AirVPN humble beginnings

AirVPN started  their humble beginnings as a project in 2010 by a very small group of activists, hacktivists, with the invaluable (and totally free) help of two fantastic lawyers and a financing from a company interested in the project and operated by the very same people.

Quote:The Pirate festival held in Rome and a lucky coincidence were decisive for the project. An extraordinary confluence of energies, ideas and persons took place there. Including people from NEXA, Telecomix, Juliagruppen, the swedish Pirate Party, the ItalianPirate Party association, the grassroots organization Scambioetico, activists from Mexico and the USA, lawyers with high competences in privacy, data protection and so-called "Intellectual property" fields, it was the perfect place and time to envision the project.

AirVPN started as a completely free service for anyone in April 2010. Soon it added a commercial side aimed to keep the project financially sustainable, capable to support the impact of free access to activists in human rights hostile countries and ensure to the team a monetary basis which could allow a full-time dedication.

Initially AirVPN had two dedicated servers in one country and was operated by Iridium, a company which was born in 1998 and that employed, in the telecommunication field, only persons involved in digital or non-digital civil activism. Iridium took care of AirVPN until November 2012, when all the handling was progressively transferred to a dedicated company (Air) with the very same persons and policies (no changes for the customers, for the privacy and for the data protection, even the privacy legal responsible person is the same one).

Today, AirVPN is operated exclusively by activists, privacy, data protection and security issues aware persons, law experts with the help of the same lawyers, and counts more than 200 servers with high bandwidth lines and good or top hardware in 35 datacenters across 19 countries in 3 continents. The solidity of the infrastructure is enhanced literally every week, so that most attacks (UDP and TCP flood, DDoS...) that caused service issues in the first AirVPN year of life now remain totally unnoticed to the users.

The customer service is not and has never been outsourced in order to provide high quality support.

Access to servers is restricted to an essential core of the team and any access outside this core must be authorized and performed under controlled conditions. No database is kept on any VPN server. The database is clustered across backend dedicated servers which never communicate directly with any client or with any other host outside our servers (nobody knows, except three persons, where the backend servers are located and additional security systems are in place to prevent any direct access to the database from outside the backend servers -not even the VPN servers really communicate directly with the database).

 


AirVPN is the only VPN in the world which transparently lets anyone access a servers monitor on the www, updated every 60 seconds, to check the infrastructure status and verify that we respect our no-overselling and guaranteed allocated bandwidth commitments stated in the ToS. This is an assurance to all customers and users to stay true to it's commitments. 

AirVPN provides features which might go unnoticed to the masses but which are important, such as separate entry and exit IP addresses on every VPN server to prevent some correlation attacks, typical on VPNs with a shared IP which is used both as entry and exit-IP address.

AirVPN is "tiny"if compared to the giants of the VPN sector, but a small "miracle" in consideration of the no-security-compromise policies: 
 

• no PPTP,
  
• no whistles and bells to mislead gullible customers, 
  
• no investments in advertising, 
  
• harsh contrasts against a project of sharing data with an association of VPN operators "to prevent frauds and improper use of the services", boycott from several ISPs due to our no-compromise network neutrality and privacy policy, 
  
• no bribes for favorable reviews in some web sites.
  

Above all, a lot of passion for what we do
At AirVPN we all feel we are "completely different" from a commercial enterprise which aims exclusively to/for profits. Profits are important for us, otherwise keeping this infrastructure would be impossible, but they come after the security for our users and the respect of our policies and commitments.
 


An episode may be interesting to evaluate our determination: 
A vile and sudden suspension of service by a major datacenters operator in France in 2010 (all paid servers cancelled without prior notice and without any explanation - still today we have no explanation for that). We had everything there, except the database, so we had to re-start almost from scratch, but the service stayed down for only 4 days.

At the end of 2012, a dedicated company has been founded, exclusively to operate the fiscal side of the project and the handling of the data according to the relevant legal framework in an optimal way. The name of the legal responsible person for privacy and data protection is there in the Privacy Notice is (the same old one ). 

The Air company operates exclusively AirVPN, and is involved only in AirVPN strictly related side projects about network neutrality and censorship circumvention. 

