Carl Dong → obscura.net
@carldong.me
📤 87
📥 23
📝 51
Building
@obscura.net
, former Bitcoin Core contributor
ISPs can't even spy on your TLS traffic without breaking your internet. Obscura VPN users unaffected.
about 18 hours ago
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Free civilizations cannot exist without privacy.
1 day ago
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Every Cloudflare outage makes me wonder: Can we develop an open-source, local Cloudflare? Modern tooling/packet bypasses like XDP and BPF surely lower the barrier-to-entry to meaningful DDoS protection significantly.
23 days ago
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😲 Ubiquiti just made a Flipper Zero for SFP modules!
about 1 month ago
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You can tell I had a lot of fun chatting with
@ente.io
's CEO Vishnu 😊 Fighters for digital privacy, unite!
add a skeleton here at some point
2 months ago
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User data is toxic waste. Companies that don't treat it as such are ngmi.
3 months ago
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🎉 BIG NEWS: Obscura is now on iOS! Obscura engineering team remains undefeated, even against the goliath that is App Store Review and In-App Purchases. We'll do a blog post about this someday, so folks can learn from our battle scars!
add a skeleton here at some point
4 months ago
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Anyone know of folks that have worked with the Android `VpnService` API?
4 months ago
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> Apple: Confirming that you've fixed X, only Y needs fixes > Us: We've now fixed Y > Apple: Please fix X > Us: You literally just confirmed that we already fixed X > Apple: Please fix X (no details added) > Us: Here's proof we fixed X > Apple: Please fix X (no details added)
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4 months ago
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British lawmakers are buying their VPN subs with taxpayer money… and telling the same taxpayers not to use VPNs. You cannot make this shit up.
4 months ago
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I am a systemd lover and I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE
4 months ago
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“We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place.” – A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto An open and private internet is more important than ever. That's what we fight for at
@obscura.net
5 months ago
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A Remote Access Trojan Malware was found in packages for Librewolf, Firefox, and Zen Browser last week 😰 If you were an Arch Linux users who tried to install these browsers via patched packages in the AUR, please check your system!
5 months ago
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reposted by
Carl Dong → obscura.net
Obscura VPN
5 months ago
NEW in v1.128: Location Switching in the Menu Bar A lot of you have asked for this, and it's finally here! Switch between your pinned locations and Quick Connect right from your menu bar! (See video below) Felix the friendly bot will miss you, but he understands ☺️
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reposted by
Carl Dong → obscura.net
Obscura VPN
5 months ago
Hey folks! Our 25% off launch sale will be ending next Monday (July 21st). If you haven't taken advantage of the sale yet, this is your sign to do so 😄 If you subscribe, we'll honor this sale price indefinitely 🔁 We've also recently added WireGuard support and iOS Testflight!
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In Rust terms: When you thought your VPN provider's elided lifetime resolves to 'static but it's really just 'whenwedie 😆
tech.slashdot.org/story/25/07...
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BulletVPN Shuts Down, Killing Lifetime Members' Subscriptions - Slashdot
VPN provider BulletVPN has shut down its servers with immediate effect, leaving subscribers without service regardless of their subscription terms. The company announced the closure on its website, citing "shifts in market demand, evolving technology requirements, and sustainability of operations." ...
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/07/14/1420257/bulletvpn-shuts-down-killing-lifetime-members-subscriptions
5 months ago
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James Dyson just made hair being stuck in Vacuums a thing of the past. Nobody is as obsessed with building the best Vacuum as James Dyson. Nobody is as obsessed with building the best VPN as our team at Obscura.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve6...
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The Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones™ cleaner | Global Premiere
Join James Dyson as he introduces the new Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones™ cleaner. Our latest, most advanced floorcare technology – now available in Japan.The f...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve6JuJV17FQ
5 months ago
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I knew there was something familiar about the American Megatrends BIOS logo... Skynet had ring-0 access the whole time!
5 months ago
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My origin story 🐉
5 months ago
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So Gemini on Android is about to forcefully get access to your WhatsApp + Messages, regardless if you've previously turned it off? And they want to dress it up like they're helping you? Please tell me I'm misunderstanding something here...
5 months ago
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In the digital age, our de-facto privacy rights in the physical world are being stripped away. Even worse - surveillance mechanisms are being set up. As people wake up to this, privacy-by-default will become table-stakes for digital products.
techcrunch.com/2025/03/02/...
