Nord VPN tv commercials are incredibly misleading

Possibly linux@lemmy.zip to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 241 points – NordVPN TV Spot, 'Cyber Zen'
ispot.tv

A VPN isn't going to protect you from malware or trackers. I'm not sure how they can get away with this marketing.

If you want to boost your security focus on your web browser

47

ispot.tv is on one of my DNS blacklists, it seems to be an advertising service?

Many VPNs have built in traffic filtering that does block common malware, phishing, and tracking domains/IPs.

Their advertising claims still do get a bit ridiculous though.

Yeah, they’re not completely telling the truth, but they aren’t exactly lying either.

They literally aren't saying anything. There are no verbs in this advertisement; the narrator is speaking in noun phrases, not sentences. So he's literally saying nothing.

Good luck trying to explain to normies what a vpn is in 30 seconds.

Internet providers, governments and criminals can see what you are doing online, With VPN they can't anymore.

Thats basically it.

...they can't really? Only the domain name is visible to the ISP, and criminals are either stopped by https or won't care about a VPN.

Everything's visible for HTTP, and in fact some ISPs inject their own ads into HTTP content. HTTPS is harder for malicious actors, but your ISP can tell when you're visiting pornhub.com, and will happily provide that to the government. With encrypted SNI it's somewhat harder, but if you're visiting an IP address of 1.2.3.4, and that IP address is solely used by pornhub.com, it's not hard to guess what you're up to.

Yes, I'm aware. IP addresses are come colocated to hell and back, and every site uses https. I'm sure your ISP is getting some real interesting data watching you visit the same 4 sites.

Not all isps are bad.

Mine have their own free vpn service which encrypts all traffic and hides your IP. So even if the government want anything on you they can't give it to them.

On top of that they are notorious for not giving the government anything. They also have competitive pricing.

Yeah I don’t buy it.

Instead of tapping individual connections, you now only have to tap the traffic to/from the VPNs exit nodes. Then you correlate incoming packets with outgoing packets (e.g. based on size, timing, etc) and you know the origin of the traffic.

Bonus is that it acts as a filter, people using a VPN want to hide their traffic so you specifically want to watch those people.

With a VPN it's harder for some and impossible for others. But don't for a second think nobody can see what you're doing. I don't want to go into the whole tinfoil provacy rabbithole but with things like browser fingerprinting it's all moot

Yes but for most normal people it's enough and people that are on that kind of watch list usually know what they need.

You can pretend to be somewhere else to watch some geo locked content

MLB.TV thinks I'm from Seattle so I can watch games that would usually be blacked out, works great

They have some additional services they advertise that supposedly deals with these, though I'd imagine they require installed software which would give them more visibility into systems than I'm comfortable with.

For trackers and to some extent malware, they could potentially block some by disallowing outgoing traffic from the VPN to known tracker IP's/domains or C&C hosts/networks, but I could see that being fairly infectivity overall with potentially for false positives.

They're probably referring to their DNS ad and malicious domain filter.

Came to say this. It's a feature they provide so they aren't falsely advertising but it's also nothing special.

I thought the 'security' angle was just a smokescreen anyway. Isn't it actually for accessing region-locked media?

It’s for torrents.

VPNs are great for avoiding the nastygrams that your ISP forwards to you from media companies. They get sent to some company that doesn't care about US laws instead, and probably laughed at before being deleted

Eh, the problem is, most of these big vpn providers end points are well known by most isp's.

2 more...

I use my VPN on public networks for additional security

Nowadays everything is encrypted by default. You don't get additional security with a VPN.

Not everything is. HTTP and unencrypted SNI are still around.

Name a popular service that isn't encrypted but using it might expose you in a legitimate way.

Well, not really with these, per se. My own VPN, Wireguard, routes back through my pihole service to double down on it's filtering. For the most, I'm not trying to obfuscate my ip. If I wanted to do that I'd use tor or something. I just don't want my traffic to be easily snooped on when I'm connected to wifi that isn't mine.

Well, if you access things on the internet you could be sued for, your IP will not appear in the logs of your ISP or the webserver you connected to.

Sure. But they can't advertise on that point. So they claim it's for malware and tracking protection even though that makes no sense.

2 more...

I cancelled my subscription once all my water turned to jello

They used to say NordVPN would boost your game's latency in their ads so I'm not surprised

Technically the truth

Technically? This irony or am I missing something?

Using a VPN generally increases your latency. Latency is...bad. They are advertising a negative consequence as a positive feature, banking on the target market not having enough understanding of the terms in play.

Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You might understand it better but the frog is dead.