Re:NordVPN library and client code open-sourced
by acatton on Tuesday March 14, 2023 @04:40PM
(#35158161)
Sorry, my phrasing was wrong. The second part of my comment had nothing to do with the first link.
I am basing the second part on this research: https://www.docdroid.net/kOP3JAh/tesonet-web-of-lies-pdf
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but the relations of Tesonet, NordVPN and Oxylab is creepy at best.
People make the allegation that NordVPN is routing some of Oxylabs' traffic, because that's exactly what HolaVPN and Bright Data (previously known as "Luminati") does. (See https://archive.is/aJY0F ) And Luminati Networks sued Tesonet for patent infringement on this.
Just the corporate structure of Tensonet in itself should make people stay away from any of their VPN products.
Re:NordVPN library and client code open-sourced
by throwaway18536 on Tuesday March 14, 2023 @06:11PM
(#35159730)
There are no “relations” between these companies, they are literally one company operating under different names to be less visible.
Source: ex-employee.
Re:NordVPN library and client code open-sourced
by mardifoufs on Tuesday March 14, 2023 @07:51PM
(#35161375)
Do they actually route traffics through nordvpn consumers, though? If you don't mind sharing.
The idea was never that NordVPN was reselling the network connections of NordVPN customers; it was always that they were, on their backend, originating NordVPN customers traffic from maybe-sketchily-sourced IP addresses.
Here is a paragraph I wrote a couple years ago on the topic of how centralized VPN companies manage to bypass blocks by content providers (such as Netflix).
> One VPN company that actually seems to do "well" at this is NordVPN: they've even managed to provide access to Disney+! Someone did a deep analysis of how this worked a while back (an article which has since been deleted, weirdly, but a copy can be found on the Internet Archive). They are "linked closely with a Lithuanian data mining company called Tesonet" which also runs Oxynet, which in turn advertises itself to have "32M+ residential proxies…100% anonymous proxies from all over the globe with zero IP blocking", which the author of that analysis believes is how NordVPN is originating their traffic... and how did they get all of those IP addresses? The contention was that they seem to be stealing them, convincing random products to embed malware that attaches them to the Oxynet essentially-a-botnet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664692
http://web.archive.org/web/20191128170008/https://medium.com...