[liberationtech] if you are a circuvmention tool developer, please FREE it now for Iranian

[Florian Weimer]

> I've heard this statement before and I'm a bit unclear. If I want to
> hide my traffic from my ISP or get it securely out of my country, I
> either have to rent a VPS or place a server with a friend somewhere
> remote. Both of those options remove the server from your control. How
> is this any safer from buying VPN service from a company? What step am
> I missing?

There are VPN/proxy services which are recommended by word-of-mouth
among potentially targeted communities.  From the point of view of an
attacker, this is very interesting because the victims are, to a large
extend, self-selecting, just like respondents to 419 scams.

If you rent a piece of infrastructure from a hosting company of which
you can be reasonably sure that it has not been specifically set up to
provide services to your people, then you are less at risk.
(Especially if it would be natural to obtain services there for
totally different reasons.)