Hacker News Reader

Comment by tmh88j | Hacker News Reader

> Nearly as disturbing as the number of people who tell me they use free VPNs.

This is absolutely not an apples to apples comparison, but why is it outrageous to believe there couldn't be a free VPN that focuses on privacy when there are search engines like Duckduckgo and browsers like Firefox that are completely free and are pro-privacy? I haven't done the research, so consider it a rhetorical question.

View on HN

A browser is just an application with some minimal services provided such as sync, extensions hosting, auto-updates.

A VPN on the other hand consists of an application and usually unmetered usage of the company's bandwidth, which costs money.

> A VPN on the other hand consists of an application and usually unmetered usage of the company's bandwidth, which costs money.

Precisely. I imagine one of the more popular uses of VPNs is Bittorrent.

Though if you're in the right DCs, that traffic will be mostly internal, I suppose, since VPN providers and seedboxes aren't that spread out (for price and TOS reasons).

Can you name some of these DCs?

LeaseWeb and OVH (both .eu and .ca) are the major players from what I know.

Maybe "browser" was too specific. Replace that with an "organization" and that's Mozilla. They make firefox, but they're more than just an application, they're a group of applications developers that are pro privacy.

So what organization with that kind of credibility is offering a free vpn?

If Mozilla did, it probably would get the kind of attention and focus you’re suggesting. I just don’t see a lot of companies with a similar vision as Mozilla that are successful.

Cloudflare is going to offer a free VPN

The marginal cost to Cloudflare for the extra engineering, compute, and bandwidth is lower than it would be for many other organizations, and it's good marketing for the things they actually make money on.

Actually it's provide them much more than just marketing. They'll be only one company to know detailed information about client connection quality, they'll able to optimize routes for their CDN even more. It's crucial competitive edge for their primary service.

That's a really good point, they'll be able to place VPN endpoints near their CDN endpoints and minimize additional latency, while still knowing the client's original IP for filtering, analytics, and providing geography based views. There's value added for both the VPN users and Cloudflare clients.

Wow, thanks. I’d happily pay them.

Last year, Cloudflare announced[0] a product called Cloudflare Access[1] which solves the same problem as VPN, not sure if it can be used as a replacement of VPN totally.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-access/ [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-access/

It's coming!

https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/10/18660344/firefox-subscrip...

Because DDG and Mozilla both have sources of revenue and so don't need to sell their users down the river to keep the lights on. If Cloudflare does offer a free VPN that's a good bit of marketing for their actual services. How's FreeVPNCo going to pay for its servers? What about bandwidth?

Firefox and its pro-privacy push bundling a VPN, a user account, telemetry and DNS-over-https (I think, Mozilla is very much informed about every! installation). It's the same sort of privacy most greedy monopolists offer...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com