Dear Customers

We bring you disappointing news from Ukash.

We have received notice that from the 4th of January 2012, TUVPN.COM customers will be unable to process payments via Ukash.

WHY?

Ukash's reason for no longer offering the service to TUVPN?

They now regard any service that blocks the IP of an online customer as being open to "facilitating malicious activity". Ukash's NEW merchant terms of use exclude businesses that offer such a service from utilising the Ukash payment processing solution.

You can be assured that we have had a rather vigorous discussion with Ukash's Chief Risk Officer. He has advised us that while they do not like to turn away our business, their Board of Directors have made the decision and it has no flexibility. We pointed out the irony of a payment processor that provides for customer anonymity, creating rules that prevent businesses offering anonymity services from using their payment service. The reply we received was, "perhaps its the combination of our two businesses that is the problem"…. We pointed out a list of other online business that use Ukash that could "facilitate malicious activity". We did not get much argument. It would seem that logic, common sense, and reason has flown out the window in this instance!

WHAT OPTIONS DO UKASH USERS HAVE?

For those customer's wishing to use UKash. We suggest you top-up your TUVPN account before the 4th of January, 2012.

After this date, you will need to use our other payment options. This includes 2Checkout where all major credit cards and Paypal can be used, and separately Moneybookers.

Thank you for your continued custom.

Regards,

The Team at TUVPN

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In response to high demand TUVPN have launched a NEW VPN server in the UK!

We are offering Shared & Dedicated IP services on this new server.

You can access the server immediately using: london3.tuvpn.com 

Alternatively you can reinstall your OpenVPN Client and you will have it in your VPN Server menu. New servers will automatically appear in our L2TP and PPTP client menus.

The NEW London Server comes packed with the usual TUVPN Features to provide you with the best VPN experience on the Net!

Please note that P2P file transfers are not supported.

Thanks for your valued custom and loyalty. We try very hard to earn it!!

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We've done it…with help from a very nice customer! We have a NEW hosting provider in France. 

We are offering Shared & Dedicated IP services on this new server.

You can access the server immediately using: paris.tuvpn.com 

Alternatively you can reinstall your OpenVPN Client and you will have it in your VPN Server menu. New servers will automatically appear in our L2TP and PPTP client menus.

The Paris Server comes packed with the usual TUVPN Features to provide you with the best VPN experience on the Net!

Please note that P2P file transfers are not supported.

We are still researching options in Hong Kong and the Czech Republic, so stay tunned and keep voting!

We tried one hosting provider in Hong Kong, but were not satisfied that it provided the kind of service standards we demand. 

Take a look at the global coverage of our network:  view map

Let us know if we can help with any questions. Enjoy!

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The US Commerce Committee met last Wednesday to discuss bills on privacy issues. Obama's administration and industry representatives, as well as federal regulators working in the sphere of consumer protection and telecommunications issues, also took part in the meeting.

Should the proposed legislation be approved, it will become the first comprehensive privacy law in US history. It will encompass the issues of e-commerce and personal information theft, and will designate the course of action  for companies if their customers’ information should be compromised. The creation of the new legislation is aimed to replace the state laws that are in force now.

One of the bills under consideration, that  prohibits companies to track consumers without giving them prior notification, has caused a lot of disagreements among the participants at the meeting. For example, Senator Pat Toomey, a member of Commerce's Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Insurance subcommittee, claims that nowadays many people voluntarily place their personal information on social networking sites. He affirms that the new privacy rules could “break the Internet,” because “different consumers have different expectations about privacy.”

Senator Toomey calls on his colleagues to thoroughly consider the new rules before accepting them. "I'm sure no one on this committee wants to break the internet, or limit many of the popular online services that consumers can access, in order to avoid fundamentally altering the current online experience in creating these unintended consequences. I just urge that we all proceed with caution," he asserted.

However, other participants at the Wednesday hearing, including  Julie Brill, Federal Trade Commissioner, Senators John Kerry and John Rockefeller, consider that protecting Internet privacy is very important for consumers. They claim that the new legislation will not restrict the activity of online companies but  that it will make  more transparent what kind of information about users they collect, giving the users the opportunity to choose whether to share this information or not.

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It is reported that the European Union is going to introduce new data protection rules. Viviane Reding, European Union justice commissioner, claimed that the new legislation would oblige all the companies to inform their customers should a case of personal information theft  occur.

However, this is not the only innovation. According to Viviane Reding, it is also planned to adopt the “right to be forgotten”, that will allow users to delete sensitive information about them from websites, and the “accountability principle”, aimed to make cloud computing usage more protected.

Nowadays, protecting internet privacy concerns almost everybody, that’s why the news caused controversy among experts. Some of them welcome it. They consider that the new rules will return customers’ trust in businesses because they will be sure that their personal information is safe, but that they will also stimulate the companies to improve their customers’ privacy protection policies. Mike Smart, solutions director, EMEA at SafeNet says that the changes “will drive the natural market mechanisms towards improving security compliance and achieving better protection of customers’ interests.”

Nevertheless, a lot of people think that these rules need to be improved before adopting them; otherwise it would be hard to implement them. Paul Davis, leader of FireEye, predicts that the new rules will likely “increase the visibility of security breaches and cause further panic about the safety of online data.” 

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Last week the US Department of Commerce released a report entitled “Cybersecurity, Innovation and the Internet Economy.” This report appeared after the range of Internet security policy recommendations developed by the Obama administration.

