I’m largely curious about how they’re chaining Obscura —> Mullvad —> Internet.
“Traffic first passes through Obscura’s servers before exiting to the Internet via Mullvad’s WireGuard servers. This two-party architecture ensures that neither Obscura nor Mullvad can see both your identity and your Internet traffic.” Via: Mullvad has partnered with Obscura VPN
According to Obscura’s FAQ:
Obscura is provably private by design.
Even “no-logs” VPNs see both your identity and your internet activity, meaning you have to blindly trust their pinky-promise for privacy. This is exactly why some privacy-conscious folks will tell you not to use a VPN at all.
Obscura is different – we never see your decrypted internet packets. It’s simply impossible for us to log your internet activity, even if we were compelled to, or if our servers were compromised. You can even verify this yourself.
Obscura’s stealth protocol is much harder to block.
Our unique stealth protocol is designed to blend in with regular internet traffic. It does so by leveraging QUIC – the same technology that powers HTTP/3 – making it far harder for censors or network filters to detect or block.
Join us at e-flux on Tuesday, February 10 at 7pm for the launch of e-flux Index #8, featuring Piper Marshall and a tribute to Dara Birnbaum. Marshall will read from her remembrance of Dara Birnbaum, published in e-flux Notes on the occasion of Birnbaum’s passing and re-published in e-flux Index #8. The reading will be followed by a screening of selected works from Birnbaum’s seminal oeuvre. Copies of e-flux Index #8 will be available for purchase at a discounted price at the event.
I’m pretty sure I first caught the piece at a party on to rooftop of Dia’s 548 West 22nd Street, Chelsea location. This must’ve been a summer evening around 2002 or 2003.
One thing making the experience unique was the party’s being held in and around Dan Graham’s, Rooftop Urban Park Project (1981–91). Again, while the memory is a bit hazy, and because there seems to be no documentation of the event online, through the haze I remember the tranquil feel of the event. While Wonder Woman transformed and transformed again, we were casually sitting inside Dan Graham’s piece with a six pack.
Kurt Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope:
“Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babes*. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know.
The moral of the story is -we’re here on Earth to fart around.
And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.
Let’s all get up and move around a bit right now… or at least dance.
*In one retelling I see Vonnegut quoted as saying, “and see some great looking babes.” In another, “some great looking babies.” Both are great. But if I’m forced to choose, well …
The project involved selling the ministry an Artificial Intelligence Platform that uses reams of classified intelligence reports to make life-or-death determinations about which targets to attack. In an understatement several years ago, Karp admitted, “Our product is used on occasion to kill people,” the morality of which even he himself occasionally questions. “I have asked myself, ‘If I were younger at college, would I be protesting me?’”
Mullvad Browser is one of 2 daily drivers. I spin up and down others, but I consistently bounce between Mullvad and Firefox where I’m always running multiple profiles. Wait. Wat?! Why would I make my life so annoying and tedious, you ask?
They’re all out to getcha. This is not a secret. Explore browser fingerprinting for maximum rage inducement.
I prefer to keep aspects of my online life segmented, a separation of concerns. Some things are similar enough that I don’t mind the related sites understanding who I am and what I’m doing there. Dev work and all of it’s associated activity sits in one profile. Newspapers, magazines, library websites and such live in another. Each profile’s cookies, browser histories, fingerprint, etc. remain unknown to the others. For more discretion (within reason) I’ll hit sites via Mullvad where I’m regularly creating new identities, escalating to Tor on occasion … sensitive topics like health.
Juggling all of these browsers def ain’t easy. What if I’m on a page in Firefox but want to open the link in Mullvad? Well, you say, you copy the link, paste it into Mullvad and don’t look back. But if it’s something you rinse and repeat all day it becomes hellish. There is a better way. Didn’t find any existing solution, so I just rolled my own.
WTF is this noise?
OK. I’ve got the dueling browsers (minimum). And they don’t talk to each other. By installing Hammerspoon and writing a Lua script I’m able to do a Cmd+Shift+Click combo, and with that open the clicked Firefox link in Mullvad. Nice.
The video may be tough to follow, but at about 30s I clear the event viewer, you see that Cmd+Shift are pressed, then a click, then waves hands, link opens in Mullvad Browser.
A floaty banger, that one.
I’d rather not do this with an extension or use other simpler methods as doing so translates to a more unique fingerprint. So then comes the wrastlin: Grab the code. Use the code.
Here’s a high‑level overview of my script, ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua:
Sets up a Cmd+Shift+Click hook using hs.eventtap to intercept left mouse down events.
Targets Firefox only, checking the frontmost app bundle ID against common Firefox builds.
Uses macOS Accessibility (AX) to locate the UI element under the cursor and extract a link URL.
Normalizes AXURL values, handling both string and table formats (like absoluteString).
Searches multiple AX paths for links:
Direct AXURL / AXValue on the element
AXLinkUIElements / AXLinkedUIElements
Child tree traversal (bounded depth + node cap)
Parent chain traversal
Focused element fallback
Opens the URL in the system default browser if found.
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