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  • Karmalakaskarmalakas@mastodon.social
    Oct 9, 2026, 1:47 PM

    @hynek their main business is web scraping and they use their VPN service users to shuffle IPs so no wonder...

    IMO they should provide VPN service for "free" with this condition in T&Cs

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  • Hynek Schlawackhynek@mastodon.social
    Oct 9, 2026, 1:59 PM

    @karmalakas it's not “free free”; it's a perk from my bank account. if web scraping is their main business, I understand this peak dumb email much better. do you have any sources for that?

    an email with the subject “Why you should never turn off your VPN” with the body being dumber than the subject line
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  • Karmalakaskarmalakas@mastodon.social
    Oct 9, 2026, 2:44 PM

    @hynek yes.. NordVPN is one of Tesonet's services (together with SurfShark, Incogni and many others). Also Oxylabs is theirs and Oxylabs specifically focuses on data scraping. Years ago I didn't know that and was looking for a new job and got an interview with them. They literally admitted what they were doing and what my job would be. Of course I declined, because back then I was working in classifieds and constantly had to battle their BS

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  • Karmalakaskarmalakas@mastodon.social
    Oct 9, 2026, 2:53 PM

    @hynek BTW, back then, when I went for the interview, there was no Oxylabs. IIRC there was only NordVPN (I think under a different name maybe). I was interviewed directly by Tesonet I think

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  • Hynek Schlawackhynek@mastodon.social
    Oct 10, 2026, 5:35 AM

    @glyph the output is almost cute; one could think it's a scrappy open source project and not a trillion dollar company talking to me

    Console output: ❯ sudo systemextensionsctl uninstall W5W395V82Y com.nordvpn.macos.Shield Password: At this time, this tool cannot be used if System Integrity Protection is enabled. This limitation will be removed in the near future. Please remember to re-enable System Integrity Protection!
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  • 🆘Bill Cole 🇺🇦grumpybozo@toad.social
    Oct 11, 2026, 3:51 PM

    @glyph @hynek I suspect that it is a security design choice.

    SystemExtensions are typically security-related tools. Installing them requires interactive authentication and authorization. Providing a scriptable tool that could be used by malware to remove them quietly would add attack surface.

    There also may be practical problems with removing pieces of the networking stack w/o entirely re-initializing the network state of everything, which users might well not understand or desire.

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  • Hynek Schlawackhynek@mastodon.social
    Oct 11, 2026, 5:05 PM

    @glyph @grumpybozo the error message literally says “At this time, this tool cannot be used if System Integrity Protection is enabled. This limitation will be removed in the near future.” so I wouldn't peg it as a design choice

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Oct 11, 2026, 5:11 PM

    @hynek @grumpybozo right and unloading kernel modules does work, this just seems like a plausible intermediary design where adding removal presents a unique and asymmetrical set of challenges

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