The document emphasizes the importance of the companies providing online services for the development of the economy. Gary Locke, Secretary of Commerce, claimed that their "economy depends on the ability of companies to provide trusted, secure services online. As new cybersecurity threats evolve, it's critical that we develop policies that better protect businesses and their customers to ensure the Internet remains an engine for economic growth."

The paper offers ways to strengthen security for companies that do the major part of their businesses on the Internet, like social networks, providers of online services and cloud computing firms. Such companies are included in the “Internet and Information Innovation Sector” (I3S).

To reinforce internet security and reach a high level of web anonymity and online privacy protection, the report gives some recommendations. First of all it is important to implement voluntary codes of conduct to eliminate security vulnerabilities. For example, for better protection companies may start using automated security or Domain Name System Security (DNSSEC) protocols. Moreover, it is of crucial importance to enhance international exchange of cybersecurity best practices and develop incentives for the companies to succeed in this sphere.

Use the following link to read the report: http://www.nist.gov/itl/upload/Cybersecurity_Green-Paper_FinalVersion.pdf.

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Nowadays there are a lot of sites created after the example of WikiLeaks. The most popular of them are Al Jazeera Transparency Unit and SafeHouse, launched by the Wall Street Journal. There are also a lot of regional sites such as Balkanleaks, Indoleaks and Brusselsleaks.

All these web sites support publicity and freedom of speech but very often they don’t guarantee anonymity to the users providing information. For example, the Wall Street Journal promises to protect its sources but at the same time SafeHouse terms of use read the following: "We reserve the right to disclose any information about you to law enforcement authorities or to a requesting third party, without notice, in order to comply with any applicable laws and/or requests under legal process."

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former WikiLeaks member and IT security expert, does not recommend using such sites because "they are insecure to begin with and people haven't thought about this properly before they started to run such a site." Recently Domscheit-Berg has created his own web site called OpenLeaks, that serves as a mediator between users providing information and media organizations that make it public.

However, to protect your online anonymity and privacy it’s better to use special tools that were developed to these purposes. The most popular of them are VPN and Tor. Tor isa  free software but it is not as secure as the best VPN services that you pay for. It doesn’t secure the whole session of data transmission, that’s why it is possible that your sensitive information will be compromised. VPN services, on the contrary, create a secure tunnel for the entire data transfer and minimize the risk of hackers’ attacks.

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Recently it has become widely known that iPhone and iPad are tracking you, collecting your current location information. This event made urgent the following questions: why do companies store data about their customers?, do users get anything in exchange for letting them do it? and, what can customers do about it?

First of all, it is worth mentioning that customers don’t give their personal information without indemnity, they receive offers in exchange for information. Companies use gathered data to create an offer that would suit you. This method of tracking was invented by marketers long before the Internet became widespread, the Internet just made it almost perfect. For example, supermarkets give you a discount for one of the products, in exchange they receive information about all the products that you have bought and give you discount coupons that you can use on your next visit to purchase similar things. And the gathering of location data doesn’t differ that much.

If you don’t want to disclose your personal data, it is easy to avoid it by switching off some options in the software on your phone or computer. Many people don’t do it just because they don't care about protecting their privacy or because they like to receive services/offers in exchange for their personal information.

Spain's Data Protection Agency wants Google to wipe away links to material on about 90 people. All these people claim that Google is making sensitive information about them widely available by means of simple searches, and insist on their "Right to be Forgotten".

Much of the information about the Spanish plaintiffs remains veiled to protect their privacy, but the case of plastic surgeon Hugo Guidotti mirrors the heart of the matter. The first link in Google searches points to the site of his clinic, but the second one takes users to a story about a woman who sued him for a breast operation gone wrong.

The making of a final decision on some suits may take a lot of time because appeals can be filed to higher courts. But in the nearest future the European Commission is going to create a law that will allow people to delete personal information that they posted earlier online. It will give the Spanish complainants the opportunity to win an action.

However, Spain's case is not the first for Google. The company regularly receives requests to withdraw links to sensitive information from its search index, or to place such links in the back pages of the search results. As a rule, Google rejects them to protect the integrity of its index.

Artemi Rallo, director of the Spanish Data Protection Agency, predicts that the "Right to be Forgotten" will become "much more important in the future. Google is just 15 years old, the Internet is barely a generation old and we are beginning to detect problems that affect our privacy. More and more people are going to see things on the Internet that they don't want to be there."

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To satisfy the requirements of the European Union, the Norwegian Parliament approved last Monday a new data storage law. But this approval was not the easiest one; there were hot debates that lasted for nine hours until, finally, the unconvincing majority passed the measure.

According to this law, Norwegians’ communications via telephone and Internet (including e-mails) will be stored for six months. The government intends like this to help the police investigate serious crimes. But people’s privacy is not defended any more. The opponents have already claimed that this law violates a person’s rights and have called it “Orwellian”. They insist that these new measures will make “massive surveillance” legal, and are going to do everything possible to restore protecting internet privacy and to prevent the final approval of the law by the European Union.

The new data storage law will undermine people’s trust in the government. It is supposed to have social repercussions, because no one wants to live under total control. A lot of users are planning to use anonymous proxies or other available tools to somehow keep their private data secure.

Trine Skei Grande, the leader of the Liberal Party, said the following about the law's approval: “This is very, very bad. I don’t think those who voted in favor of this measure really understand the consequences that it will bring. Future generations will condemn us for what was approved tonight.”

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