Yeah that's totally fair & we try to be pretty upfront about the issues (FAQ + forum). There's definitely a lot of bubblegum and duct-tape on this at the moment - been putting a lot of work in to fix the bigger issues ASAP (been modeling a lot off the AdGuard approach / targeting parity).
Really making the longer-term bet here that with a lot of work, the underlying proxy infrastructure will enable a lot of really interesting possibilities, and the shorter-term bet that with this approach we can create the best / most effective adblocker for paywalls by far.
TL;DR - we can unblock a lot of things with this approach that browser extensions can't; it also works across all browsers (esp. relevant for Safari users).
Digging in, there are a few reasons actually - first is, Chrome removes extensions with this kind of functionality from the Web Store constantly (only option would be to sideload).
Under the hood, Incoggo is also actually a local proxy (it adds a trusted root cert during the install process - we have some details on this / other potential issues / concerns on our forum). Reason for this being, Chrome extensions can't modify inbound requests in the way that's required to unblock several of the publications we support (NYT, Bloomberg, WaPo being key examples).
This is all very unexpected actually! (No one from FreeVPN made the post here!) We've been doing some early market testing in a few Linux communities on Reddit, but full disclosure, the product is currently in an early-alpha stage (it’s only available on Ubuntu and Gentoo Linux currently, and very much under construction). We have big ambitions for the project, but it is still very early days.
Love hearing the feedback from everyone here — some very valid criticisms from a lot of folks — and on a lot of points that have been brought up here, we actually have plans to address. A few bullet points on where we are as an organization / project:
— the marketing copy isn’t set in stone — I’ve been working on the site a bunch recently & it’s very much in flux (we’ve been posting in a few Linux communities to see what the response looks like)
— when we posted a few months ago about the project, in all honesty, it was a demand test to see if this would be something worth pursuing — but we’ve been trying to take the feedback from those posts to heart in our development process
— we market ourselves as a VPN, but to be clear we _are_ a dVPN (distributed VPN). The peer-to-peer VPN wording on our site is mostly for the sake of simplicity. I’d point most folks to our project README on GitHub for more in-depth technical details.
— right now FreePN is structured as a 1-to-1 peer connection, but we eventually plan to build in multi-tenant peer support as well as optional multi-hop routing (similar to Tor) and selective whitelisting of domains so that as a peer you can elect to categorically block certain types of sites — say torrenting. These blocklists would draw from open-source category site-lists like Fortiguard.
— we do currently only route web traffic (+ DNS) — so only traffic on ports 80 and 443 is being routed (optionally port 53)
— we don’t currently support IPv6 (though we have plans to add support in the future)
— we don’t log traffic (you can see in the repo), and while peers logging traffic is a potential concern, that’s only true if you’re using non-HTTPS connections (we have plans to bake in something similar to HTTPS Everywhere, automatically upgrading connections).
As far as our vision for the product — our goal for FreePN is to eventually become a ‘privacy all-in-one’. We started FreePN because we care deeply about internet privacy — but trying to protect yourself online practically is a very technical and time-consuming endeavor (basically — it’s really hard to protect your privacy online, and we’re trying to make it easy). In terms of features, we’re working on building in ad-blocking as our next major milestone.
I’ll do my best to respond to everyone’s questions and concerns here this evening / in the morning & tomorrow as I’m able!