Anonymous Services - Can We Get A List Going And Feedback?

I can't deny that you'll be in bad company using LR. Tor and VPNs are like that too. Anything that provides strong privacy and anonymity will attract them. Offline, anonymity is readily available by using cash in large cities. Online, it takes some work. That's unfortunate and sad, but it's the way it is.

I use PayPal too. PayPal checkout is effectively the only option for many providers. But I don't trust it. They seem very cooperative with "the man".

LR certainly has a reputation for being less cooperative with trackers. Accounts can be as anonymous as you can manage. It requires contact information, but doesn't check it, as far as I know. It's become more vulnerable since Panama (its home) caved to US pressure for financial disclosure. And it's being aggressively black-listed by the US and allies.

Even so, if you're careful, LR probably can't be tracked. At least, tracking would require considerable effort. Of course, you don't want to leave a trail, either in funding your account or in paying for stuff.

 

Well besides buying stolen credit cards or hiring a hitman what else is Libertyreserve used for? Can't really name any, a few VPN's if that. That's why I would caution new people on LR, your in league with some very shady company.

I wouldn't say it's anonymous either, everything has a trail. like it or not. i'm not saying LR is bad just it should come with some warnings.

 

BolehVPN ?

Is Malaysia that safe ? Does anyone know about the current practices of internet monitoring, data retention, mandatory logging, data exchange with the USA ?

The servers: USA, UK, Germany (supposedly strong privacy laws, do they apply to non-citizens as well, data center raids, sharing with the USA ??), Canada (a bit like the USA), Luxembourg (?), Netherlands (overall not so good), Switzerland ('ally' of the USA), Sweden (the Assange case).

'allies' of the USA are generally not good locations.

 

"Evidence Act" Changes Spur Anger
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19251896

 

From that perspective, no, Malaysia is not safe. Malaysia and the United States have a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) in place, and they have also been known to conduct raids on data centers (similar to Germany). That's one of the reasons why the BolehVPH's owner has specifically chosen NOT to operate a VPN server within Malaysia's jurisdiction. Malaysia is merely their "home base" country of operation.

I'd go with Luxembourg, Sweden, or Netherlands. For most users, any of those locations would be more than adequate from a privacy standpoint. The Assange case is irrelevant, because no one's going to conduct a globally coordinated effort to track you down unless you're really THAT important.

Right, but realistically, ALL countries will cooperate with the USA depending on the circumstances. Usually they do so voluntarily, but even if they don't, there are certainly other ways of exerting pressure. That's why if you need stronger anonymity, you don't rely on just one layer of protection.

 

I want to buy a CounterMail account. They don't accept BitCoin (Why, why, why CM?! )...but they do accept Liberty Reserve. One legit reason.

PD

 

Russia and China most likely won't, barring exceptional situations.

Btw, is there anyone who does internet banking through a VPN ?

 

Well, isn't this crazy. How to conspiracy theories commonly start? Lack of transparency and lack of information. Wilderssecurity is contributing to this and ultimately it doesn't help xerobank.

Could someone at least tell me the gist of what the problem is and if it's ever likely to be solved? Is it something like Steve going through major personal problems?

 

@Nathan C

Why do you care? It's obvious that XeroBank is no longer in business. The website has been abandoned. I do wonder why it's still online. But Steve's post-XeroBank life is irrelevant. And it's none of our business.

 

Is that a fact ?

I seem to recall that not that long ago some people were still using Xerobank.

 

I can't imagine why anyone would. Does the signup process even work?

If anyone knows differently, I'd welcome the news.

 

Xerobank still connects and seems to work okay. But I did just try to set up an account to see if it would let me and I was unable to.

I hadn't heard that Steve was having problems but if it's true I wish him the absolute best.

 

I do as well

 

TORGUARD.NET

any reviews? website is blocked by malwarebytes lol, must be used for mischeif.

 

Swedish VPN provider IPredator.se now offers OpenVPN, in case anyone's interested:

Good NEWS everyone! - IPredator blog

 

Thanks a million for the update been waiting a loooong time for this.

