Free advertising for Windscribe if their claims are true. Also a lot of people in the thread spreading fud about it without any real evidence. I know because I actually tried to search for it. They are based in Canada and as such part of the Nine Eyes group, but they have a heavy no-logs focus towards privacy. What was seized was one of their Dutch proxies running on ram drives. They could put all the effort they want into preserving power, it doesn't mean much if all they don't have any logs except the vaguest of statistics. It doesn't matter how mature they are if the privacy practices are there.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
496 points (96.3% liked)
Technology
80916 readers
4518 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Oh no, without a warrant. How could they. How impolite. No, our security is only intended for jurisdictions with law-abiding police.
Fun fact, but you can't really do much if the police decide to just take your stuff, because they have guns. And likely more than you do.
Yes. They should perhaps dispose of that server when returned, or thoroughly examine all the firmware and such for changes. A hostile party has touched it.
Too sumarize the article:
US clickbait and ad infested news website directly quotes "trust me bro" Twitter post + describes in 2 sentences what a ramdisk is and does zero real "journalism" like maybe contacting mentioned dutch authorities or Windscribe themselfs.
Once again: Ban Tom's Slopware. Post the original source instead.
What authorities exactly? How did they get their hands on these servers without being let in? Do they have a response to this all being put on twitter? Even the article doesn't mention reaching out to "Dutch authorities" for comment, in a great journalistic failure to clarify anything.
Whatever they find is inadmissible, if there truly wasn't a warrant.
Doesn't mean they can't use it for parallel construction
Does Dutch/EU law have that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
It's not a law but a practice that cops do in order to use dubiously acquired evidence to build a case against someone.
Yes but that doesn't answer the question of whether it's an accepted practice in the EU. I'm also not so sure it isn't somehow codified into law, in the US there's precedents supporting it but IDK about other countries.
The point is that it skirts the law. You can't really make it illegal because it is a way of subverting legality. If they legally obtain the evidence then it's legally obtained. If they happened to get to that point through extra-legal means that doesn't really matter, as long as the end result is legal. Maybe you could argue in court that they only got there because of extra-legal actions, but they can argue the opposite. If this helps them look in the right spot for illegal actions, who's to say that them looking there couldn't have happened purely by chance?
You really can make it illegal if there's the political will to do so, but it's a hot potato, so the likelihood of of the practice being formally reigned in is unlikely. You make fruit of the poisonous tree absolute and create laws that make illegal search or seizure kill investigations without the possibility of future charges for a given criminal act.
Obviously that would also have practical drawbacks as well, but it is certainly legally possible.
It basically means dodging legal restrictions on investigation by using illegal (or at least inadmissible) means to obtain evidence, and once the police have it, they look for legal ways to get that same information.
So everywhere "has it", the question is whether they use it. I don't know if there's reason to believe that EU police forces use such methods more or less than their US counterparts.
I know what it is, but that doesn't mean it's an accepted practice in the EU. I don;t really know much about how their law works, which is why I asked about it.
It's not an acceptable practice anywhere, but it happens all the time
It definitely is a legally acceptable practice in the US, but I can't speak to other countries.
load more comments
(8 replies)
Got it, do not use IT services in ~~Denmark~~ Netherlands.
Dutch is not Denmark. Dutch is Netherlands
“Oh you’re Danish! You should meet my friend Geert Van den Berg, he’s also from Dutchland!”
If I had a penny for every time, I’d have at least three fiddy.
Tree-fiddy.
Goddamn it Loch ness Monster.....
Right? I use lemmy to avoid dinosaurs from the Paleozoic era, not to interact with them!
Look, I know I am no longer young and hip but calling me a dinosaur hurts my feelings...
Also, turns out Geert is from Germany and not the Netherlands.
Cries in European.
load more comments
(2 replies)
An important distinction lol
load more comments
(2 replies)
There's that legal jargon that comes to mind, fishing expedition
To what end? What authority? At this point it could be you or me in a mask with a body cam, for all the credentials authorities are showing these days.
Spoiler: it was a random thief in need of hardware.
The thief just want to set up their own gaming server; issue is that it's too expensive to purchase, so it's easier to steal it.
Good odds that type of thing is happening more than is being told.
load more comments
(3 replies)
RAM disks alone will not be enough; the law enforcement can literally freeze the DRAM for forensics.
Police have had, since the late 90s I think, the "Hotplug" which is a special battery pack / generators that provide a special power plug where you can gently loosen the existing plug, slide the generator's plug in place over it, then remove the computer from the main supply while keeping it powered on.
Power plug locks only buy you time or prevent casual mayhem; the police can work around those.
I'm intrigued how that would work with some styles of plug that disconnect before coming out of the socket like the uk type-G plugs. Unless they're not touching the socket itself and connecting somewhere else? I have no idea, i'm not an electrician.
It doesn't matter for server class hardware, they generally have dual PSUs to ensure they stay up if one of the two lines fails. So unplug one side, plug in your backup/mobile supply, the disconnect everything else and then run away with the blade
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
Should build the software so the second it loses internet connection, or its IP address changes, it clears the ram.
Cannot move a server without it losing internet, and even if they find a way around it, it’d still force an IP address change.
The DevOps way is to have them die at regular intervals in addition to other triggers and then rebuild on a regular cadence. Iirc correctly Netflix servers have a 12 hour TTL. Windscribe could easily do a 1-2 hour TTL with matching certs and encryption keys.
Surely the servers aren't running on bare metal anyway? So wouldn't they just keep the virtual servers in ram and destroy them regularly to redeploy from an image? (I have no idea - I was a web dev 20 years ago!)
But it seems like when you have imaginary "computers" that can be regularly destroyed and rebuilt at little cost or hassle, there shouldn't be much point in trying to capture or examine the actual hardware because all it's doing is managing virtual machines existing in ram?
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
While it is running or seconds after...
load more comments
(1 replies)
Police have UPS-like devices which splice into existing mains cables to keep machines alive on the way into the forensics lab. Presumably it’s standard practice to use those.
Of course, the server could be configured to wipe itself if it loses connectivity for more than a few seconds, or its routing changes. The police would need devices that route Ethernet traffic over 5G, though those would presumably be detectable as bandwidth goes down and latency goes up.
No clue if data centers in other countries are similar to the ones in the US but the handful I've been in are basically Faraday cages with zero cellphone service inside so it would be quite the feat keeping any kind of internet connection after the ethernet cable is removed.
view more: next ›