To VPN through trust

In Russia at the current time, secure network services, the need to use which at first glance is not entirely obvious, are becoming, if not the de facto standard, then more and more in demand from users. This happens for a number of reasons, among which, of course, is almost a five-year aggressive domestic government policy towards regulating the Internet space, as well as the global trend for security and keeping as much personal information as possible with you during network communications, so that no intruders Neither corporations nor state officials took advantage of them without your knowledge.



The right to anonymity in digital interaction is with each of us and is confirmed even at high levels of the UN regularly .

')

If we talk about the Russian state regulation of the Internet and IT, then we can recall dozens of laws that have been passed in recent years and all of them are exclusively regressive, repressive and burdensome for the Internet industry and citizens. Most of these laws make changes to the federal law “On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection” (149-), as well as other regulatory acts, such as the Administrative Code, introducing with the Internet regulatory authority and administrative impact for "Recalcitrant". At the moment, “recalcitrant”, which can be punished with blockages and fines, for the state are only those or other network services or IT companies: websites, software developers, telecom operators, hosting companies, owners of online stores, etc. . The state has not reached users yet. Well, if we leave out the “extremist” cases for posting and reposting a wide range of materials that, according to Russian law enforcement agencies, may pose a threat to the security of the state or offend anyone’s feelings.



Of course, the next step of the Russian lawmakers, if they remain in the same trend towards the Internet space, will concern the impact on citizens for using certain tools (“bypassing locks”, “protection from surveillance”, “privacy”) etc.). Now, by law, we have come to the point that tools and services have become prohibited. What is worth only one law - " the tight regulation of VPN and search engines ." And in a year or two it is quite possible that they will punish users for using them on their devices when communicating on the Web.



But while we haven’t reached this yet, it’s worth yet another time to improve our Internet literacy (and at the same time - your closest environment) and start using network tools that not only allow you to restore access to information that for some reason is Russia turned out to be blocked, whether directly or contiguously, at the same time, by IP-address; this is rather their good additional bonus. The main goal of these services is to protect your communications from the risks of leakage of private data to third parties: whether they are criminals, hackers, unreliable Internet companies or special services of different countries.



Along with the use of secure mail services and instant messengers (as well as self-generation of encryption keys based on PGP), we recommend using a VPN. Of course, there are a large number of such service providers, incl. there are free. But it is not always obvious how much these services actually keep your data safe and whether they can be trusted.



In order to increase mutual trust between users and the VPN services themselves, we launched a kind of “marketplace” of such protected services - vpnlove.me



To date, we have selected 5 services that are recommended for use by international and Russian digital human rights groups:









Among them, there are no random services and those associated with any state intelligence services of any countries. And we expect that with time this choice will only increase.



Using trusted VPN services , you can not be afraid that your personal data will be stolen when you use public access points.



All services recommended by us have already earned a reputation as reliable means of protection from spying and leaking personal data, and also help to easily restore access to blocked information. They are used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, as well as RosKomSvoboda itself.



We can contact the representatives of the VPN-services themselves to get into our selection.



At the same time, we request information from VPN service providers and analyze the results of the received responses.



Examples of questions that we send to services:

• What is your jurisdiction?
• Where are the servers located? In what countries? And what is the total amount?
• Do you have physical control over your servers?
• Do you keep custom logs? If so, which ones and for how long?
• Do you have traffic prioritization? For example, BitTorrent traffic downgrade?
• Do you have an SLA in data transfer rate?
• What encryption protocols do you support?
• Is there any support for SOCKS5?
• Do you use your own DNS server?
• Do you have a Russian-speaking support?
• Can you provide a recommendation from someone from IT human rights defenders, for example, participants EFF, FFTF, AccessNow, FrontlineDefenders, TorProject, etc.?
• Are you ready to involve representatives of RosKomSvoboda as a third party in the event of a conflict between the user who came from our portal and your service?
• What will be your actions if any of the countries of the former USSR sets the conditions for transferring user logs in return for the right to work in the country (otherwise the website and server IP addresses will be blocked)? Let these countries be, for example, Russia and Ukraine.

It is important for us that in case of disputable cases the service does not stand aside and is willing to connect including. and us to resolve the situation. We are ready to mediate in disputes. It is also important that user data and information about their communications does not reach third parties, whether public or private organizations. As well as the quality of the provided protected services and the established reputation of the service among the Internet audience and network activists. Another criterion that can positively characterize a service is readiness to receive payments from users for their services in cryptocurrency.



If you can offer us any other services in this collection or are yourself a representative of such a company, then we are waiting for your suggestions: contact@vpnlove.me .



And also suggest what useful "features" would you like to see at VPN services? What do you miss when using these services?