I see ExpressVPN, PIA, CyberGhost, etc. in post titles here on the front page, so I thought I would post this comment I just wrote in a thread here. Keep your guard up, companies such as Kape may own more VPNs and VPN review sites than we currently know, and their motives may go beyond simple collusion.


I'm suspicious about some other VPNs that they aren't documented as owning. I was hired to write for them and for some reason, Surfshark seems like one of their go-tos that they tend to cast in a good light. I also see a lot of focus on NordVPN and not as a scapegoat either. Of course it would make sense for them to vary the contents and conclusions of their "unbiased" reviews, but it made me wonder if something might be in the works, or maybe by some circuitous route they already benefit from misleading promotion of Nord or Surfshark.

Kape Technologies is at best a blatant collusion network and quite possibly an actual Mossad intelligence operation whose founder (or one-time head?) has origins in Unit 8200. Israeli tech/security companies in general are known for having ties to Israeli intelligence, but in a situation like this, I think that this company and its holdings are especially not to be trusted, and some degree of extra caution is not undue if you feel any suspicion that they may be behind a VPN provider, even if it can't be proven that they own it.

Watch out for reviews from vpnmentor.com or wizcase.com, or reviews that sound like / focus on the same things as their reviews do. If you skim a few articles you'll pick up the pattern easily:

https://www.vpnmentor.com/bestvpns/torrents/

https://www.wizcase.com/vpn-reviews/

"Blah blah blah I tested these VPNs and here are the results"

No not really, for all I know nobody has actually done any testing, and if so, the writer is not privy to the data and is only writing about the results that they were told happened. The articles are all written to a pretty specific template. They tell you to write certain parts in your own words, but the substantive information is all fed to you.

Articles that sound similar to these can't be trusted. At best, they were written by some freelancer who doesn't necessarily know very much about VPNs and was given a PDF to study yesterday about what a VPN is and why anyone would need one, and then let loose to crank out prescribed talking points in their own words, supported by the first Google result they could find that agreed with the thing they were trying to say. That is why many of them will use the same phrases to describe things that could be phrased more fluidly if they were actually familiar with them, or they'll gloss over explanations of things because they don't actually know what's going on under the hood.

Here's the one about "How to get a [country] IP address in [current year]"

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ONnU8iyU3pBEl99uDQJz7MU1TvUMXC0r/view?usp=sharing

Favorite talking points include:

  • Fast speeds
  • "x servers in y countries"
  • State of the art super awesome military-grade space-age AES256 encryption. Did I mention that AES256 is so very impressive and amazing?
  • You can have multiple devices connected at once (no shit??? It doesn't need to be a special feature, it's called a gateway. You can configure your 15 year old Linksys WRT54G with stock firmware to establish a VPN tunnel)
  • Unblocking streaming services
  • The VPN provider has good customer service, not that you'll need it because you're not stupid or anything, but sometimes shit goes wrong and it'll be good to have them there to quickly restore VPN access for your critical "security" needs
  • Torrenting support
  • Kill switch
  • Doing [thing you want to do] is easy with a VPN, and in fact premium VPNs are the only reliable and safe way to do [thing you want to do]
  • Split tunneling
  • "No-logging policy"
  • Servers with no hard drive that run everything in RAM for ultra security in case they get raided I guess?
    Protip: Agencies gathering info for an investigation generally capture data on the wire over time, not by seizing a server and hoping they can retrieve something useful off the hard disk that day
  • Also, promoting Intego antivirus -- guess who owns that

Here's one small way to spot articles coming from Webselenese / Kape Technologies:

Don’t use em dashes (—); use n dashes instead (–), with spaces on both sides.

Courtesy of the style guide. Who even does that? What a bunch of savages!

Don't trust reviews that sound even remotely like this, including saying vague things like that a certain VPN (or VPNs in general) is "highly secure" (meaning what, as opposed to what, and how?) or things like this:

ExpressVPN provides obfuscation on servers outside the country. Obfuscation works by hiding the fact that you’re using a VPN, so you can access the uncensored web without triggering government firewalls.

Yes, "obfuscation" does, in fact, mean "hiding," thanks for that. This explains nothing about how it actually works nor what the caveats and pitfalls may be.

etc.

Edit Report
Pub: 03 Jun 2022 01:47 UTC
Views: 27