Pia is owned by kape technologies, a company founded by former Israeli intelligence officers that buys up VPNs.

I tend to recommend airvpn for cheap port forwarding but bear in mind you may recognize the need for a separate normal service because of airs unique position in the marketplace.

Anyone handling (incredibly insecure! This cannot be understated!) push notifications can be secretly compelled by force of law to hand them over. That’s not unique to Apple or ios.

To bring that all the way back to what I said, that the claim “ios hardening is a myth” is not true: you can turn off push notifications in ios. Because of the nature of the technology there are other controls around it that are not part of the receiving devices operating system and need to be handled separately.

If you haven’t already, disable push notifications.

I think there’s a fundamental lack of understanding amongst people in general about the purpose of our networks. The Internet, like cable television and broadcast tv and radio before it, is a propaganda and surveillance technology overlaid on military command and control.

I want to keep it 100% with you: I did not make the point that it works. I made the point that your claim (and apologies, I’m paraphrasing here) “there is no way to believe it works unless you personally can see the code” is absurd and I will stand by that.

The first link you sent seems to be about google. You were talking about iPhones though. Are you trying to make a broader point about more than just iOS?

The mysk case referenced in your next link (nov. 2022 analysis of a mid 2021 iOS version) actually had an interesting update this year: all the wiretapping type charges got thrown out but the deceptive practices claims were allowed to proceed. It’s likely the plaintiffs will win that one since the company has significantly changed the wording around the settings controls in question in the intervening five and a half years of development.

Despite how this might seem, I’m not trying to fight you. I want to bring this back to how you initially said “ios hardening is a myth”. I really think you have a cohesive approach and argument to make but you’re not tying it all together because you think that left on their own claims like the above and the one about not being able to trust settings unless you can see the source are self evident but they’re not.

as a kind of backwater waste of time discussion spur I think that specifically the source reading line of reasoning pushes people away from security and privacy because it excludes a person who can’t analyze the source code because they are unable to effectively read it.

Normal person who can’t read code even if it were in front of them in plaintext: “well fuck me I guess”

Now it’s extremely clear to me from your replies that you feel you’re in some kind of fight or something. I don’t want that. We don’t have to keep talking if this is stressing you out and it’s not a win or a loss.

I didn’t make the claim that iPhone hardening is a myth, you did. I am open to you providing something to back it up, as I have not seen anything that would.

You said you can read news stories about the toggles not doing anything. May I see the news stories that show the options in iOS don’t do anything?

I am open to hearing evidence that iphone hardening is a myth.

That’s an absurd statement. I do not need to open the power switch on my table saw to understand and recognize that when I turn it off the blade stops spinning.

Even if I were unable to directly view the blade I could see that stock passed across it is not cut.

Even if I didn’t have a table saw I could read the news stories about law enforcement complaints that turning the power button to the off position stops the saw from spinning and craftsman is unwilling to offer a bypass to the switch citing safety concerns and form a cohesive rational understanding that the control does what it says on the tin.

Because of people being driven away from proton I have been suggesting it more than usual, but the simplest and most correct answer if you value your own safety is mullvad.

The service speaks for itself and there is nothing that compares. Several people have replied to me when I suggest mullvad saying “what about one of the founders donations to a Swedish far right political party?” so rather than extol the many virtues of literally the best vpn service out there I will spend time explaining the thing they’re talking about.

There is a party in Sweden called orebro. It is a small political party based in the city of orebro and has varied platforms. One is a policy called remigration which broadly refers to deporting non ethnically Swedish people from the country. I am tiptoeing around explicitly calling this a far right policy because frankly Europe as a whole is trending against migration so it may reflect window shifting more than goose stepping and I am a communist and no communist nation in history has ever operated on open borders however the word remigration as a description of their platform is, let’s just say an ethnically charged dogwhistle.

The party’s other platforms are what could be called left or even schizophrenic and someone described it as “Marxist revisionist” and that’s probably true.

One of the two founders of mullvad, Daniel berntsson, donated half a million kronor to orebro.

Do you consider that policy right wing? Is it bad enough to outweigh the other platforms of the orebro party? What portion of the half million kronor donation would you consider to be going to that platform as opposed to the party’s many other platforms? What portion of that donation comes from berntssons stake in mullvad? What portion of your five dollars a month supported the party or if you take a more nuanced view, that particular policy? Is it even possible to ethically consume services under capitalism? When you pass on will the portion of this purchase that can be traced to that policy by Anubis’ accounting staff make your soul heavier than a feather?

