this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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Interesting what’s going happening with mullvad. For the best part of 10’years, you hear nothing.
Does anyone know why they are recently noisy?
Going by rate of blog posts by year they don't seem any noisier than usual. The opposite if anything. 18 this year and there's only 3 and a bit months left of the year whereas in 2018 they made 60.
You are incorrect. Look through their blog archive (scroll to the bottom): https://mullvad.net/en/blog/
They've been posting steadily for over a decade, maybe the posts just got more popular this year on whatever sites you browse
Noisy? Bit odd to call it that. Also, from my perception they were always present with regularly published news about how they improve or just update/change their service.
They dropped port forwarding and likely lost a lot of business related to this. They are trying to compensate for the loss I think which is great.
Not sure what you mean, they've been posting fairly regular updates on software and infrastructure improvements and security audit responses on their blog for the entire time I've been a customer (6 years).
They've been relatively quiet on their blogs actually, its just that its growing in popularity, so more people are talking about it.
Imo what makes it so good is their pricing scheme. You put however much money you want in your account, and you get an equivalent amount of time. All you need is an account number, no email no contracts no hassle
Mullvad was always the most straightforward privacy centric vpn with a very long and uneventful history.
They used to offer port forwarding on top of all that. People use port forwarding to do torrents, run internet facing services from home, and share csam.
The authorities could never go through mullvad to get the identities of csam users because of mullvads infrastructure (according to them it’s not stored so it’s impossible for a raid to turn up identifying data).
The authorities switched tactics and convinced a bunch of websites, dns services and other stuff to block mullvads public facing IPs. For a while there in march or so you couldn’t browse shit from a mullvad ip.
The goal was to force csam people on to other services that are softer targets for law enforcement.
It worked. Mullvad dropped port forwarding and all the torrenters, selfhosters and csam traders left.
Mullvad has been working to be a better vpn provider ever since because the raids themselves scare users off, the dropped services lost them some users and the awareness of international law enforcement cooperation scared some users off using vpn services in fourteen eyes countries (mullvad is in Sweden).
At the time all this went down I only had mullvad but now I use another vpn for port forwarding and mullvad for everything that doesn’t need that.