I'd say it is safe to say now that OpenVPN is offered with them, they should be considered on the top 5 of most secure and safe VPN's out there.

 

Testem them, for me the speeds were unacceptable for me (1/6 from my bandwidth).
I don't want to pay with paypal. Don't trust them. After alot of trials I finally managed to get some libertyreserve.
Just read on airvpn they accept LR. That's a big plus. I will sign up with them, asked for a trial to check them out first.
The other option is boleh as they accept LR and mullvad, the latter asks for BT. But I don't know how to get my bitcoins. Does exchanging LR to BC require any kind of passport/picture verfication? I tried to buy some LR and most of the exchangers asked for ID.

LE: what do you think of http://vpnlab.ru

 

WM-center is good for BC<->LR. Most of the LR exchangers only accept wire transfers, money orders, Western Union, and other forms of payment that require ID. In some countries, you can fund LR via services that accept "anonymous" payments at stores, banks, etc. The CC<->LR exchangers charge ~50% fees, and most of them are scams.

BitInstant is an easy way to get BC. No ID is required, but you do need to deposit cash at a bank. After a couple cycles through BitLaundry, it's anonymous enough to use for VPNs, or to buy LR. Using BitLaundry, you send BC through interim accounts. I put each account in its own VM, and connect via nested VPNs.

 

`

It's worth stating at this point that those of us in the United States of America are shut-out of payment options for VPN service based anywhere outside of the United States.

It's a circular thing:

1. We can fund a VPN service in the U.S., but we can't get truly secure VPN in the U.S.

2. We can get secure VPN outside of the United States, but we have no way to anonymously fund such a service.

The ONLY option is payment from PayPal balance and PayPal is not anonymous. PayPal won't even process the prepaid or gift cards anymore for international transactions to comply with the new regulations halting processing of such payments.

That pretty much puts those of us in the USA in a lurch if we want speedy VPN service from iPredator, Boleh, Mullvad, the list goes on and on. Yes, we have Tor, but as much improved as it is over the last couple of years, the speeds are still nowhere near what a VPN can provide.

FinCEN in an effort to fight "terrorism" and "financial crimes" have shut down the international transfer of money without their having your name and address. Some of us, back in the 60's and 70's and 80's thought we were fighting the surveillance state of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc to keep freedoms such as these. Today, the surveillance state has arrived here and we have become what we once feared.

Needless to say, it's interesting to read about all of these services (and also having used some of them at one time) but at this point....

Thoughts?

`

 

@LockBox

BitInstant < -https://www.bitinstant.com/home- > currently operates in the US, Russia and Brazil. BitLaundry < -http://app.bitlaundry.com/- > and WM-center < -https://www.wm-center.com/- > are global.

Getting the first "anonymous" VPN is the hardest part. Even without BitLaundry, Bitcoins from BitInstant are more anonymous than PayPal. You could use a free VPN to get the Bitcoins, and use them to get an AirVPN account. That's a good primary VPN, because their bandwidth is high, and they're pretty mainstream.

Now you could use free VPNs, routed through AirVPN, to get more Bitcoins using BitInstant, and run them twice through BitLaundry. Each interim Bitcoin account should be in its own VM, and connect using a different free VPN via AirVPN.

Using some of those laundered Bitcoins, you could get a Mullvad account, and connect via your AirVPN account. If you like, you could do another BitLaundry cycle or two, using more interim Bitcoin accounts. Then you could use your well-laundered Bitcoins to get Liberty Reserve via WM-center, and buy whatever you want. BolehVPN, Insorg and iVPN all accept Liberty Reserve, and they're all good.

That just an example. The key is bootstrapping, leaking as little information as possible from one step to the next.

 

Mullvad also takes cash in an envelope. There's a risk and a wait time, but they do accept it.

PD

 

Good point! I forgot about that.

How's their speed doing these days?

 

Ok, after reading this thread for a while, I decided to register and post as well.