Only you can answer those questions. I would recommend you instead answer the following question: is that enough to cause you to accept a worse quality and more unsafe service?

If it is, a similar but not equivalent service is ivpn, but as a current user of their service it is more complex, easier to screw up and has not been tested to the extent of mullvad.

I don’t know what can happen.

What has been shown over and over again in the world of physical security is cellebrite (an Israeli phone hacking company) reporting in their internal marketing and training leaks that updated iphones are less exploitable with their hardware system than everything except for updated graphene pixels. Cellebrite is commonly used by cops. The most recent leak indicated that a locked after first unlock (afu), a less secure state than before first unlock (bfu), iphone could have enough data retrieved from it that the company would sell you their services to produce a hack unique to that device and software in six months.

Ios is a big target and has had exploits used by nations intelligence services before. It is extremely rare that they are zero-day, meaning that there isn’t a patch out, and if memory serves there has never been one seen in the wild that was both a zero day and not covered by lockdown mode.

I encourage you to look into the cellebrite leaks, the op list and the computer security worlds reporting of ios vulnerabilities and evaluate for yourself if it meets that bar. I use both ios and graphene daily so it meets my personal criteria.

E: In case I am being too detailed, adp encrypts your cloud data removing your capacity to recover your account through apple and the phones themselves are using encrypted memory and storage. Restart often and learn your phones duress options.

This is a good list and gives a lot of context to help a person understand what they’re doing and how it changes their phone.

Not enough can be said of the effect lockdown mode has on stuff everyone expects to “just work” though. It really cuts a lot off.

Strata makes it workable with low vram cards like 8 or 12gb.

The cell communications network lawful intercept backdoor was popped a couple years ago.

E: I’m catching downvotes here so let me be 100%, the cellular communication network lawful intercept backdoor was compromised so having an always on vpn prevents me from getting spied on by cops when browsing on my cell data. The recent Indian number four incident shows how this affects everyone even with tls.

That is not true.

I am open to hearing evidence to the contrary.

That’s true. I left it out because I think even bringing it up in the context of safety equipment is harmful. If the cat brand of tourniquet was associated with a reprehensible political movement I wouldn’t tell people to find other windlass tourniquets, I would recommend the widely available type with many training materials that are easily accessable.

My focus was first and foremost to help people find the safest vpn and that is absolutely mullvad by every measure.

Even suggesting “if you can tolerate how one of the founders spends his money” is an off ramp from making the right choice.

I believe your non-moral concern is ill founded. The company famously chose to drop one of if not its single most popular feature (port forwarding) in order to protect users allegedly sharing csam from an international police investigation and a physical raid that not only found nothing, but found no way to effectively surveil their system.

It is a stretch to suggest that the company with the best software, simplest no kyc or pii metadata system and a proven track record of defending users even when their actions are reprehensible to the point of discontinuing a well loved feature and taking the revenue hit in cancellations is just going to decide to share data.

A more likely scenario (and one that we’re seeing happen in real time) is that nations mobilize to take real power over signals entering their borders and even create standards and systems unique to their own networks. China has already done this and Russia is in process. In the world we are presently approaching there is a possibility that a user who needs to appear as someone coming from outside the border of their zone needs to navigate services intended specifically for that purpose as opposed to relying on a general purpose privacy service like mullvad.

It’s already like that for Chinese endpoints.

While a gun doesn’t phone home (yet!), cars do. Cell phones do. Computer operating systems do.

Mullvad protects users from the latter two which we know for a fact are happening over a purposefully installed lawful intercept backdoor built into the communications network which was reported exploited by non le actors about a year and a half ago and aside from an interestingly timed east coast Verizon outage earlier this year there is no indication has been patched.

It is for the above reasons I do not think entertaining the possibility of mullvad of all service providers simply deciding to comply with governments is a helpful, useful or safe thing to do.

I appreciate your considerate and thoughtful replies. It’s real easy to go hyperbolic in this world awash with cortisol and I admire your restraint.

No, warrant canaries don’t work.

You gotta look at things that have happened.

I post it all the time but mullvad doesn’t have port forwarding anymore because Interpol got together with all the cdns and blacklisted their servers after the company was unwilling to backdoor their systems to catch csam traders and raids didn’t turn anything up. The police had wanted to surveil the company’s systems so they could identify people using port forwarding to trade files using windows file sharing (bonkers). When that failed they turned to a cdn block of all their server ips so either the company would discontinue port forwarding or dissolve, flushing the csam trading into less private or secure channels.

Mullvad ended up ditching port forwarding rather than work with the police. They took a huge hit for it too, lots of people left for ivpn or air.

