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Google launches free VPN service
Jigsaw, formerly known as Google Ideas, and now owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, has launched Outline, a piece of free proxy software. It’s out for Windows, Android and Mac
Outline makes it easy for news organizations to set a up a corporate virtual private network (VPN) on their own server to more safely connect to the internet and keep their communication private.
Outline is completely open source and was audited by Radically Open Security.
Comments
This is not a service. This is software only.
This seems to be really awesome. I will definitely give it a try.
It is also not a VPN. It does not send all system traffic, only traffic of supported browsers. That said, its pretty seamless, threw it up on a VPS and it works great. Only downside is there is no system tray / taskbar support, it must be open and minimized.
It's probably still in beta.
In my opinion this is just another software doing... nothing special.
It's not meant to. It's meant to provide a simple service for journalist etc to access the internet in foreign countries without being monitored/blocked. And it does just that.
besides by google.
Google isn't monitoring anything. Its a Shadowsocks proxy on self hosted hardware. Its basically just a client and docker server.
Is it?
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No. Go view their privacy policy. Google has no need to lie, their sweeping data collection policy is public. Nobody cares. But you can packet sniff if you want.
It's an open source project and hosted on GitHub, you can review the code if you don't believe it.
And yes, it's a wrapper of Shadowsocks proxy.
https://github.com/Jigsaw-Code/outline-server
Shadowsocks Modified failed version.And also added advertise
I prefer to use Shadowocks, it's really awesome, especially use it with TOR
Software not service.
"I'm looking to hide my identity online"
Step 1: install Google software and connect to Google
lol... I was wondering the same... Google developing something for privacy, doesn't match the vibe at all
Google develops privacy tools… They want to keep your private data all for themselves.
What's the benefit of this over VPN into TOR. Speed?
It's well known that connecting or even hosting such server in China cause you trouble, while the GFW is now almost capable to identify shadowsocks traffic, I don't see any useful in this software...
It should be warned that Shadowsocks, the underlying protocol of Outline, is never designed for security purposes, but obfuscation. The security features were provided to reduce the impact of gfw's proactive scanning. A more secure alternative protocol is openvpn, while blocked in China due to outstanding fingerprints.
Is shadowsocks encrypted?
Yes. It is an encrypted proxy.
So this basically allows you to offer VPN services via google to journalists? or do you have to find the VPN clients yourself?
selfhosted shadowsocks server with manager where you can send join codes to your journalists/friends to join via the client
I don't get it. Is it free vpn or no ?
...because China is the only situation in which you'd use a VPN?
I could not care less about the Chinese GFW, and neither does the rest of the world.
I wonder about it a little. Shadowsocks is really good, but since a few month it can be detected by the GFW and I recently swapped to SSR.
I did setup outline on a new VPS for the only purpose to try if it will get blocked. I will report back next time when I get near the GFW.
It's free software, it's not a VPN service that you can buy/rent. You need to get a server to host it.
BTW, I tried to install it first on a Raspberry and it didn't work.
How does it differ with openvpn ?