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Firefox Mozilla The Internet Privacy Technology

Mozilla To Launch VPN Product 'in the Next Few Weeks' (zdnet.com) 73

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Mozilla has announced today that its highly anticipated VPN (virtual private network) service will launch later this summer, "in the next few weeks." The product has also been renamed from its original name of Firefox Private Network to its new brand of the "Mozilla VPN." The name change came after Mozilla expanded the VPN product from the initial Firefox extension to a full-device VPN, capable of routing traffic for the entire OS, including other browsers. Currently, the Mozilla VPN offers clients for Windows 10, Chromebooks, Android, and iOS devices. Mozilla said beta testers also requested a Mac client, which they plan to provide, along with a Linux app.
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Mozilla To Launch VPN Product 'in the Next Few Weeks' More

Mozilla To Launch VPN Product 'in the Next Few Weeks'

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  • Opera's VPN sucks and they don't even cover torrents and other stuff generating tons of bandwidth.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      There's no shortage of decent VPNs on offer today for less than 5USD a month that allow torrents and provide decent bandwidth. Many of those offer clients that don't even need to be installed on your machine, they can instead be installed on your openvpn compatible router, guaranteeing no leaks.

      This seems like an overpriced, underperforming offering being sold on brand recognition alone. Which begs the question, "does mozilla still command any meaningful brand recognition in US, which is the only place this

      • I don't understand who are the people "highly anticipating" this offering.

        The people working at Mozilla, of course.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          I wouldn't be surprised. Considering that this news is that they're apparently rebranding from "mozilla VPN" to "firefox VPN" suggests that few to no people cared about their product.

          The really stupid part in this story is that this seems to be an inferiour version of mullvad VPN, which is mozilla's "server provider" and costs the same 5 USD per month. All while offering all the same features that mozilla advertises in their VPN, and many more. The more I look into this, the more it reeks of a failing contr

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Considering that this news is that they're apparently rebranding from "mozilla VPN" to "firefox VPN" suggests that few to no people cared about their product.

            You have that backwards, so what does that suggest now?

        • Re-designing the UI every month is going to keep a huge number of UI designers in work - although it might alienate everyone else, Mozilla has never worried about that in the past, so I can't see it being an issue any time soon.

          Won't someone think of the bugs?

        • ..."which they plan to provide, along with a Linux app" ...
          see you next year then , Moz

      • There's no shortage of decent VPNs on offer today for less than 5USD a month

        Can you recommend some of the best ones...for speed, etc?

        Do any of these keep records ?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          Speeds tend to vary month to month, as various providers "adapt" to VPNs and they have to shift servers to evade new blocks. As a result, one can't really issue a blank recommendation for everyone everywhere.

          In all the honesty, pretty much any major VPN today will not keep your records and will give you decent speeds on most servers outside really limited countries like China.

    • Perhaps it is is time to make something better than TCP/IP

      For the past 20 years we seem to be doing more hacks and tricks to try to get TCP/IP to work in today's modern world. Where we need Increased Security,Privacy, Bandwidth and Greater volume.

      Our networks need firewalls, NATing VPN's to get in, other VPNs to protect our home browsing. Every major protocol has two versions one that is encrypted and one that is unencrypted.

      TCP/IP isn't bad, but it is a nearly 50 year old technology. Based on a completely

  • Considering Mozilla's political activism, I think it would be foolish to use this VPN service.

    • Can you expand on that comment?

      I'd like to hear more specifics.

      • Re:Playing politics (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Generic User Account ( 6782004 ) on Friday June 19, 2020 @09:13AM (#60201970)
        Mozilla ousted its CEO Brendan Eich, the guy who created Javascript, over a personal donation in favor of a law against same-sex marriage in California. If a company can't ignore the personal political opinions of their staff, would you trust them with protecting yours? Freedom of speech is only freedom of speech if it also protects the speech you don't like.

        • ...Brendan Eich [made] a personal donation in favour of a law against same-sex marriage in California.

          Basically, he wanted to help same-sex couples to avoid the hell of marriage and got fired for it!

        • Re:Playing politics (Score:4, Interesting)

          by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Friday June 19, 2020 @10:24AM (#60202250)

          If a company can't ignore the personal political opinions of their staff, would you trust them with protecting yours?

          Because the personal opinions of staff are something completely different than the personal opinions of customers. Seriously have you ever worked in a company? Basically every company in existence has had some kind of skeleton in their closet for mistreating their staff. You're upset right now because in this case the guy was important enough to hear about but this kind of shit is par for the course, and in many cases it has nothing to do with customers.

