I also use Mullvad VPN exclusively for my VPN needs. The fact I can get 6 months of access with a scratch card bought from a store & my account is just a random integer number is an example of privacy by design: no email, no phone numbers, no credit cards. I don't even do anything illegal, I'd just rather have a (what I feel) trusted option when I want to browse the Internet anonymously.
You can even just randomly generate such an ID number, write it on a piece of paper and enclose it with cash in one of several currencies, and post it to them.
It doesn't defeat the point in my threat model. No one in the position to log my traffic knows who I am other than my source IP address (which is already enough to link it back to me anyway). So let's take Mullvad at their word that they don't log anything, what's the threat now?
Maybe Amazon are x-raying the card numbers before shipping them out to customers, but that would require Mullvad giving up the card number -> account number -> account number traffic logs. Not much of a threat there.
Maybe all amazon orders are funnelled somewhere and they correlate the fact I bought a VPN card with my home address, and then correlate my bandwidth into Mullvad IPs (gained from my ISP logs) with data leaving Mullvad but that's all very unlikely and very circumstantial.
I'm also not doing anything illegal so perhaps my threat model/level is lower than the 'average' VPN user.
Anyway, not to be a shill but honestly I am just completely won over with how Mullvad do business. I know that a VPN does not make you automatically 'private'/'anonymous' but just the way they do business makes me happy.
Because the people who know who I am, and the people who know what I browse are different. If I paid directly to Mullvad they would know both.
The simple fact they go out of their way to buy their services in this way makes me believe them even more when they say they don't log user traffic, unlike other VPNs.
But you have to get money into your crypto wallet somehow, which makes it relatively easy to deanonymize for most users (serious crypto privacy enthusiasts could of course pay cash for their crypto or perhaps mine it themselves) if they're looking at your traffic specifically, but hard if you're only worried about bulk collection.
IMO the coolest privacy option they have is to literally mail them an envelope full of cash with just your account's cash payment ID.
Back when I was doing that uber-shady business of torrenting, and this kind of VPN was much less-common than it is today, I paid for VPN access with crypto.
I'd gather a small amount of that up (however I did that), keep it in an offline wallet, and spend it on VPN service every now and then.
It just seemed like the right way to go about things.
(And then I lost that wallet, because of course I did, with about $14 worth of BTC in it. I didn't care enough at that time to see if I'd backed it up properly; I wasn't planning on using it for anything anymore anyway. That was in 2014 and those backups are waaaay gone now, but it'd be around $2k worth of BTC today -- plenty to buy some DDR5 RAM. Whoopsie-doodle!)
I know of links and have used it, but I don't think I've ever used links2.
Am I correct to assume that links2 is more of the same/better?
(Also: Your comment seems perfectly sane, but it was already marked as "flagged" by the time I saw it 18 minutes after it was submitted. I vouched for it.
But I wonder: Whose ruffles did you panty in order for your comments to land this way?)
> Am I correct to assume that links2 is more of the same/better?
Most distributions install links2 as links.
> But I wonder: Whose ruffles did you panty in order for your comments to land this way?)
I don't know, but most people on voting based forums don't like what I have to say, even though I am almost always right. For example, when I say that Linux is an operating system using a software development methodology from the 1970s, that hurts some people's feelings. Similarly, when I say that I use Linux, because I am poor (read: not a decabillionaire), not because it's good (Mac/Windows are obviously even worse), that just rubs people the wrong way. So, ultimately, it's because most people are political and stupid in nature.
I think almost everything sucks relative to my standards, which is only natural, because I am engineer and I only exist to fix broken shit.
Naw you'll have to email dang and ask him they have a auto system, I got auto shadow banned once and had to email them, they said I didn't do anything wrong and then restored all my comments. I went like 3 months thinking nobody liked my comments enough to give me an up point. Worth reaching out about their auto mod is sensitive
