The bad actors who want to steal your passwords and credit-card data, and the state actors who want to spy on Persons of Interest, don't know each-other or talk to one-another. A VPS provider being compromised by a series of private individuals doesn't imply that your VPN running on such a service is going to be sneakily MITMed, because there's no obvious profit motive in doing so (unless you're a very publicly super-rich person who is also very publicly using the service, and it's very obvious how to blackmail you if you could just get data exfiltration via that service. Like Jeff Bezos with WhatsApp.)

Instead, you might get whatever elements of your identity stolen that Linode's account-management servers have possession of; or your VPS instance might become host to crypto-mining malware and then get shut down by Linode (which will come at no cost to you, other than the downtime.) But neither of these things will really focus on you personally. They're automated bulk attacks.

A couple times, nearly a decade ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linode#Security_incidents

If you dont want to trust them now, in 2020, don't - they aren't the only provider of VMs. I'd imagine the big cloud providers (AWS/GCP/Azure) have fairly significant security teams - has there ever been a disclosure of customer VMs being compromised on any of them?

The kid in the coffeeshop is probably not the one hacking Linode to compromise your VPN running on your VPS.

That's kind of a tautology. If you assume the system is insecure, then yes its going to be insecure with that assumption. This is going to be true of any VPN system, so i think its an unfair criticism to level against this particular VPN setup.

If you want to be secure against local adversaries, use TOR.

> That's kind of a tautology.

More specifically, it's begging the question. The actual definition of begging the question, not the mistaken usage.

To beg the question is to assume the thing which is to be proven.

this is my favorite extremely annoying but massively useful "acktually..."

begging the question as a logical fallacy is prevalent in politics and media representations, and is a differentiatior between reasoned debate and talking head nonsense.

Polictician 1: UBI! P2: free market competition! P1: why do you want poor people to suffer, P2?!

P2: 2nd amendment! P1: Ban firearms! P2: why do you want americans to be put in danger, P1?!

both of these are begging the question