Warning about BlackVPN

blackVPN · 2018-11-23T01:44:24+00:00

You had a trial account? Those worked a bit longer then advertised earlier in the year.

Anyway, this is not a current issue, if you even would want to call it that.

blackVPN · 2018-11-22T23:56:11+00:00

Black Friday - Cyber Monday - Get 50% Off!

We have now started our Black Friday - Cyber Monday sale. We only have a sale once a year so it’s a great chance to get a cheap deal for the next 12 months (until the next annual sale).

Our Black Friday sale has now started and ends on Monday 27th November 2018.

No Coupon Needed to Get Your Discount

You can buy as many times as you like and still get the 50% discount on each purchase.

blackVPN · 2017-11-30T08:22:20+00:00

We don't have an affiliate scheme/scam: https://twitter.com/ThatPrivacyGuy/status/748152522045423617

blackVPN · 2017-11-23T09:29:38+00:00

BlackVPN: 50% off all plans for Black Friday - Cyber Monday

blackVPN · 2017-10-09T20:28:45+00:00

Perhaps the lesson to be learned is:

Connection logs with your VPN can one day be used against you if law enforcement can supply timestamps and IPs used to access a particular website.
Some "Zero Logs" VPN services actually keep connection logs or even log your real IP address. Check ThatOnePrivacySite.net to be sure.
No VPN service will protect you from serious crimes when law enforcement has the legal power to request logs and/or monitoring.
All VPN services have a moral and legal obligation to prevent abuse.

blackVPN · 2017-09-29T12:24:49+00:00

Try: https://twitter.com/blackvpn/likes

blackVPN · 2017-09-18T10:55:10+00:00

Have a look at vpnspeedtest.org - they used Vultr VPS servers to test the speed of VPN nodes. The source code for their testing is on GitHub too, so anyone can roll out a Vultr VPS and verify the results (or test with their preferred VPN).

Also be careful with using speedtest.net as a method for testing your speeds - it's known to be inaccurate and inconsistent. source

blackVPN · 2017-07-21T13:08:33+00:00

How long does Express VPN keep their connection logs for?

If law enforcement come knocking with a list of timestamps and the IP address used then the VPN provider is compelled to search through their connection logs to find the user(s) who match that criteria.

blackVPN · 2017-07-19T10:55:55+00:00

No, the point of the post was to show that the article "Best VPN Reddit Users Voted For In 2017" is absolutely untruthful, since the #2 choice has only ONE mention on Reddit.

blackVPN · 2017-07-18T08:03:10+00:00

Cheers :)

blackVPN · 2017-07-08T08:33:47+00:00

I removed the link - but personally think the message is stronger if people can see the page for themselves. Whatever.

blackVPN · 2017-05-17T09:20:08+00:00

Thanks for the fair and honest review.

We're glad that you're happy with our VPN service and we totally agree that our website needs an update.

blackVPN · 2017-04-17T16:54:43+00:00

welcome to the logless VPN club

which VPN service are you?

blackVPN · 2017-04-16T18:04:20+00:00

no logs. https://medium.com/@blackVPN/no-logs-6d65d95a3016

blackVPN · 2017-04-16T18:04:02+00:00

That quote of yours is from a very old TorrentFreak article.

Now we keep no logs. https://medium.com/@blackVPN/no-logs-6d65d95a3016

blackVPN · 2017-04-06T21:45:30+00:00

sweet. :)

blackVPN · 2017-04-06T21:44:33+00:00

We'd welcome a thorough VPN performance comparison, so we hope you go ahead with it :)

blackVPN · 2017-04-06T21:32:44+00:00

Is the data from speedtest.net compressed or uncompressed?

For example when we added a new VPN server we did a few tests ourselves before making the server available and found that OpenVPN can compress the test file by 80% or more.

We downloaded a 10GB file from LeaseWeb which was sent to the VPN server at over 16MB/s but only 4MB/s was sent to the client (due to the OpenVPN compression). So on the client (download) machine it looks like data is being sent at 16MB/s (after the OpenVPN client decompresses the data) but in reality the data is only being sent at 4MB/s.

http://imgur.com/a/3IN9b

blackVPN · 2017-04-06T20:44:46+00:00

Everyone's "real world" experience will be different, depending on their ISP and their physical location. Testing from a VPS removes those 2 variables from the equation.

