NYM vs VPN in Details

"VPN is completely anonymous and your data will be protected"

This is the main marketing trump card of such services. True, they often "forget" to mention that your data may be sold to third parties who have not made any commitment. The VPN provider can track your steps, he's kind of on top of us, online, and he just promised us that he wouldn't tell anyone anything.

To be fair, it's worth noting that many VPNs openly warn that they make money by selling information, but not on the home page, but somewhere in the privacy policy or user agreement. Let's be honest - when was the last time you read them in full before accepting them?

But even if you don't go into the VPN scheme, just think about it: what is a company's promise worth if it is registered on the other side of the world and legally out of the customer's reach?

"VPNs won't give your information to the government"

I'm sure that's what American hacker Cody Kretsinger thought when he trusted his anonymity to Hide My Ass VPN. Ironically, the service, with a name that translates without vulgarity to "hide me," revealed Kretsinger's IP address at the first request of the FBI.

One might argue, "This is the exception that proves the rule." But it's worth noting that there is a so-called "14 Eyes Alliance" whose members share information and can use each other as proxies to keep tabs on their citizens and not formally break laws, as they have long adopted agreements among themselves, I'll talk more about these alliances in another article.

Just google where the most popular VPN services are based and you'll see what I mean. There are a huge number of VPN services based in alliance countries that will have no problem sharing data when needed. And obviously, it makes no sense to mention their "help" in the news, otherwise they will stop being used, and the alliance states will lose one of the surveillance channels that traditionally attracts people with criminal intentions. You just may not know that if you use a VPN service, its jurisdiction may fall under the Five Eyes, Nine Eyes and Fourteen Eyes Alliance.

I'll pay for a paid VPN, and then no one will violate my rights

A common myth. Yes, to some extent, of course, paid services are more reliable than free services, they at least to some extent undertake to comply with obligations, because you actually have a contract with them. But all the details are, of course, in the fine print.

All the insidiousness lies in the privacy policy, which is obviously not designed with you in mind. I suggest those who speak English well to make a little experiment: take any VPN of this kind and read the policy from the beginning to the end.
I'm sure you will find a phrase similar to the one used by NordVPN: "By using the Services, you acknowledge that we cannot guarantee the security of any data provided or received by us through the Services, and that any information obtained from you through the website or our Services is at your own responsibility."

Almost all of the recent leaks involved a standard set of email, login, and customer password. Since few people use different passwords for sites and applications, it may be enough to gain access to many or all user profiles at once.

Note the word "paid": it implies that you have to pay for the service according to your plan, and the service has to identify you somehow. This means that even a VPN that supposedly doesn't store data will, at a minimum, have your bank card and email address information. And I'll note that paid services are susceptible to hacking, too.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, because there are many technical vulnerabilities, but they are more for daredevil hackers, and to understand it you need a serious knowledge of cryptography.

The NYM team's solution is much more elegant. NYM's mixnet is a decentralized mixnode overlay network, so there are no observers from above, providers or service providers watching your traffic. The mixnode operators simply have no access to the encrypted sphinx data packets being transmitted from the starting point to the end user. They have a job to do. They only mix your traffic with other users' traffic and spurious traffic, they have no keys to unlock the contents of the data packets.

Since the network is decentralized, and any NYM token holder can run a mixnode, who needs to contact the FBI or the government authorities of different states to reveal the necessary identity and its data? Yes, someone from the operators of the mixnode could be a public person participating in the mixnet and promoting their mixnode, it could be a popular community, etc. But given the aforementioned, no one has no idea whose traffic he is mixing. All the information we can find out is that he's just doing it, and only if he's stated it himself and identifies himself with a specific address somewhere in the community. But there's nothing to be asked of him, he has no user data.

In my next articles I will try to understand more in details about comparison between Tor and NYM miksnet and disclose who are alliances with eyes)))

Read more about NYM on their website, social networks and their blog, you can also take advantage of this solution for free with an early version of the SOCKS5 client NymConnect. All the links are below.

https://nymtech.net/download/ (NymConnect App)
https://nymtech.net
https://nymtech.net/blog/#news
https://nymtech.net/blog#videos
https://discord.gg/nym
https://www.youtube.com/nymtech
https://twitter.com/nymproject