There are plenty of good/trustworthy VPN services. They just don't advertise as much as the bad ones. I know that the VPN company I use can't abuse my connection because I don't even use their app, and can instead set up wireguard/OpenVPN connections to my liking.
Beyond the technical side, a public VPN company provides much more anonymity than using your own VPS/server, as you share an IP and traffic with other users rather than just having a second personal IP to your name.
>There are plenty of good/trustworthy VPN services. They just don't advertise as much as the bad ones.
This is also why I always immediately unsubscribe from and stop watching any YouTuber who starts pushing these services. They are 100% shady. Which leaves only two possibilities; that the content creator is either naive or willfully complicit.
Krebs has generally great content, but how the Ubiquiti situation was handled really rubbed me the wrong way. Krebs made a mistake, trusting a source that ended up being the malicious party. However Krebs never owned up to it. Never issued an apology or admitted his frankly scathing posts about Ubiquiti were inaccurate or at best incomplete. It’s unfortunately a common theme these days in media.
He’s one of very few people doing this type of investigative journalism online, and is - as cringey as it sounds - the closest we’ve got to an IRL ‘internet superhero’.
Ubi was a bad call but the information was credible - as an insider, the informant was in a unique position to spin his story in such a way. I don’t blame him for making the bad call, and I don’t think he should ‘own up to it’.
That one story is far from representative of his broader achievements, and comparing it to the concerted efforts other more malicious actors in the media landscape is disingenuous at best.
1. Krebs' source was anonymous and he has not confirmed it to be the party responsible.
2. Ubiquiti is currently suing Krebs for defamation, and the lawsuit is the source of the allegation that Krebs' source and the indicted person are one and the same.
3. Krebs' original article does report both sides of the issue, albeit with a scathing tone regarding UI's security disclosure practices.
4. Even if Krebs' source turned out to be the indicted individual, it is still ethical to avoid revealing the source. No one has been convicted.
5. It is generally not a smart move to apologize for an action that is at the center of an ongoing legal action, in any case.
> “During the research we identified two free VPN services that [use] a subterfuge to lure users to install software that looks legitimate but makes them part of the network. These two software are currently unknown to most if not all antivirus companies.”
I wonder why that is? It couldn't possibly be that antivirus companies are paid to ignore certain software...
Why not? It's not obvious to detect until anyone found a minor free VPN app is malicious. (Though maybe almost all "free VPN" could be malicious in some way)
I know that Krebs can be pretty polarizing to a lot of people, but let's look at what actually happened here.
>On Sunday, July 10, KrebsOnSecurity contacted Psychz Networks, a hosting provider in Los Angeles, to see if they were aware that they were the sole Internet lifeline for 8kun et. al. Psychz confirmed that in response to a report from KrebsOnSecurity, VanwaTech was removed from its network around the time of the Jan. 6 hearing on Tuesday.
So, he called and asked something to the effect of, "Hey, did you know that you're the only provider for 8kun? Any comment for my report?" and we're to take that as Krebs "[deciding] that political speech is a security threat to the Internet, and he is actively working to further the censorship"?
I'm not quite sure that I can make that leap as easily as you can.
Well I am not you, but Brian Krebs' opening paragraph proudly ends with; "Watkins suggested the outage was somehow related to the work of the committee, but the truth is KrebsOnSecurity was responsible and the timing was pure coincidence."
So to me it appears that Krebs is working against Internet freedom.
Also, I have never visited any 8kun sites or consumed any of their content. I have no stake in their existence, but I believe that they should be allowed to exist. If crimes have been committed by people using their service, the criminals should be dealt with and afforded due process according to the law, instead of removing the entire platform.
>Well I am not you, but Brian Krebs' opening paragraph proudly ends with; "Watkins suggested the outage was somehow related to the work of the committee, but the truth is KrebsOnSecurity was responsible and the timing was pure coincidence."
>So to me it appears that Krebs is working against Internet freedom.
No, it appears that Krebs called up and asked if Psychz Networks knew what they were hosting. Psychz looked into it and decided, "Oh, we didn't know and we'd rather not host this, and it's within the terms for us to pull the plug, so we're pulling the plug."
Psychz could've just as easily told him to go kick rocks and kept it online. In that regard, Krebs is only indirectly responsible for the outage despite his statement otherwise. Your ire should be directed towards Psychz.
>Also, I have never visited any 8kun sites or consumed any of their content.
If you've spent any chunk of your time on the internet, or paid attention to the news, for the past five or six years, you have absolutely "consumed their content", in that it has trickled it's way down to you in one form of another.
>I have no stake in their existence, but I believe that they should be allowed to exist. If crimes have been committed by people using their service, the criminals should be dealt with and afforded due process according to the law, instead of removing the entire platform.
Sure. But just as the moderators of 8kun patrol their platform for content they don't want on it, hosting providers are under no obligation to host content they don't want to host. All Psychz did here was exercise their own free speech. C'est la vie.
