Someone contacted me claiming to be developing their own VPN service and offered collaboration in the format of “here’s a referral link, maybe someone will buy a subscription, and you’ll get half of what they spend.” I don’t live in Russia and have no idea which services are considered decent or rubbish by local standards, so I cannot consciously recommend this product. I had thoughts about setting up some kind of VPN on my own VPS and offering it to the few remaining relatives and acquaintances in the RF, but it seems that today they are all universally far more competent in such matters than a sweet summer child like me, who has never known real censorship. So, I decided not to embarrass myself.

I asked if there was a way to verify whether the offered service actually doesn’t keep logs. I was told that a buyer of the service can see from the configs that the open-source xray core is being used. As the wise neural networks explained to me, this core is indeed open-source and indeed knows how not to write logs, but it also knows how to write them, and you certainly won’t see that from the client configs. The second question I was interested in was whether payment via more or less anonymous crypto was available. In response, I received a screenshot with a ton of payment methods; Monero, for example, was present. So, even if Comrade Major gains access to the non-existent logs, he won’t be able to link your traffic to personal data, but you’ll still have to mask your IP additionally.

I think there are currently more VPN service offers in the RF than there are cocaine offers in Montenegro, and anyone who wants can choose something from a very impressive list. I don’t think the service I was asked to promote stands out in any particular way—cocaine is cocaine, nothing extraordinary. If your current VPN subscription is expiring anyway, or if this one seems more convenient, or if you feel that sending me donations directly is too much of an honor but doing it via a referral link is fine—then welcome. Here is the link to the service website, and here is the link to the Telegram bot, if the privacy of the purchase doesn’t concern you particularly.