What the other person is saying about trust is true. Ultimately you’re trusting the provider of the service. I trust mullvad because they don’t have port forwarding anymore.

No.

Different services offer different things for different customers.

Proton offers everything under one banner, a turnkey replacement for google. Seems great until you consider the person who doesn’t want kyc pii for all that stuff under one roof.

Mullvad has no password and keeps as little information about the user as possible. Seems great till you consider the user who wants to gate access by accounts with passwords.

People want different things out of the services they use.

In the case that my safety relied on a vpn I would accept the fraction of my $5 per month that could be traced to insane Europeans.

Every person is different. I consider alternatives to mullvad to be unacceptable in terms of operation, simplicity, functionality, reliability and of course track record.

It’s perfectly fine with me if someone chooses to use a different vpn than I do, but I want people to understand that they aren’t all the same.

As a broad parallel example to illustrate my thought process, I own firearms, cars and many other things manufactured or marketed by companies whose executives hold and materially support right wing politics.

Mullvads multi hop is often automatically used when a person wants their anti dpi (daita) feature but has chosen a server without that functionality.

Multihop is a useful tool when trying to access geofenced content, often my own.

The problem is that there are more ways for it to fail. Jurisdictions aren’t a huge deal if the provider has a well tested system. Bear in mind that almost everywhere in the world kyc data can be ordered to be given up by a judge. A provider with less knowledge of who you are is safer in any jurisdiction than one with a whiz bang system who has your pii. Use cash.

I recommend you don’t choose ivpn over mullvad.

The apps are worse if you end up using the apps, the config file generator has more limitations(that I found) if you use config files, there are more ways to screw up and leave pii lying around in the user account, there are in general more little errors you can make if you’re not careful managing your ivpn account, it’s significantly slower and higher latency than mullvad with fewer servers in fewer locations and has not been tested by law enforcement to the extent that mullvad has.

I am replying to you and not the person who said to choose ivpn because I don’t want to fight anyone about this and only want to pass along my experience with both services to a person trying to make a choice.

I’m not trying to troll.

Do you have any examples of apple turning keys over to the cops? I’m interested if there’s more than simple correlation attacks like what happened when that persons proton account was subpoenaed and the cops matched their recovery email with the account they already had.

I know there’s precedent for that kind of thing where basic account information is given up but no actual “data” is shared.

We are way offtopic though I think even if a person is using a wide open default samsung a vpn is protecting them from surveillance via the lawful intercept backdoor in the cell system.

E: and I want to be clear, the post I replied to said backdoor to the os and so that’s what piqued my interest. Cloud services are their own fucked up thing.

I generally think about a backdoor in an os as a way to bypass a device’s lock, not as a backdoor to an encryption process. It’s the same mark of age that caused me to see no problem with the articles statement that turning off telemetry only turned off crash reports and whatnot. That made sense because those are the thing the user turned off and iOS has other controls for the other stuff.

Which is why I brought up the physical security and bfu points.

I also don’t know of any examples of Apple giving up customers data that isn’t along the lines of the proton example where the user set their proton recovery email to their firstname.lastname@icloud account and the cops used that to tie datasets together with the phone the user unlocked for them (if memory serves, that was a little bit ago).

I think people have a severe misconception about the (lack of ) security of Apple devices and tend to look at how a default iphone works as some egregious violation of trust when the vast overwhelming majority of users wouldn’t accept the limitations that being secure on a phone put upon them.

Ios lockdown mode is a great example. 99% of the time it’s fine but when people try to share contacts you’re shit out of luck and they gotta copy and paste it into a message to you.

As I said before, I don’t think the majority of people would accept the knowledge that their data is unsoupoenable (sp I’m sure) in exchange for account lockouts or forgotten passwords meaning loss of all cloud data. It’s why adp isn’t the default.

Was it netbsd who used to brag about no exploits in the default install? And then you actually do a default install and there’s no services and you think “yep, it’s pretty hard to get into a server that’s not running anything”.

It’s not quite that egregious but graphene is a good relatively secure by default setup while ios is pretty wide open so you can airdrop naked pictures to everyone on the bus and link your location data to your Facebook account, which is honestly what most phone users want. But those gates are closeable and strong in ios.

I uh also want to point out that the metadata cops use against you is your push notifications and I don’t even know any other in person fellow graphene users who disable those.

Broadly, having a phone is dangerous and if everyone understood that radio, television and the internet are propaganda and military c&c networks they’d be much less likely to buy the products to use them.