Could it be that the original freenode staff did not want to have anything to do with you in an operational manner? Whilst the financial contributions for legal defense always went a long way, not much else was needed, like the live events and freenode branded merch. Staff were not adequately informed as to how the sale went down. Later, I do not believe tomaw was trying to strongarm anyone into leaving, staff genuinely wanted nothing to do with the supposed crown prince of Joseon.

Ultimately, the people who invested their labor into the network felt like they had little control over the future of the project and felt like they had been rug pulled by christel so they left. They did not believe that it was christel's to sell. Ultimately, as soon as the original operators left, the new management have not necessarily left a great impression. For a while, freenode.net would just redirect to a subreddit? And then later it was a reddit clone of sorts? (https://web.archive.org/web/20220505184527/https://freenode....). Channels were taken over at will. There were somewhat dubious partnerships made, crypto products endorsed. The first blog posts made by the new management straight after the changeover were markedly different from the previous messaging - (https://web.archive.org/web/20210730233709/https://freenode....). The original freenode was doing its best to be a place where like minded people could collaborate and communicate without adding too much of a political sway or coloring anything, the freenode after the takeover did not aspire to do any such thing. If in May of 2021 one could've argued that the old staff were a tad too eager to leave, then the newcomers did everything in their power to prove them right in less than a month.

Please do fund FOSS stuff, it really helps. Just don't expect to buy yourself out of being cringeworthy.

At worst I have a neutral opinion of the Mullvad team because I don't know them at all and don't use their product. I have a negative opinion of the guys who stole everyone's money at Mt Gox and who destroyed Freenode, because they stole everyone's money at Mt Gox and destroyed Freenode. In any case, why would I ever have a positive opinion of them, which is what's required to exceed my neutral opinion of Mullvad? What have they done to deserve a better-than-neutral opinion?

Not sure how you can "debunk" that Freenode was destroyed - it clearly was - and the fact that an identical network minus that person is now running just fine, proves that person was the problem. All evidence points to the fact that Freenode (under a different name) seems to have been saved by kicking out the guy who was trying to blackmail it by having ownership of the name Freenode.

You're right, Intel CPUs aren't trustworthy either since they tend to stop working after just a year or so. I have a greater confidence that my CPU doesn't contain an intentional remotely exploitable backdoor, because that takes serious effort (also because it's AMD), than that Intel hasn't sent a couple of short bitstrings to the US government.

Defense in depth only works if you put up meaningful security measures. As numerous people including GP has pointed out, you still retain the means to log user traffic. That's not meaningfully secure than the alternatives.

More importantly, trusting random strangers is much better than trusting a known hostile actor. During the Freenode fiasco, you have repeatedly demonstrated yourself to be untrustworthy and vengeful. Everyone saw your petty revenges against people who dared voice the slightest of criticisms. Why on earth should anyone trust that you'll uphold your customer's privacy no matter what?

There's also the factor of why should we trust the person who destroyed Freenode while telling everyone he was actually saving it from the evil people who were trying to steal it from him? That's a liability. He might sell all our traffic logs to some evil entity while claiming he's just protecting us.

The backdoor is as simple as “Intel has all the signing keys for the hardware root of trust so they can sign anything they want” :)

This VPN requires you to trust in Intel - a failing US megacorp desperate for money - as well as the guy who destroyed Mt Gox and the guy who destroyed Freenode. Personally, I'd rather trust in Mullvad.

Cute idea. Bit worried about the owners here; rasengan doesn't have a stellar reputation after what happened with Freenode.

The idea itself is sound: if there are no SGX bypasses (hardware keys dumped, enclaves violated, CPU bugs exploited, etc.), and the SGX code is sound (doesn't leak the private keys by writing them to any non-confidential storage, isn't vulnerable to timing-based attacks, etc.), and you get a valid, up-to-date attestation containing the public key that you're encrypting your traffic with plus a hash of a trustworthy version of the SGX code, then you can trust that your traffic is indeed being decrypted inside an SGX enclave which has exclusive access to the private key.

Obviously, that's a lot of conditions. Happily, you can largely verify those conditions given what's provided here; you can check that the attestation points to a CPU and configuration new enough to not have any (known) SGX breaks; you can check that the SGX code is sound and builds to the provided hash (exercise left to the reader); and you can check the attestation itself as it is signed with hardware keys that chain up to an Intel root-of-trust.

However! An SGX enclave cannot interface with the system beyond simple shared memory input/output. In particular, an SGX enclave is not (and cannot be) responsible for socket communication; that must be handled by an OS that lies outside the SGX TCB (Trusted Computing Base). For typical SGX use-cases, this is OK; the data is what is secret, and the socket destinations are not.

For a VPN, this is not true! The OS can happily log anything it wants! There's nothing stopping it from logging all the data going into and out of the SGX enclave and performing traffic correlation. Even with traffic mixing, there's nothing stopping the operators from sticking a single user onto their own, dedicated SGX enclave which is closely monitored; traffic mixing means nothing if its just a single user's traffic being mixed.

So, while the use of SGX here is a nice nod to privacy, at the end of the day, you still have to decide whether to trust the operators, and you still cannot verify in an end-to-end way whether the service is truly private.

I'm a huge fan of the technical basis for this. I want services to attest themselves to me so I can verify that they're running the source code I can inspect. And, well, the combination of founders here? Good fucking lord. I'm really fascinated to see whether we can generate enough trust in the code to be able to overcome the complete lack of trust that these people deserve. I can't imagine a better way to troll me on this point.