

TunnelBear VPN app - plg
https://www.tunnelbear.com

======
thejerz
I'll be sticking with iPredator, and here's why: I don't care what my VPN
client looks like -- I care about how secure it is. I have immense trust for
Peter Sunde & Friends. They are not in this business to Get Rich Quick™. They
are in it for deeply held moral, social reasons; reasons, so deeply held, they
have put their own personal safety and freedom at risk. I feel very safe
knowing they will NEVER comply with NSA, Interpol, etc., and that they are
always one step ahead of BigBrother. I'm sure the Tunnel Bear people are cool
and all, but no one can touch the Pirate Bay team. End of conversation.

~~~
svintus
Hi, I'm Ivan Sergeyenko, also known as iBear. I am one of the engineers on the
TunnelBear team. We all hold deep respect for Peter Sunde and his team.
iPredator is definitely one of the most trustworthy VPN services out there.

Our goal, however, is different. We aim to bring VPN/privacy protection to
people who have never heard of VPN (notice that we don't have "VPN" anywhere
on our site, except for in a quote from TNW and in the help section). Despite
there being 100's (if not 1000's) of VPN services out there, very few of them,
sadly, care about the non-tech-savvy audience.

~~~
ris
"We aim to bring VPN/privacy protection to people who have never heard of VPN"

Will such people understand the subtle ways in which using a VPN will make
your communications _less_ secure, though?

~~~
DonGateley
How about giving us a clue rather than just being cryptic.

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rafaelm
I want to thank the Tunnelbear guys, they've made their service free for
everyone in Venezuela during the protests, to avoid government internet
censorship (which is about to get worse since they are now meeting with the
ISPs to implement more strict website filtering).

I know they cannot offer this indefinitely but I want to thank them for their
help.

~~~
svintus
Thank you for your kind words! We are doing our best to stay on top of the
situation, despite the government's attempts to block us. If you read this and
tunnelbear.com is blocked for you, try tuneloso.com. It's a static mirror
we've put up on S3, it has not been blocked yet, to the best of our knowledge.

------
thisiswrong
> " All you have to do is turn the knob to “ON” and you are protected. " The
> Wall Street Journal.

Haha - No thanks. The fact that TunnelBear rely on reviews from the MSM, who
are gvt mouthpieces defending the NSA spying through sneaky wording
techniques, this just puts me off. I mean come-on, they're getting Yahoo to
vouch for them? With the amount of hacks Yahoo have had recently! Yahoo didn't
even use SSL between their severs for christ's sakes... and not to mention the
NSA are all over their users' data!

I like the idea, and the interface is attractive. But only a solid review from
the likes of TorrentFreak (or a similar 'forward-thinking' media outlet) would
reassure me enough. Does TunnelBear even accept cryptocurrency?

------
jerguismi
I have been using [https://mullvad.net/en/](https://mullvad.net/en/) for some
time. It can also be paid with bitcoin.

I don't see what's so special about tunnelbear, except better branding. VPN
provider market has been quite flooded for some time.

------
sairamkunala
This was featured 2 years ago. [http://hola.org/](http://hola.org/) is an
easier alternative for web browsing.

~~~
Cless
Note that you can't use hola for anything except the browsers it supports. (As
far as I know.) So it's good if you want privacy only in the browser.

------
jmspring
Curious what logs and other personal information is kept on their servers.
Haven't read through the blogs yet, but one thing a number of people consider
when using a VPN service like this is the type of information that the
provider keeps.

~~~
MikeKusold
They claim that they keep no logs.
[http://help.tunnelbear.com/customer/portal/articles/1469449-...](http://help.tunnelbear.com/customer/portal/articles/1469449-information-
on-logging-encryption-and-legal-stuff)

~~~
svintus
Yes this is correct. I am sorry that this is not made more apparent on our
site.

