Lifetime subscriptions to data routing services is a sign that the startup is going under.
Also the little traffic filtering trick it’s doing means their service is monitoring your DNS requests.
You guys really need a style guide update to get rid of & signs in headlines
The list price for a 12 month subscription is $33, so basically you’re gambling that the service lasts 14 months. If it makes it that long, you get your money’s worth. If not, you don’t.
But how are they going to keep earning money from all the people who are “lifetime” members 15 months from now?
No you’re not. In the losing half of the agreement, your browsing data is forfiet, assuming that they keep records of your DNS requests. Basically, they know exactly (down to the millisecond) how long you’re looking at each site, and can even likely figure out how many tabs you have open, and other data about you. Who’s to say they won’t sell that data as bankruptcy looms, you’re the product in their equation. Since this can work as a confirmation to the ad networks. I give those bastards as little as I can.
They can’t, obviously, that’s why they’ve started offering a lifetime subscription. They expect their life won’t last as long as their lie.
From DNS alone you can infer only the time when the first request at a given domain was made. DNS results are locally cached. Subsequent opening of the resource, or having it open in a tab even in presence of a running javascript “pinging” tracker, won’t provide any information up until the DNS record timeouting or cache purging.
That said, watching DNS requests can provide a lot of information. Run tcpdump on port 53 on your gateway, or (even better) run your own local resolver, and watch the logs. It’s amusing and you can even see the targets of HTTPS traffic.
With local resolver you can also perform MITM on the attached devices.
Todo: try it on my smart TV.
Sometimes I wish I could invite you guys to spend a few hours with my computers! It’s been a long time (35 years) since I learned to program in Pascal. (It’s been a long time since anyone learned to program in Pascal!)
MrsTobinL uses HolaUnblocker quite happily.
Hey! I learned a bit of Pascal … 32 years ago! High five!
Pascal, Fortran, Loci, machine code (err … started)
oh man pascal. does anyone use that anymore? learned a bit in high school and later in college i had a class where the homework was not due till the end of class so i did everything in the last 3 days of the semester.
i think my most fun programming class was assembler on the mainframe. i don’t know why but it was really neat working at that level for operations.
So you don’t cache any of your DNS requests? 
This is leaving aside that your surmise that this is “the only way” the service could work may be wrong. I haven’t looked into how they do their setup but I can think of a couple of days to do it.
You’re the browser security guy after all. I’m a helpdesk peon. It just seemed to me like the most direct and reliable way for an app to figure out whether to put your traffic through a media-vpn or to leave it alone would be to just look at all your DNS requests and trigger on a predefined list of URL patterns.
I did my share of Modula-2 and Delphi programming at uni. They’re basically Pascal.
But that was 20 years ago, almost. I am an old.
Sure but if it only does that locally, then that information never leaves your system and you can watch to see if the app transmits data upstream to some host when you’re going about your day to day business.
At the first programming course I ever did, they taught us C++ THEN Pascal 0_o
The modern incarnation is Delphi, and yes, it’s still in use. The current vendor is Embarcadero Software, who acquired it from/with CodeGear, who acquired it from Borland. (I may have missed some steps there.)
I use it for a desktop app that I’ve been maintaining since the Turbo Pascal days. It brings in some money pretty reliably. They’re always asking for this change or that change.
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