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- Hacker News
- Basically a middle-man for a Mullvad VPN, where if Mullvad decides to pull out of their agreement with this company, you lose your connection and are hopefully refunded.
The single point of failure for this product is Mullvad and its leadership's changing opinions.
by iAMkenough - > the first VPN that can’t log your activity and outsmarts internet censorship.
I guess they never heard of Zero Knowledge Systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Knowledge_Systems
by wahern - With a name like this, I’m reminded that privacy is only as good as your entry node being used widely/not being too “obscure.”
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/harvard-bo... is a good example: because the person making the threat was one of the few people on the campus network using Tor at the time the threatening emails were sent, he was identified as a suspect.
If an activity is traced to the Obscura network, and your network activity shows you as one of few people using it at the time - or, if you’re using it for completely unrelated things and are unlucky enough to have accessed at the same time someone else used the network for illegal activity - you could be at risk.
by btown - This sounds pretty neat, and I do dig the website, though I can’t help but think it’s an odd combination to have bitmap/pixelated fonts and graphics inside perfect squircles.
Seems like you guys have two distinct ideas of a visual identity completely at odds there. Shape contrast is nice and can be rather fun to play with, but it has to be handled with care. Right now it feels like the designer had a bunch of ideas and didn’t know how to bring them together in a cohesive identity.
Bonus point for the TRON reference at the end! “I fight for the users!”
by osnxkwmxkwnd - i am very skeptical of most vpn companies, and while i haven't looked too hard at obscura, it is worth noting the official partnership with mullvad (https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-partnered-with-obscura-v...) which is certainly a positive signal
side note: i really wish more companies did the no email + randomized account number flow. there is a certain popular "pro-privacy" product beloved by many here that requires an email address and refuses to offer a similar account number method, which has turned me off the product.
- So two hops, basically. First hop sees your IP address but not the website you're going to, second hop sees website but not IP address. Similar to Private Relay: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602.by skaul
- I don't understand the point of this.
Many (if not all) of the benefits on the landing page are available in Mullvad too, which is a more mature and reputable product, has all clients fully open-source, and powers the exit servers for Obscura.
Why should I choose this over Mullvad?
by maxloh - As others have pointed out, this is like Apple iCloud Private Relay, and other multi-hop privacy systems that have been built on and off over the last several decades (Tor included).
We wrote a research paper on the general principle a few years ago: https://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2022/papers/hotnets2...
by barathr