          I work for a company that massively support women in management and in stem. Publicly they donate hugely to education for women, advocate for equal rights, equal pay, and all that good positive sexism. That didn't stop them from being dragged through the courts successfully by a woman who was fired for reasons that made everyone internally facepalm. It didn't stop someone quitting over sexual harassment. It didn't stop someone else from being retaliated against after reporting sexual harassment.

          Welcome to the duality of the business world. Do as I say not as I do.

          • Do as I say not as I do.

            Yet another great tagline for a VPN service.

            You're missing the point. People who see themselves as arbiters of opinion are unfit to run a VPN service. If someone had been ousted the way Brendan Eich was ousted from Mozilla, but for donating to support same-sex marriage, that would not have been acceptable either. If you can't work with people who have other political opinions, you're unprofessional to a degree that precludes you from handling sensitive data.

        • Unless you were there in the room when all the conversations about that subject occurred, how can you know what really happened leading up to him being fired? For all you know the guy was making fag jokes left and right in front of people that worked there, and Mozilla as an organization had the grace to not talk about that to the press.

          • "Get rid of racist police and there won't need to be violent protests. No more jackbooted thugs with badges and guns."

            Why do you think that "jackbooted thugs with badges and guns" are motivated by racism and not not simply psychopaths who believe that because of their jackboots, badges, and guns that they can do whatever they please with no "R" for repercussions?

            Jackbooted thugs do not do nasty shit because they are racist -- they do it because they think they can get away with it and they believe their vic

            • That is the stupidest and most pointless excuse for an argument I've ever heard.
              Let me simplify it for you: Get rid of violent police.
              A police officer should be calmer, cooler-headed, controlled, and more thoughtful than everyone around them, because they have deadly weapons and the authorization to use them.
              So we should screen all existing police psychologically, and remove the ones who don't meet that standard.
              Then you screen all applicants and reject the ones who likewise don't meet the standard.
              Th

          • Get rid of racist police and there won't need to be violent protests. No more jackbooted thugs with badges and guns.

            It's bad form to troll with your sig.

        • Mozilla ousted its CEO Brendan Eich, the guy who created Javascript, over a personal donation in favor of a law against same-sex marriage in California.

          I learned something, thanks. I thought the kicked him out because he created Javascript.

      • > Can you expand on that comment?
        >
        > I'd like to hear more specifics.

        Mozilla went out of their way to suppress gab.com's "dissenter" plugin, because Gab is home to a lot of "wrong-think". The dissenter plugin was a lot like "Disqus", an external server which hosted comment threads about specific website articles. It was used a lot by people who had been banned at those websites, or websites that insisted on using Fecesbook for comments.

        * First, they banned the dissenter addon from the Firefox addon

    • With the current worldwide sociopolitical climate the way it is, the only way you're going to avoid political activism at all is to go live off the grid entirely in a cabin in the deep wilderness somewhere.

  • Mozilla is more irrelevant than ever (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nashv ( 1479253 ) on Friday June 19, 2020 @08:54AM (#60201892) Homepage

    The main reason Mozilla was worth anything is because Firefox was at a time, the best browser out there. Now it lags behind the competition so much on the performance and battery life front that it's a joke.

    Mozilla needs to do one thing and only one thing well - built the most performant browser out there, along with privacy. That is the one thing they refuse to do over the last 2 years. The usershare drops below 5%, and their still won't pull out their metaphorical head out of their philosophical arses.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday June 19, 2020 @09:46AM (#60202110)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • People use Chrome because Google pushes it and because some websites have started to treat it the way they treated IE in the 1990s, not because it's the best. I don't understand its popularity at all, it's almost as crude and feature free as IE was.

        I'm not going to speak to the merits of either browser, but I use Chrome because it has a clean and straightforward interface that hasn't drastically changed over the years, and it runs well. I use FireFox for connecting through a SOCKS proxy or if I need a second or third browser configuration.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nashv ( 1479253 )

        >I don't understand its popularity at all

        You don't understand it ? Just head over to the Firefox Reddit and see the massive shitstorms brewing there. Ask all the IT people in Enterprise who are moving to Edge(Chromium). Edge (Chromium) has surpassed Firefox in usershare , without any kind of pushing or install-by-default. Why do you think ?
        Ask why every new browser wants to use Chromium.

        To be clear, I didn't say Chrome that Firefox, but Chromium is objectively and demonstrably more performant than Gecko.

