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@ sword in the stone
2025-02-11 20:47:07
I will say I don't think most people need that tech to bypass firewalls and censorship though, or at least not Mullvad's primary user base. So it's not really a threat to them. Whereas Obscura is going to be targeting a slightly different customer base, and yet they're still effectively funneling customers to Mullvad, so I'm sure this is a win for both companies. Obscura gets access to a lot more infrastructure than they could offer and they can just focus on their tech, Mullvad gets lots of new customers effectively through Obscura.
Also, I'm not sure at all on the details of Obscura or how it works or who's behind it or anything (the website seems to be down anyway so maybe they can't handle the traffic of this sudden spike in interest). So take this with a massive pinch of salt, but Mullvad's primary customer base are people who want the best level of privacy from their VPN provider, they allow anonymous sign ups with no account details, pay in lots of different ways etc. And a potential problem with using a service like Obscura which goes through two different services (Obscura and then Mullvad) is that you're increasing your exposure to different parties, so maybe you're increasing your exposure to correlation attacks which could de-anonymise you for example, or maybe to supply chain attacks.
That's why I was saying they're probably different audiences, because it seems like Obscura's main benefit is this tech to bypass firewalls by obfuscating traffic. But that's not really Mullvad's use case. And if you want better obfuscation with Mullvad then you've got their DAITA system anyway which makes every packet the same size/timing to avoid traffic analysis.