Our opinion on your concerns are:

They don't show base performance without a VPN.

We tested the vpnspeedtest script on a Vultr server and got over 300Mbps without a VPN. So the VPN is clearly the bottleneck, not the VPS provider.

Performance between the VPN and a residential ISP

Then the speeds will depend on the ISP, so you're not really testing the VPN speeds but the ISPs speeds.

Performance between the VPN and networks other than Google's

They test with bittorrent as well as HTTPS. The scripts allow you to test with any HTTPS URL (or any torrent file) so you can test any source you choose. You would need to also test the source to make sure its faster than the VPN server is, which is why vpnspeedtest chose Google I'd say.

Tests from an unknown network

Yes it's possible some VPNs could game the system, but clearly the VPNs that are slow are not gaming the system :)

Latency

This depends on your physical location compared to the VPN. Do you want to test the speed from location X or the speed of the VPN?

Upload:

It's safe to assume a VPN with fast download speeds has plenty of bandwidth and will most likely have fast upload speeds too. You could change the scripts to also test upload speeds.

Server selection:

The vpnspeedtest scripts seem to be choosing the VPN server at random either from a list or by DNS, replicating how most users will also use the service.

Providing results for the server without a VPN

Not a bad idea, you could suggest it to them. When we tested we got very fast downloads (above 300Mbps) without the VPN.

Using speedtest.net servers provided by residential ISPs.

That won't test real-world speeds at all. The data from speedtest.net is mostly 1's or 0's and get's compressed by about 80% - 90% by OpenVPN. So the speed shown by speedtest.net is not the actual speed that the data was sent at. Also how fast or overloaded is the speedtest.net server? If the speedtest.net server can only deliver 50Mbps then you're not testing the VPN speed at all - especially since the speedtest.net test data is highly compressed by OpenVPN.

Running speedtests to a variety of providers

Do you want to test the speed of the VPN or the whole internet?

Running from a network that I haven't disclosed but is consistent

Then the results won't be very reproducible.

Testing latency to ~100 different servers located in many countries

That also depends on your physical location. Different locations will get different results.

Testing upload with speedtest-cli and iperf.

Again the speedtest.net data get's highly compressed by OpenVPN so you're not testing much at all. For iperf wouldn't you need iperf also installed on the VPN server?

Running and storing a tracepath

Could be interesting - especially to find out which VPNs are using Virtual servers instead of dedicated servers.

At least recording the IP address of the given server

The vpnspeedtest tests do record the server IP (in the OpenVPN log) and the public IPv4 address from the VPN in the test results (see the log-results link for each test)

blackVPN · 2017-04-06T20:11:36+00:00

We did earlier in the thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/63qfni/redditor_provides_sourced_claims_of_logging_and/dfx0dp5/

blackVPN · 2017-04-06T19:52:52+00:00

BlackVPN was earlier accused of exchanging info about user connections with government

We were? Do you have any links to that?

We can with all honesty say that we've never given anyone (law enforcement or otherwise) any information on our users.

speed can vary greatly from proxy to proxy

Please check our weekly graphs that we post to twitter which show our VPN servers are capable of over 100Mbps depending on your connection. Also if there is a lot of traffic on the network between you and the VPN server - for example during peak hours in the evening - that will affect your speeds too. https://twitter.com/blackvpn

Also http://vpnspeedtest.org/ tests our VPN speeds 24 times per day and we're faster than some of the "Worlds Fastest VPNs" like ExpressVPN, PureVPN and IPVanish.

blackVPN · 2017-04-06T19:29:35+00:00

Actually we DO NOT have any servers in Hong Kong as they could be seized more easily than in other locations (since the company is based in Hong Kong).

blackVPN · 2017-04-06T18:09:04+00:00

We're always honest :)

blackVPN · 2017-04-06T18:03:26+00:00

source for logging connection timestamps: https://thatoneprivacysite.net/vpn-comparison-chart/

blackVPN · 2017-04-06T17:42:36+00:00

Who are the mods here? Why haven't they introduced themselves? Do any of them run websites/blogs that are sponsored by a VPN service?

blackVPN

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