That's exactly what I tried now. I have a paid by PayPal vpn which I don't enjoy that much and I plan on buying 2 subscriptions to boleh, mullvad or airvpn, after reading opinions, though I haven't tried any of them. Boleh will be the main, as I need it for p2p, and the other can be either. I will keep the main on my host, and when I need to feel completely free, I'd use the guest, the inner vpn and a new identity. So this was my attempt to get either Liberty Reserve or Bit Coin. I read around here about setting up VM, so I installed linux mint as it looked more user friendly than ubuntu and tried a few hours to set up a free VPN over the existing one running on host, but it wouldn't work. I tried 3 vpn, to no avail, couldn't get connected. I don't know why. I'm still trying to figure an anonymous way to do this, but without 2 vpn I won't plan to setup an account to get Liberty. It's a shady semi anonymous ecurrency, and may draw alot of attention, unless you get it as anonymously as possible.

This was also my first experience with linux, I do like it, but there are some things that I cannot replace - like for example a way to resolve dns hostnames through proxy. Tried all packages, searched the web, the closest is proxychains, but the DNS resolve is buggy and always gets a US one. I need that, as some sites require flash that I intentionally allow, so I need a program to resolve the sock's DNS hostnames (like in windows with proxifier), since flash can retreive that easily. And since I prefer sometimes to use socks5 on top of vpns in case the vpn IPs are blacklisted, or simply have an ip of a certain country, I do need that. Plus Bluefish, sort of the equivalent of dreamweaver is nowhere near, not to mention GIMP's attempt to replace photoshop. There are too many programs I miss when using linux. But this is a different discussion and I'm offtopic. Still, I will try to find a good free vpn that works on linux, for a short time until I have my LR.

Also, is it a problem privacy-wise if I used as guest a windows version, if I happen to "find" a copy not registered to my name? Is it really that hard to have a hardened, leak free setup using windows? I like the sudo and terminal stuff, and I'm willing to learn some basics of linux, still I'd miss much of windows' software. And speaking of VPN setups, with 2 vpns running - outer on the host, inner on the guest machine, (no tor); do I need to have pfsense on a vm? Or some sort of a firewall? I skimmed through mirimir posts on VMs, but if needed I will give a more in depth look. Or there's no need for that if no TOR is involved?

As for cash in anvelope, I don't know, I'd never do that personally.
Yes, I'm also curious about speeds.

 

@scriptolab

OK. So I gather that your host runs Windows, that you're running a VPN on it, and that it works. Right? What virtualization software are you using?

Once the host VPN is working, using another VPN on the Mint VM is easy. First install OpenVPN using Software Center. Then get the VPN's client files. There are usually a server certificate ("ca.crt"), a client certificate ("client.crt") and key ("client.key"), and one or more configuration files ("route-name.conf" or "route-name.ovpn"). They're often labeled "for Linux users". Copy all of them to /etc/openvpn. You'll need to use the terminal, and use sudo, because root owns /etc/openvpn. If the client files archive has the credentials (certificates and key) in a folder, preserve that structure (because the VPN config files will expect it).

Now, in terminal, cd to /etc/openvpn, and type "sudo openvpn 'route-name.conf'" (without the outer quotes). It should connect. It may ask for a username and password. If it doesn't connect, edit the "route-name.conf" file, and change the verbosity line to "verb 5". That'll give you more detailed progress messages.

It's possible to use VPNs more elegantly using "sudo /etc/init.d/openvpn start" but that will fail if username and password are required. You can fix that by putting username and password in a file (e.g., "user-pass") and adding "auth-user-pass /etc/openvpn/user-pass" to the "route-name.conf" file. You can also set up the Network Connections wizard. But the simple way is best until you know that it works.

Does that work for you?

 

*SIGH* There is nothing wrong with paypal to pay for a VPN. It's convenient and safe, + you don't have to worry about dealing with people in the Ukraine or some far away land *ROLLES EYES*

mirimir do you own WM-centre? Your plugging it hardcore. All Information is welcome but you should warn about the risks associated with using LR & Bitcoin. As in they will get your ass put on a watch list quicker than you can say go!

Remember, crawl, walk then run.