BolehVPN: Freedom Through Security

The Old CISPA

In 2012, three pieces of USA legislation with huge potential effects on the Internet were tabled. They were the Stop Online Piracy Act, Protect IP Act and the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act.

Of all three, the majority of publicity went to the first two. If you remember, SOPA and PIPA were stopped by a huge protest generated by internet activists. CISPA was shelved after not gaining any traction in the Senate. Even if it had passed the Senate, the White House had threatened to veto the bill anyway, due to privacy and civil liberty concerns.

The New CISPA

The new version of CISPA has undergone some changes to clean up definitions and ensure privacy is maintained. However, the language is still murky and vague and the majority of the bill is unchanged. CISPA is designed to prevent cyber attacks by obtaining and sharing “cyberthreat information”. In practice, this means private sector firms are able to  access personal and sensitive data of US citizens such as emails, cloud-storage, documents and so on.

If CISPA is passed, it will override existing privacy law and provide immunity to participating companies and the US government. The data collected will be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act and other state laws that require disclosure . Once collected and passed on to the government, it can be disseminated to any agencies and used to investigate other crimes not pertaining to cybersecurity.

CISPA Today

CISPA recently passed the House of Representatives and is headed for the Senate. If it is not filibustered there, the only hope to stop it is a presidential veto. And several of the big tech companies which opposed SOPA and PIPA are backing this bill (Full list of supporters can be found here).

The biggest impact this bill will have is on US citizens, however non-US citizens may be affected as most US companies keep their data in local datacentres. And it won’t matter to the government agencies if the data is from foreign users. Think on how many US based websites we use, and how much data we give away.  It would be a treasure trove for intelligence analysts, but a deep invasion of our privacy as Internet users.

Sources: http://www.zdnet.com/what-is-cispa-and-what-does-it-mean-for-you-faq-7000013965/

https://intelligence.house.gov/hr-624-letters-support

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/04/cispa-amendment-and-passed-out-committee-heres-why-new-version-still-threatens

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New BolehVPN-GUI Released!

CHANGELOG

Windows BolehVPN GUI 2.1.5 / 2.1.5b (Cloaked)

• Updated to OpenVPN 2.3.1 base for normal version
• Prompt for GUI update when new version is released

Mac BolehVPN GUI 1.1.0

• Fixes bug when internet connection is not restored when exiting before disconnecting
• Prompt for GUI update when new version is released

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One of the SSL certs of our payment providers is broken and due to this all access to payment is being disabled. We’re working on this, but it will take some time to sort out as we need to go through all our payment providers and see which is the cause of this. We are really sorry about the inconvenience, but if you wish to make payment you will have to use Paypal for now and then email us at sales@bolehvpn.net about this.

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We noticed the load on the FullyRouted-Canada servers was getting pretty high recently. Just brought up a new one, you’ll need to update your configs through the Settings tab in the app before you can connect to it though.

We’ve also switched to a new support system which should result in even faster support times!

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At approximately 4PM Tuesday, March 12, 2013 (CET) our data center partner Equinix Switzerland reported a partial power failure in the datacenter ZH04. The cause of this power failure is not yet know and is still being investigated by the datacenter staff.

We expect this to be resolved shortly.

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