Cryptohippie seems like a cool service, in principle, because they provide not just a single VPN server to send your traffic through, but an anonymizing network of servers that mixes your traffic up with other people's traffic. But I don't see why they are necessarily the best option. For the money, wouldn't you be better off signing up for two or three separate VPN services and hopping your traffic through each one? Mirimir often mentions the importance of dividing trust between different services, so that you do not rely on just one party to be doing what they claim they do. With Cryptohippie (or any business claiming to provide a super sophisticated solution), you have to believe that their service does what it says it does and that they can't be compromised (maliciously or through national secuirty letters, etc.). With multiple services in different jurisdictions, you make it much more complicated to coordinated compromising services all over the world, just to track one person. Also, Cryptohippie is based in the U.S. I thought a lot of people (because of national security letters and the aggressiveness of the U.S. government) consider the U.S. one of the worst places for a privacy service to have it's legal headquarters--this makes them subject to U.S. court orders, including sercret orders that you will never know about). Of course, it also depends on where one happens to live. To me, it seems like if one's main concern is juts to increase general privacy from marketing trackers (like Google, etc.) and from mass dragnet tracking by governments and if one has no reason to believe one is a specific target of a state agency, then a less expensive good service like iVPN or AirVPN is fine. If you really have a good reason to be concerned about being a target of a powerful state agency, then you need multiple services and tor and something complicated, like Mirimir outlines in his tutorials at iVPN (and for email, you should be deploying PGP yourself and not relying on anonymizing services).
We are looking into refining the lockdown feature which is similar. But we really feel the best way is to just use a freeware firewall program to just configure it Such as Comodo.
Cryptohippie USA is a company that sells CH accounts. They don't handle the actual service. Cryptophippie Panama is the service. They separate the sales from the people who handle the service. http://www.cryptohippie.net/ They've been around for a long time and a lot of people trust them. It's a personal choice.
I don't think the question is whether or not Cryptohippie is trustworthy. The point, as I understand mirimir having made in these forums, is that trust isn't good enough. One needs to water down, as it were, one's reliance on trust alone. More specifically if one's security relies entirely on trusting one single entity, then no matter how sophisticated their system on paper, it only takes one failure in the trust chain to compromise one's security. But by hopping one's VPN traffic through different (hopefully trustworthy) VPN services, more than one entity must betray your trust to compromise your security. That is, multiple parties in multiple legal jurisdictions must be forced to collude simultaneously. It's just harder to pull off and less likely to happen. So from a security standpoint, their is an inherent security vulnerability in placing all of ones trust in just one entity, regardless of how good they are supposed to be and regardless of the technical sophistication of their system. That's why I stated that if one really needs the kind of privacy and security that Cryptohippie technically offers, then one probably should not be placing all of one's trust in a single party (whoever it is). And for the money one could accomplish better security by dividing up the trust between multiple services in different legal jurisdictions.
