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Comment by svintus | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I'm Ivan Sergeyenko, also known as iBear. I am one of the engineers on the TunnelBear team. We all hold deep respect for Peter Sunde and his team. iPredator is definitely one of the most trustworthy VPN services out there.

Our goal, however, is different. We aim to bring VPN/privacy protection to people who have never heard of VPN (notice that we don't have "VPN" anywhere on our site, except for in a quote from TNW and in the help section). Despite there being 100's (if not 1000's) of VPN services out there, very few of them, sadly, care about the non-tech-savvy audience.

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Hey, Ivan, have you folks fixed the security hole yet where your tunnel can potentially drop and the connection simply reverts to clear without the user knowing it? Have you yet included a function similar to VPNCheck which blocks traffic in that event?

Unfortunately, because TunnleBear uses it's own client rather than the standard Windows VPN mechanism VPNCheck can't be used with it. While I love your company and the generous touch of humor and whimsy you bring to a normally somber market, I can't live with a product with that gaping a security hole. If and when that's fixed and if the performance is about an order of magnitude better than it was when I tested it a year or so ago I'll be on board in a heartbeat.

Hey svintus, I think your friend Gita was just telling me about you a few weeks ago :) Do you quit your job to work on tunnelbear, huh? People like you belong on my hero-bookcase

I'm trying to avoid proprietary OS's now -- I don't suppose I could get into the linux beta you mention here: http://help.tunnelbear.com/customer/portal/articles/824779-i...

"We aim to bring VPN/privacy protection to people who have never heard of VPN"

Will such people understand the subtle ways in which using a VPN will make your communications less secure, though?

How about giving us a clue rather than just being cryptic.

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