Today we are announcing a partnership with Obscura VPN, a newly launched two-party VPN service that uses our WireGuard VPN servers as its “exit hop”.
This partnership starts on 11th Feburary 2025, with apps for macOS being available from this date on Obscura VPNs website.
While connected through Obscura, your traffic first passes through Obscura’s servers before exiting to the Internet via Mullvad’s WireGuard servers. This two-party architecture ensures that neither Obscura nor Mullvad can see both your identity and your Internet traffic.
Obscura users can verify that their traffic is sent encrypted to a Mullvad server by comparing their server’s WireGuard public key (shown on the Obscura App’s “Location” page) against those published on our server page(https[://]mullvad[.]net/servers).
Obscura also features a custom obfuscation protocol based on QUIC that mimics HTTP/3 traffic to bypass firewalls and censorship.
Well it’s nice and all, and while I don’t have any speed complaints at this point I hope mullvad is going to focus on expanding the server network. They’re partnered like with what, three companies at this point? Mozilla, Malwarebytes and now Obscura - all are using mullvad’s infrastructure to provide VPN services.
They have a launch price of $6, but it looks like they plan to raise the price to $8 after launch. I’m wondering what features they’re planning to have that would make it worth paying them the extra few bucks over just going with Mullvad (especially since they’re just using Mullvad’s servers).
From their website, they say that they are using QUIC for communication with Obscura servers. Do they have any alternative ways? QUIC is just blocked as a protocol by some ISPs in my country.
Mullvad does anonymized payments using cash and crypto. What payments do obscura allow?
I do wish you could specify the entry and exit. I’d personally be MUCH more comfortable with mullvad being the entry, seeing as their client software (ie the software that’s actually encrypting my traffic and changing firewall rules) is battle-tested.
I don’t mean to hate on obscura but I do question how comfortable people are going to be with trusting obscura instead of tried-and-tested mullvad when it comes to client-side implementation and payments.
Why the early launch? Not to dog on you guys but releasing with only MacOS does not inspire confidence in a privacy space. I love this idea and I think that it
Another question, what country do you guys operate from?
No Australian servers. Based in US and subject to US law. No historical information about the company and ownership. And for a service that claims to be unable to see your traffic, this quote from the legal terms is concerning
“Obscura may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, disable and/or terminate User Accounts of users who repeatedly infringe the intellectual property of others”
That’s some seriously doped out way of running ads. You never have to call it by name while it’d ask for some serious thinking to get UBlock catching those. That said I still find it way better, for anyone, than paying for “reviews” or bribing search engines. Now we can only hope prospective obscurantists will not in any way get privilege on the Mullvad layer; while perfectly possible I don’t think it’s reasonable or fair to assume. For what it’s worth, Mozilla VPN is not faster than vanilla Mullvad (same), and Tailscale users complain as much as we do.