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McAfee Acquires VPN Provider TunnelBear (venturebeat.com)
McAfee announced that it has acquired Canada-based virtual private network (VPN) company TunnelBear. From a report: Founded in 2011, Toronto-based TunnelBear has gained a solid reputation for its fun, cross-platform VPN app that uses quirky bear-burrowing animations to bring online privacy to the masses. The company claims around 20 million people have used its service across mobile and desktop, while a few months back it branched out into password management with the launch of the standalone RememBear app. [...] That TunnelBear has sold to a major brand such as McAfee won't be greeted warmly by many of the product's existing users. However, with significantly more resources now at its disposal, TunnelBear should be in a good position to absorb any losses that result from the transfer of ownership.
RIP TunnelBear VPN. I won't touch ANYTHING with the name McAfee on it.
Because it won't be long before you're accidentally installing it along with McAfee Security Scan and TrueKey when you just want Adobe Reader.
That TunnelBear has sold to a major brand such as McAfee won't be greeted warmly by many of the product's existing users.
Nor should it be, McAfee will cease any meaningful development on it until it languishes far behind the alternatives. And support will get worse and worse.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
With a name like TunnelBear they should have sold themselves to The Boring Company.
I'll see myself out...
Will Linus Tech Tips drop TunnelBear as a sponsor or won't they?
significantly more resources now at its disposal
Since this is McAfee, this can be interpreted in multiple ways.
Most likely, it means the TunnelBear app will soon bloat to an obtrusive adware monster, using only 2GB RAM (while inactive).
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It was a brand new Win 10 laptop. Nothing had been installed. It wouldn't connect to the internet and moved at a crawl.
I finally managed to partially get it working by disabling all non-Microsoft services and programs at startup. I then "uninstalled" McAfee from the computer. After a reboot I noticed that there were still active McAfee services running. Some Googling revealed I needed to run the "McAfee Removal Tool" to get rid of this junk.
I ran "McAfee Removal Tool" for 20 minutes, which never completed, and eventually hard-reset the machine. Finally the McAfee processes weren't showing up any more, but who knows what remained from the software.
TLDR; McAfee is still a piece of shit
Here's the playbook:
- major shareholder- employees get 18 month handcuffs, then will quit
- g&a employees get whacked in next rolling RIF. At McAfee they're currently RIFs twice yearly
- in 18 months, product dev is shifted to Bangalore and remaining engineering is given the opportunity to find open reqs somewhere in the US
Innovation will stop once it's rebranded.
If the new TPG McAfee is anything like the pre Intel one.
Because it might have made an interesting story if it had been.
Why would you use a VPN to do anything these days? The VPN offers nothing that a cheap throw away OpenVZ machine could, but at least with the OpenVZ you have some chance of knowing what the outbound traffic is doing, its much less likely that the provider is going to sniff you traffic.
Given there are more uses for a VPS than a VPN, I don't see the VPN market growing, this cannot be a good business move.
Why UNIX?
I've seen a couple of antivirus distributors include VPN as a choice in their offerings. Kaspersky is one of them. Avg is another. If you want to remain anonymous then don't use those from your VPN provider. Intel actively participates with the US government so using their VPN likely gives the US government access to your activities when using the VPN. I would question their av product as well.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
1. Start VPN company 2. ??? 3. ??? 4. Profit