~~~
intopieces
Hi Ivan,

I wonder how it is possible that you keep no logs of customer IP addresses. It
seems that, from a technical standpoint, you must log some IPs for
troubleshooting connection issues and being sure that your system is not being
used for nefarious purposes (i.e., ones that cause harm to your own system,
not necessarily copyright infringement or spam). Furthermore, wouldn't you
need to log IPs to track how much data one user transfers? Or even to
determine who has an account and who doesn't? This data must reside somewhere
on your system.

------
Nk26
Tried them about a year ago, Service was pretty slow. Never heard from CS
after 3 attempts. Ended up needing to go through PayPal to get my money back.
Private internet access has been my goto ever since.

~~~
z92
Now I use DigitalOcean's $5/month box running CentOS.

~~~
popotamonga
Is there a 1-click deploy for a VPN on DigitalOcean that just works? SSTP
prefered.

~~~
shubb
I'm interested in any howto for setting up a VPN server - the ones I found
online usually assume you want to VPN into a buisness network, not channel
access to the internet.

For most things though, you can just use ssh, no setup on the server required.
You just need putty, or another ssh client on your local computer.

Nice guide for putty here: [http://www.bestvpnservice.com/blog/how-to-setup-
putty-for-ss...](http://www.bestvpnservice.com/blog/how-to-setup-putty-for-
ssh-vpn/)

For command line ssh clients, things are much easier. Just go:

ssh yourhost.com -D 8080

and then set up firefox to use a 'socks proxy' at localhost:8080, like the
firefox part of that putty guide.

------
raingrove
SSH doesn't work over Tunnelbear. That's really a deal breaker.

~~~
agf
Pretty sure that's not true. I believe I've used SSH over TunnelBear, and this
page specifically calls out SSH as supported:
[http://help.tunnelbear.com/customer/portal/articles/1470869-...](http://help.tunnelbear.com/customer/portal/articles/1470869-what-
applications-work-with-tunnelbear-)

~~~
naland
what I can't bear right now is their help web pages, bad responding to zoom
and cut right display... brr. Is 'care about the non-tech-savvy audience' too
? or bearing down on them.

------
borski
We built a really simple one-click solution for building this that walks you
through how to do it, without having to trust an outside party with your web
traffic:
[https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/vpn](https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/vpn)

------
bitsteak
Why anyone would voluntarily MITM their own data and hand ALL of it over to a
single company (and a single point of failure) is totally beyond me. It's a
market failure that services like these continue to exist.

~~~
dmix
A single point of failure...such as sending unencrypted traffic to an ISP?

The difference is I can buy a VPN with BTC, not be required to provide details
of my identity, and make 99% of the traffic out of my machine encrypted (which
_prevents_ significant amount of local MITM attacks, for ex at coffeeshops).

------
impostervt
Would love to see a bitcoin purchase option.

~~~
eps
Yes, and please add an option to pay in bacon while you are at it.

~~~
svintus
We don't currently accept BTC, but you can pay for TunnelBear with honey.
Contact us for our mailing address. (I am quite serious, we've actually
received some delicious organic honey in the mail a couple of months ago). We
wouldn't mind accepting bacon, but you will have to make the payment in
person, I am afraid bacon would spoil during shipping.

------
dexcs
I would like to see this kind of software open source.... Most of the VPN
Clients are to complicated...

~~~
dewey
[http://www.sparklabs.com/viscosity/](http://www.sparklabs.com/viscosity/) is
also pretty simple.

------
ssully
Seems really cool and easy to use. I love how it's as simple as an on/off
switch.

Still though I would like to know more about what is actually going on. As
others have said, being open source would be neat.

------
fenesiistvan
Is there any VPN client API/SDK/lib which can be easily embedded in apps?
(C++/Java/other?). Something with a free plan would be even better

------
TrainedMonkey
Is this openvpn based solution? I am looking for something that could bypass
bluecoat...

~~~
svintus
Our PC/Mac/Android clients are using OpenVPN.

------
evertonfuller
How do you guys fund this?

