The irony is that VPN providers like WindScribe have physical servers in India and Russia, supposedly running them illegally without keeping any logs and I rarely see anybody questioning the reasons why the Russian and Indian governments are ok having those illegal VPN servers running inside their datacentres and not taking them down or questioning how wise that is.
Having an IP for a country doesn’t mean that there are any servers in that country.
IP addresses geolocation and the server location are completely different things.
There are several companies (the most popular one is MaxMind) that provide geolocation data on IP addresses, other websites use their data to detect locations of their visitors.
At the same time, the server that “announces” the IP address can be in any part of the world. So what you do as a VPN service provider is you rent IP address ranges that are already attributed to a particular country and announce it from your server which can be located anywhere.
One benefit of having the server physically located in the same country is that there’s a smaller chance that IP geolocation providers change their database and that’s it.
The other benefit is that rules for domestic traffic may be different. In our experience this is important in China, they have very different rules for domestic traffic. On the other hand, having a server inside China is kind of impossible for a non-Chinese company anyway.
That is just a joke, Windscribe makes lots of jokes, constantly (look at their blog posts if you don’t know what I am talking about).
Also, the Windscribe’s status page doesn’t list a server called “Your Mom’s house”.
Why did you even mention this? Seems irrelevant to the discussion.
If that’s the case, then they also forgot to update this page from the official Windscribe documentation.
Another thing is that the “Fake Antarctica” server is always explicitly described as fake in the two link I shared, which sounds unneeded to me if more servers are also “fake” (virtual servers).
On the other hand, it does seem weird for Windscribe to have a real VPN server in a country like Russia, so maybe the Windscribe documentation is really outdated in this regard.
Sorry, I meant to say that the status page doesn’t list any server called “Your Mom’s House” in the context of a response of mine to a comment that I referenced (the referenced comment written by @Lukas). I should have been more specific.
I will edit my previous post to make it more clear.
I am going to go with what WindScribe support told me a couple of months ago and they told me that their Russian VPN servers are really located inside Russia, they have no virtual locations except the “Fake Antarctica”.
Is there any way to find the real country it is in? And does Tor Relays have that potential issue?
My thought went to tricking the locations to have a bunch in say France (Or USA, etc) so the Tor routing is all that country instead of different countries.
It would allow agencies to potentially deanonymize users easier. Not sure if that would be needed as Tor does not care if the IPs are all from the same country already as long as it is not the same exact IP.
They say it uses unneeded resources but realy how much resource does it take to have the routing go “No Guard Node or Exit Node can be same country”?
So little as to be nothing in exchange for that added real protection. Sorry, there are issues I have with Tor as you can probably tell.
When India implemented invasive laws related to VPNs, Proton left the region:
They’ve stated that they would do so in Russia as well if they felt it was an issue, but they apparently currently don’t. I’d be curious to know why they think it’s different and not an issue, but I also think Proton would do the right thing if it was.
In my two comments in this thread I specified that the server “Your Mom’s House” isn’t listed in the Windscribe’s status page, but I know it is listed in this page.
Proton is using many virtual servers, they don´t list Russia as being one of those but I read once in Reddit in the Proton thread that their Russian server was virtual, perhaps they have not updated the list.