For an updated list of AirVPN achievements and donations, see AirVPN Mission HERE. 

Why AirVPN?
 

• No traffic limit. No time limit. Access to all of our exit-nodes.
  
• Five simultaneous connections per account.
  
• Unlimited and free servers switches.
  
• High performance servers in many countries
  
• No maximum speed limit, it depends only on the server load (see here).
  
• Minimum allocated granted bandwidth: 4 Mbit/s download + 4 Mbit/s upload
  
• Every protocol is welcome, including p2p. Forwarded ports and DDNS to optimize your software.
  
• Transparent policies on bandwidth allocation in order to give you an exact evaluation of the performance you can achieve: no overbooking, no overselling.
  
• Uses OpenVPN to establish the connection between your computer and our servers. OpenVPN is the most reliable and secure solution for encrypted tunnels, offering a higher than military degree of security. Forget PPTP or other unsecure protocols.
  
• We offer OpenVPN on ports 80 TCP / UDP, 443 TCP / UDP and 53 TCP / UDP. Additionally, every Air server supports directly OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL and OpenVPN over Tor. This means that even the most brutal techniques of monitoring, censorship, throttling and traffic shaping will fail against AirVPN, because your ISP and your government will see only TCP or UDP traffic on a unique port.
  
• Fully compliant with the European Union legal framework protecting your privacy: Directive on Data Protection (95/46/EC), Directive concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy (2002/58/EC) and General Data Protection Regulation (EU Regulation 2016/579)
  
• API - Application Programming Interface
  

Features at a glance:

Surf Anonymously

• Protection against snoopers, data miners and privacy intrusive entities
  
• Hide your IP - Get a new IP address, so that nobody can discover your identity through it
  
• No monitoring nor logging of your online activities
  
• Perfect Forward Secrecy - Through Diffie-Hellman key exchange DHE. After the initial key negotiation, re-keying is performed every 60 minutes (this value can be lowered unilaterally by the client)
  
• Additional connection types, supported by every Air VPN server, for ISPs or countries disrupting OpenVPN, are OpenVPN over SSH, SSL or Tor
  
• Stay protected with the security offered by high level encryption: 4096 bit RSA keys size, AES-256-GCM Data Channel, HMAC SHA384 Control Channel
  
• Make it impossible to identify the type of traffic or protocol you are using, even for your ISP.
  
• Connect to any wireless network without risking data eavesdropping between your computer and the WiFi hotspot.
  

Defeat restrictions

• Circumvent censorship, georestriction and traffic shaping. 
  
• All protocols welcome. Net Neutrality respected.
  
• All protocols allowed - No discrimination toward any service, protocol or application.
  
• Internal VPN DNS based on root servers 
  
• anti-ICE/ICANN censorship
  
• Port Forwarding / DDNS - Without port forwarding, the performance of some applications, for example BitTorrent and eMule clients, would be severely impaired and the services on your computer would not be reachable from the Internet
  

 


 
 


 
 
 
 




 




 

To boost forum participation/contribution, all who wish to participate MUST have created a minimum of 3 threads and 5 posts (threads in sections: (i) Giveaways / Contests (ii) Deals and (iii) Geeks FYI > Feedback are NOT INCLUDED). Entries not meeting the requirement will be deleted. WE WILL BE CHECKING!

1. For your contest entry, please answer the question below.  

In your opinion: "WHAT makes AirVPN different from other VPN service providers?"

Post your answer WITH your social media share  as contest entry.  Please see sample entry below.
 

 

2. REQUIRED: Please share this giveaway by pasting the code below in your Facebook/Twitter/Google+ Account.  

(Share is NOT limited to popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram.)
 



Optional (but greatly appreciated) : Like/follow AirVPN's social networking sites as added support. (at least one (1) social media site)
 



3. One entry per IP address ONLY. WE WILL BE CHECKING!

Only one entry per member is allowed. Dual entries will both be deleted and user will be banned from giveaway so please be careful.

If there are any questions / concerns pertaining to the giveaway/contest please get in touch with me through PM. Do not post it in this thread. Doing so will merit a warning and ultimately be banned from entering further giveaway/contests.