that's that.
These days, enough of our users have been enticed by the promises of the VPN industry that we can't really tell who's who anymore based on IP address, and the same thing is starting to happen with useragents and mail clients. I suspect a lot of our users are simply handing over credentials to foreign agencies running some of these apps at this point. Then said agency logs in over the VPN whenever they please and we don't even notice because they're coming in from the same location as the user themselves-- there's just no such thing as "normal" anymore.
We can't ban the VPNs because inevitably some exec who thinks VPN will prevent his spouse from discovering his Grindr account will complain that he can't connect anymore, so it all gets enabled again.
Again, conspiracy theory, but if I were a state agency, normalizing abnormal behavior is what I'd do.
Source: I'm a Windscribe co-founder.
Source: A happy customer
The cache for their "about us" section [0]:
Press release in PIA's blog for when they bought Cypherpunk VPN [1]: Press release announcing CES sponsor [2]:Seems in the spirit of their own values!
WeVPN indirectly approached us to "make their users whole" for the time that they had paid for. In the spirit of collaboration, and not further tainting the already murky image of the consumer VPN industry, we decided to comp every WeVPN users with free service for the duration of their remaining subscription.
This is a goodwill gesture only, we're not engaged in any official partnership with WeVPN, and are/were not affiliated with them in any way.
I recommend just trying it for yourself, there is free service available. Choose Wireguard as the protocol, and try the closest geographic location to you.
https://windscribe.net/features/strongest-encryption
However the RSA portion only applies to OpenVPN, and for compatibility reasons. Use WG (our default protocol) if you want modern algos and high throughput.
Why? Because of the concept of "store now decrypt later." It is speculated that entities are mass logging encrypted data of interest now, so that they can decrypt and review it as soon as quantum computers are available.
Great Veritasium video on the topic: https://youtu.be/-UrdExQW0cs
I personally think it is feasible that a quantum computer will exist with enough qubits (the algorithm already exists: Shor's Algorithm) to break all of our current encryption in around 5-10 years.
Which isn't bad, but it isn't just goodwill.
Nah no acquisition.
https://discord.com/channels/435955361955053579/435955361955...
However it's being handled though I think the gesture is pretty nice in general. A ton of WeVPN customers were about to lose their money and for some people in restricted countries losing VPN access can be a hell of a blow.
When in Shanghai for example being able to jump across like this would have been pretty handy. As opposed when one that I used went down I had massive issues trying to get back online as other VPNs were being super restricted.
Each to their own.
The transition was seamless.