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Signal is the No. 1 downloaded app in the Netherlands. But why? | TechCrunch
Privacy-focused messaging app Signal has been flying high in the Dutch app stores this past month, sitting in pole-position for much of it.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/02/signal-is-the-number-one-downloaded-app-in-the-netherlands-but-why/
5 months ago
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reposted by
Carl Dong → obscura.net
Faceless TimeTravel_0
6 months ago
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Today's background music: A dramatic reading of RFC 2119 on loop 😆
soundcloud.com/ericwbailey...
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RFC 2119
https://ericwbailey.website/published/you-must-listen-to-rfc-2119/
https://soundcloud.com/ericwbailey/rfc-2119
5 months ago
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If you can't see your VPN App's source code, you can almost safely assume it's compromised.
www.theregister.com/2025/06/24/...
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Fake SonicWall VPN app steals user credentials
: A good reminder not to download apps from non-vendor sites
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/24/unknown_crims_using_hacked_sonicwall/
6 months ago
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Me: Oh! Tim Sweeney won and we can link to our own payments on iOS! Apple: You plebeian. Your app won't pass App Store review without also offering Apple in-app purchases. And there's a whole different set of rules for EU. 😒 We would have already launched iOS otherwise.
add a skeleton here at some point
6 months ago
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A cheery bit of Tom Lehrer for our Sunday evenings 🎶
www.youtube.com/watch?v=frA...
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Tom Lehrer - We Will All Go Together When We Go
Tom Lehrer on public domain (2020):https://tomlehrersongs.com/http://www.amazon.com/Tom-Lehrer-Collection-CD-DVD/dp/B0039TD73G/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frAEmhqdLFs
6 months ago
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This Meta AI search thing seems pretty bad (and perhaps sad)... "'What counties [sic] do younger women like older white men,' a public message from a user on Meta’s AI platform says..." "...all tied to user names and profile photos." 😨
www.wired.com/story/meta-...
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The Meta AI App Lets You ‘Discover’ People’s Bizarrely Personal Chats
Launched in April, the Meta AI platform offers a “discover” feed that includes user queries containing medical, legal, and other seemingly sensitive information.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-artificial-intelligence-chatbot-conversations/
6 months ago
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Too many services have meaningless E2E encryption: THIS APP IS E2E ENCRYPTED!!!* *one end is you the user and the other end is our data harvesting pipeline
6 months ago
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Sec, gotta ask my ancestors for the WiFi router password real quick
6 months ago
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It's a series of tubes!
6 months ago
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Is anyone on Xfinity/Comcast or Spectrum/Charter internet with a stock router/modem and knows how to run `cargo` commands? Please DM me immediately, would like to test out a mitigation for ISP blocking. Happy to offer 2 years of free
@obscura.net
!
7 months ago
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...then they fight you...
add a skeleton here at some point
7 months ago
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Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons, won’t stop
@obscura.net
either! Had a great time chatting with Carey on the pod 🔥
add a skeleton here at some point
7 months ago
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Waymos in SF record video but not audio. Which is interesting for privacy… But doesn’t this mean that this camera (see pic) is recording my phone screen at all times??
7 months ago
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These shoes were a gift from one of
@obscura.net
's earliest believers. I wear them almost daily – a constant reminder to stand up for our fans and users.
7 months ago
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Apple's `includeAllNetworks` API is a great idea, but not without its flaws. We'll get to the bottom of this.
add a skeleton here at some point
7 months ago
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Saw a MythBusters clip the other day and felt such a wave of nostalgia 🥹 Whatever happened to the Discovery channel? Are there still shows like MythBusters and How It's Made?
7 months ago
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So is `iptables` pronounced "eye-pee-tables" or "ip-tables" (as in "hip")?
7 months ago
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POV: You're an ISP looking at SNI hostnames
add a skeleton here at some point
7 months ago
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Recently started writing to organize my thoughts. I proudly present: A post (with animations!) on "Why your TCP-based VPN stutters (and how to fix it)" incl. a shoutout to BIP324:
https://blog.carldong.me/tot
Hope y'all enjoy! 😁 (and subscribe for more of my technical ramblings)
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Why your TCP-based VPN stutters (and how to fix it)
TL;DR Tunneling TCP connections over a TCP-based VPN leads to conflict between the reliability mechanisms of the two connections, resulting in decreased bandwidth and stutter-y performance. Always tunnel TCP over UDP when you can. In rare cases, overly restrictive firewalls may block UDP traffic, in which case you should obfuscate the tunnel’s UDP traffic as TCP to bypass restrictions. The adoption of UDP-based QUIC will make more internet traffic be on UDP, forcing firewalls to be less restrictive towards UDP traffic.
https://blog.carldong.me/2023/05/03/why-do-vpns.html
over 2 years ago
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