> Grace Marsh, a Jehovah's Witness, attempted to distribute religious literature on the sidewalk near a post office in Chickasaw, Alabama. The Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation owned Chickasaw, Alabama in its entirety as a company town. Marsh was convicted of criminal trespass. Appealing her conviction, Marsh argued that the state law violated the First Amendment.
[snip]
> In an opinion by Justice Hugo L. Black, the majority ruled in Marsh’s favor. The Court reasoned that a company town does not have the same rights as a private homeowner in preventing unwanted religious expression. While the town was owned by a private entity, it was open for use by the public, who are entitled to the freedoms of speech and religion. The Court employed a balancing test, weighing Chickasaw’s private property rights against Marsh’s right to free speech. The Court stressed that conflicts between property rights and constitutional rights should typically be resolved in favor of the latter.
> A state can prohibit the private owner of a shopping center from using state trespass law to exclude peaceful expressive activity in the open areas of the shopping center.
> The Marsh holding at first appears somewhat narrow and inapplicable today because of the disappearance of company towns from the United States, but it was raised in a somewhat high-profile 1996 cyberlaw case, Cyber Promotions v. America Online, 948 F. Supp. 436, 442 (E.D. Pa. 1996).[1] Cyber Promotions wished to send out "mass email advertisements" to AOL customers. AOL installed software to block those emails. Cyber Promotions sued on free speech grounds and cited the Marsh case as authority for the proposition that even though AOL's servers were private property, AOL had opened them to the public to a such a degree that constitutional free speech protections could be applied. The federal district court disagreed, thereby paving the way for spam filters at the Internet service provider level.
True but to apply 1A it had to be determined that the constitutional protections were applicable at all which hinged on the level the area had been "dedicated/opened to public use" more recently other qualifiers have been added such that a company needs to exercise "powers traditionally exclusive to the state" to be held to constitutional standards. There were cases back years ago like Cyber Promotions v. America Online that allowed companies to limit speech on their platforms that would already cover cases like this too.
The ruling makes clear a company town is not a private forum. One thing that separates that company town or shopping mall from say a private resort is the requirements for access. Cruse ships, aircraft, etc default deny entry making them less public spaces.
Beyond that, a private home can deny access based on skin color while a bed and breakfast can’t. That same bed and breakfast could however deny access because a customer is rude.
Speech that isn't disruptive isn't really worth anything. There's little point in saying things people already agree with. It's saying the things that people don't want to hear that has real value. If you can't say the things that people don't want to hear because they are "disruptive" then you don't really have the freedom of speech.
Literally every one of those things can be applied to Twitter, and yet no one has tried to get Twitter deplatformed. I mean, really, Twitter was subject to public outrage only a few years ago when people uncovered Saudis openly bragging about their child brides on the site and people started mass reporting them... and yet Twitter remains online and unmolested. There is a very clear double standard present.
Legally speaking, the only actual one of issue is the child porn. The first amendment allows private parties to happily host and run literal Nazi pride events if they want, and there's very little legal way to stop it.
However, in the same vein, if you want to host said Nazi pride event and need to find private companies and businesses to provide catering and other services, they all legally have the right to tell you to fuck off, and if that means you can't find ANY services, then that's too bad for you, stop being such an insufferable prick.
The right of assembly is essentially codifying "if you are a cunt then nobody will want to deal with you" into law. We've had to work around it in some cases, because sometimes people treat things like skin color and gender and other horrible things as a proxy for "cunt", but explicitly exclusionary and violent ideology is not a protected class.
> However, in the same vein, if you want to host said Nazi pride event and need to find private companies and businesses to provide catering and other services, they all legally have the right to tell you to fuck off, and if that means you can't find ANY services, then that's too bad for you, stop being such an insufferable prick.
Substitute 'Nazi pride' (whatever the hell that actually means) with 'being black' and tell me you still support this. Go ahead. I dare you. Public accommodation laws exist for precisely this reason, and I'm not at all convinced they shouldn't be applied more broadly.
> The right of assembly is essentially codifying "if you are a cunt then nobody will want to deal with you" into law.
If you're not being a cunt to at least somebody then you're probably not saying or doing anything of consequence. Once upon a time it was legal to own other human beings until someone started being a cunt about it. Sometimes that's exactly what the doctor ordered.
> explicitly exclusionary and violent ideology is not a protected class
So, just to be clear: When certain parties on Twitter start spewing generalities about "all white males"... they should be deplatformed, right?
> Substitute 'Nazi pride' (whatever the hell that actually means) with 'being black' and tell me you still support this.
I mean, the difference is right there: one is an ideology, while the other is a state of being. Being a Nazi is a choice; being black is not. Seems pretty reasonable to me to say you can turn people away based on their convictions, but not their immutable characteristics.
OK, so just to be clear then: If I find your beliefs to be absolutely abhorrent because it would mean that I could be arbitrarily refused service then you'd be totally cool with me refusing YOU service... right?