    • The thing is, no one cars. You think the best browser or the one that does one thing well is Chrome? Firefox's rise was as an alternative to a browser that was truly shitting the bed. It was the only "real" competition on offer in a nasty time. Along came Chrome, the difference that made Chrome popular? Advertising and product placement. You couldn't search the web without being asked if you wouldn't rather try Chrome. So people tried Chrome, shrugged and got on with their lives.

      Mozilla doing the browser "w

      • Yeah, there's pretty much a predictable chorus of anti-Firefox people who will complain loudly when they make any change whatsoever. *remove* features - they complain, *add* features - they complain. But that chorus are oddly silent on stories about new Chrome updates.

        As an example is the claim that they've dropped the ball, specifically in the last two years of "just make a fast browser that keeps up with the competition and a browser and nothing else". Well, they did that at the end of 2017, and went from

        • ADDITIONAL: as well as complaining when any features are either removed or added, the same people also loudly complain that Firefox isn't doing enough to keep up with other browsers, i.e. they complain about it when things stay the same.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by aliquis ( 678370 )

      As far as I'm aware Firefox have the best browser now. It's what I use all the time.

      To me it lost the lead at 1.0.7. I switched back for the anti-tracking features but also Chrome seem to become slower if you save a lot of tabs.

      I definitely wouldn't use Chrome or Opera over it. I use Opera to save webpages as PDFs.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      We need a new Mozilla and Phoenix web browser. :P

  • The problem with VPN's (Score:5, Informative)

    by onyxruby ( 118189 ) <onyxruby@ c o m c a s t . net> on Friday June 19, 2020 @10:31AM (#60202264)

    VPN's have a couple fatal flaws that most people seem to gloss over. Who owns your VPN? I'm not asking who owns the domain name or operates the VPN. I'm not even asking who owns the company that provides the VPN service. It's really easy to have a holding company own another company. A famous example of this is Alphabet which owns Google. The country that a company officially resides in for tax purposes often is unrelated to where it's headquarters are located.

    A lot of people like to get a VPN service from another country as they think it will make it more difficult for their government to spy on them. Some of these people have quite legitimate concerns. Are you familiar with the other countries legal system to know how to look up things like holding companies? When you do this, how are you able to verify if there is a holding company for the company providing your VPN service? That's a common arrangement without subterfuge that can be done for tax purposes. These common arrangements that are done for tax purposes and have no malicious intent can make it difficult to find out who really owns a company.

    Now consider foreign actors with malicious intent that want to know what people are willing to pay money to hide. They will probably do a little more to hide the ownership structure than a publicly disclosed holding company. Seriously, how do you know your VPN provider is not actually owned by China or Iran?

    Even if your VPN isn't outright owned by a foreign actor, how do you know they haven't been compromised by a foreign actor? You don't, and neither do they. At a time when a pandemic is still very much on people's minds, VPN providers are a valuable target for state sponsored actors. The point being that you have to treat your VPN just like you do your Internet provider and encrypt your traffic over it just like you would over the Internet. Stop trusting your VPN and assuming that it is safe, it's naive and unjustified.

    • Even if your VPN isn't outright owned by a foreign actor, how do you know they haven't been compromised by a foreign actor?

      Along the privacy axis there are threshholds of achievement.

      If most people are just trying to do care free torrenting... then only specific "foreign actors" matter, those being the riaa/mpaa and countries that would do their bidding.

      • If torrenting is all your doing than you right and it doesn't matter. If your using it to work or conduct anything you need to keep private than it's a whole different story.

        • This isn't snarky but a serious question. Do you have a VPN in mind that meets your standards of trustworthiness? If not, what alternatives would you employ other than never connecting to public networks?

          • The point is that VPN's are being trusted when they shouldn't. The purpose of a VPN should really be to act as an abstraction layer to protect you from your own ISP spying on you. A secondary purpose is for getting around pissant geo blocks. You should never trust any VPN provider. Treat your VPN provider as if your directly on the Internet without a firewall.

            I'll add in what I see as being the closest you can get to a use case where you can trust a VPN. If your using your employers VPN to perform work duti

  • why not Mozilla work on an IPTables plugin for thier VPN???

    • Why would they do that? That feature would be limited in use to the 1.6% of PCs that have Linux, and even then only the subset of those users who even have Firefox. Or, they could spend that time and effort supporting the other 98.5% of their users.

  • I appreciate more and more what they do over the years. And this is also a very good move, if it is sincere. But! Mozilla is registered in USA. That is a big nono. It is not possible to make a trustable entity in USA, as the law and some forces can just say to you - you have to reveal this or put that into your product, and you are not allowed to whisper about this conversation to anyone. The only way might be to shut down your company, as the ... what was it called, some Lava... company which shut down whe

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