Comment by kfreds | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kfreds | Hacker News Reader

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The VPN market has had considerable growth year-to-year since at least 2009. It's just that in the last few years that growth has added up to big absolute numbers.

Here's how I think about customer segments:

* Those interested in online privacy

* Those interested in circumventing censorship

* Those interested in a secure network channel from their machine to "The Internet", by which I mean secure from their local ISP eavesdropping on them.

* Those interested in circumventing geographical restrictions.

Due to the nature of the Internet and how its most important protocol (IP) works, changing your IP address is a necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, step in protecting your privacy online. This fact says something about the long term relevance of VPNs, Tor, and similar technologies.

Source: I'm one of the co-founders of Mullvad VPN.

In the age of wifi the man in the middle included someone sitting in the same coffee shop as you. ISPs turning into jerks came on the heels of that. Depending on where you got your news, it might have seemed like you heard about ISPs and hackers around the same time, but from my perspective the ISPs learned how to be bad from security experts explaining how much mischief a person could get up to and deciding that sounded like a swell idea.

> ISPs turning into jerks came on the heels of that.

> ISPs learned how to be bad from security experts explaining how much mischief a person could get up to and deciding that sounded like a swell idea

Telecommunications companies have played a central role in government surveillance schemes for at least 50 years, well before the advent of WiFi. ECHELON was fairly extensively reported on in the late 90's.

> it might have seemed like you heard about ISPs and hackers around the same time

I connected to the Internet around 1993, but my interest in computer security didn't start until around 1996. I'm not sure if that qualifies.

Yeah I wasn't talking about surveillance, I was talking about adulterating internet traffic.

From the surveillance standpoint, we now have devices we take with us and leave unattended. We are all waiting for a proverbial woodpecker to destroy civilization.

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