Last September, Vishnu sat down with Carl Dong for the first episode of his podcast. Carl runs Obscura VPN. It was the first time the two of them had spoken, and it ran for an hour. Growing up behind the Great Firewall, chat control, what went wrong with the big VPN conglomerates, and of course mascots - one of us has a duck, the other an orange robot.
Today, Obscura joins Friends, our short list of companies we're happy to send our customers to.
Obscura is the first VPN that can't log your activity, and it works where VPNs are usually blocked.
Most VPNs ask you to take them at their word. You hand one company your IP address, your billing details and every site you visit, and in return you get a no-logs promise. Most of the big names are owned by conglomerates you've never heard of. And even an honest provider can be breached, or compelled.
Obscura just refuses to be in that position. Your traffic passes through two independent companies - Obscura, and then Mullvad. Obscura knows who you are but can't see where you're going. Mullvad can see where you're going but has no idea who you are. Neither half can join the dots, and you don't have to take anyone's word for it - you can check it yourself, right in the app. They can't leak what they don't have.
None of this is an accident. Carl spent years on Bitcoin Core working on reproducible builds - the deeply unglamorous problem of proving that the software you run is the software that was written. He's brought the same instinct here. Obscura has been independently audited, it runs on Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android, signing up needs no email, and you can pay in Monero or Bitcoin. Don't trust, verify.
Carl's closing note on the podcast stuck with us:
We are in the righteous fight of our lifetimes. We should band together, instead of some of the infighting that I see - not bash other companies for having different security models.
That's a pretty good description of what Friends is for.
The offer
Ente customers get 25% off up to a year of Obscura VPN. Drop your email at ente.com/friends and we'll send the code over. Enter it at obscura.com/account/subscription - on a subscription or a top up. It works at checkout in the Android and iOS apps too.
Obscura customers get 25% off any Ente plan for the first year. Your code is waiting at obscura.com/circle-of-trust.
If there's a product you love that belongs on this list, tell us on Discord.