Thanks for chiming in here and clarifying things. I for one am looking forward to more improvements, features/functionality, and support for other platforms.
Do you have a product roapmap yet?
Other things people are going to want is an audit by a third party company and open sourcing as Mullvad does (if at all those are things you’re considering).
Oh I didn’t know Tor had this! Thinking about it some more manual rotation would actually be relatively simple to do on the code-side as well.
I’ll take this back to the team and see where this best fits on our roadmap, thanks Jonah!
In the next immediate months, I think our 2 main focuses are going to be (and this may change):
iptables rule 
Feature-wise, we want to dig into the UX of fine-grain split-tunneling and see if there’s something that’d be compelling and easy-to-use. One thing that really interests us is having separate locations per-browser-profile. But there are other ways to do this as well.
Fully-fleshed-out Linux and Android clients are also in the plans, since most of our engineers are Linux+Android users.
I was really curious about how this would work when I saw you mention generic WireGuard client compatibility on Discord. Makes sense though.
To be honest Obscura is such a relatively simple service it annoys me that nobody’s done this sooner (I always said Mozilla should’ve done exactly this with their own Mullvad partnership years ago), but I’m glad someone is finally doing it now 
(This is not to denigrate your work obviously, even if it is technically not very complex, turning it into a very polished product is still a whole different story that I don’t think many fully appreciate lol)
Yeah I was somewhat surprised that nobody’s done it sooner too… I suppose (pure speculation) it’s mostly that by nature of how 2-Party works, you need to rely on another independent party, and for most established VPN businesses that’s a really tough sell (to give up some autonomy).
Mozilla could have totally done this though… So idk what happened there 
Well, I have a lot of complaints about Mozilla in general lol
I wonder if Mullvad would let you generate Shadowsocks keys instead of (or, in addition to) WireGuard keys, since I know they already support it for obfuscation in their app.
Then instead of using a generic WireGuard client people could use a generic Shadowsocks client like Outline that connects to Mullvad via your servers.
It probably wouldn’t be quite as cool as the more modern QUIC solution to this, but could still be a good option to give people who want to use some obfuscation protocol instead of straight WG.
Just a thought
Are you going to increase a user’s capacity to use more than 3 connections simultaneously or is 3 all you get on each account?
Nobody does customized pricing in this space except I think Windscribe. I hope you’ll make it possible to select the number of simultaneous connections one wants along with the time (as you currently do anyway) with customized prices so people can get and pay for what they want and what they are comfortable with. Please at-least consider this.
Now that I think about it, it’s funny cause you provide 3, Mullvad gives you 5, IVPN gives you 2 or 7, and Proton gives you 10.
Welcome to the forum @obscuracarl
Orchid could chain multiple VPNs since 2017 (incl built-in anonymous micro-payments?). Ditto for other dVPNs. Rethink will also do this soon (I use Amnezia exiting with Proton just fine). Server side Integration isn’t required for this.
Good catch. Odd they chose the same name.
The tricky part is just acquiring exit node access. If you use your own Proton account it somewhat defeats the purpose, or at least sets you up for a potential opsec fail in a way Obscura does not.
As far as existing dVPNs, because there is still some level of trust required in a two-party system that they won’t collude, I’m much more keen to trust one where one of the parties is a notable existing VPN provider, like Mullvad in this case.
Edit: case in point, I think Obscura has actually been around for a few years themselves, but nobody was really talking about them prior to this Mullvad announcement and relaunch.
Agree.
In my case, both Proton & Amnezia are credential-less. And Proton’s implementation is actually pretty good (in that KYC from payments is disassociated from VPN access) with frequent key rotation & all.
True. For Orchid specifically though, they put up a rather (long) whitepaper (I haven’t read it), and I believe they claim their guarantees are similar to that of Tor’s (hacker news discussion).
I guess I am just unfamiliar with how this works. I’ll have to read into more detail about it.
Really? And still no clients on other platforms (and the other things you’d normally expect for a product that’s not new)?
narrows eyes Huh.
If that’s the case, then I don’t know what to think of their business decisions because no matter how you think about it and cut it, its very odd that they don’t already have other clients OR the ability to generate Wireguard config files at the very least.
This partnership with Mullvad - to me atleast - provides more “legitimacy” to Obscura than I would have given it before considering almost none of the requirements for a VPN to be able to be recommended by PG had been met (even though it is now not there yet but hope it will be one day soon enough).
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Anyone reading this may disagree with my take and understanding and that’s okay. But I don’t think my deduction is invalid at the very least. This is a highly subjective take on it and I don’t mean anything unnecessarily bad about it but only what I said - odd. So, please don’t infer anything incorrectly from what you think I may be implying.
It’s unclear to me what they actually had available for testers over the past few years, since their old website was pretty scant on details.
Fair. I’m really tempted to give them a shot for a month even as it stands to see what it is like. It won’t be great but I’m sure certainly not bad.
Oh that’s an interesting idea! Unfortunately the API that Mullvad provides us doesn’t seem to be able to create Shadowsocks tunnels, so it’s not something we can do straight away.
We’ve also had a lot of folks wanting to use us on their WireGuard-capable routers, so we’re going to focus on shipping the WireGuard config generator first 
There’s a slight difference here: You can have 3 devices actively online simultaneously, but you can register more devices than that without conflict.
That’s totally fair, and we love hearing feedback like this to improve our UX, will consider!
Thanks @Niek-de-Wilde! The community here is great and I feel very welcomed!
Even with the theoretical privacy benefits of MPRs over VPNs it will be difficult to replicate Mullvad’s value in handling all the parts that I presume Obscura is supposed to manage here:
No offence to Obscura here but I wonder if it would have been better if they each handled the inverse aspects for the partnership.