this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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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.