Ivacy News

We are proud to announce that Ivacy VPN service supports cashU. CashU, the largest internet payment solution in the Middle East, is a very popular payment solution; especially for those who do not have, or wish to reveal their credit cards or bank accounts on the Internet. cashU can be used to pay and transfer money online without risk of theft, fraud or personal information being revealed.

Since 01/22/2010, Ivacy allows it's users to use the movie rental service vudu.com (which is originally restricted to US-only audience) from any place on Earth. Another geographical barrier is notwithstanding; and we are working on providing our Mars and Pluto users the same functionality; it would be announced separately, so stay tuned, fellow martians!

Ukash, the world's largest prepaid-cash issuing estate, has announced its new partnership to introduce Ukash online issuing to customers in China for the first time. So it should be much more easier for our chinese audience to use Ivacy.

Already available in 26 countries and with more than 300,000 global physical issuing points, Ukash's move into China is indicative of the company's rapid expansion and continued efforts to provide easy, controlled and anonymous online cash payments.

Through this partnership, consumers are able to order their unique voucher through an online 'pinshop' and pay using their China Union Pay branded debit card which is issued by all major banks in China.

Available in denominations of USD 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, online bank transactions are secured by a mandatory physical security device, which ensures consumer details are kept completely safe whilst acquiring their Ukash vouchers. Ukash vouchers are issued in USD directly from a customer's CNY bank account and conversion details are shown onscreen.

Mark Chirnside, chief executive officer, Ukash said: "A lot of digitally nervous consumers are reluctant to shop online, fearful of revealing their financial details and becoming victims of online fraud in the process. This makes Ukash increasingly relevant, as it guarantees consumer safety when playing, shopping or paying online. The expansion of our online issuing function means that customers in China can now benefit from making payments online with the ease and simplicity of Ukash vouchers, with full financial anonymity and without ever having to set foot inside a store."

© Ukash news

While we've recently been quite busy implementing SIP telephony and upgrading our network infrastructure to keep pace with the demand of our users, it seems we missed some legislative news coming from some European countries.

It has recently come to our attention that France has adopted a HADOPI law, which stands for "loi favorisant la diffusion et la protection de la creation sur Internet", which aims to "end piracy on the internet".

According to this New-York Times article, focused solely to HADOPI law,

In France, the government has estimated that the law could result in sanctions against 50,000 people a year, according to leaked documents that were published during the debate on the plan. More than two-dozen judges will oversee the penal system created to enforce the law, according to the reports.

It's so heartwarming to see the French people upholding their principles of "Liberté, égalité, fraternité". Well, maybe not much of liberté left there; still, it sounds cool, right?

Anyway.

We want to celebrate the HADOPI law being signed, so we are making a limited time offer.

All new users who enter "Liberté" in promo-code field during the sign-up proccess will get an additional 15 days of unlimited Ivacy access with their first purchase.

THIS PROMOTION BEGINS NOVEMBER, 20th AND WILL LAST FOR 15 DAYS, ENDING 5-DEC-2009.

We ask you, our users, to post any such legislative stories on our forum "Law and legislation news".  The first person posting a confirmed report of another weird piece of Internet legislation being signed into law will receive a three month unlimited Ivacy subscription for free.

Dear users,

We've doubled the network capacity of our russian node up to 2Gbits, This upgrade will result in a greater speeds, better response times and overall smoother experience. Thank you for choosing Ivacy for all of your privacy needs.

Dear Ivacy users,

After receiving hundreds of complaints from our US hosting provider about our users seeding torrents, we were finally forced to prohibit seeding torrents from our US node.

Mediadefender.com, the originator of all the complaints, also requested us to disclose the identities of our users. Needless to say, we were unable to provide any information because of our logging policy.

To further avoid the pressure to disclose the identity of our users, we have disabled torrent seeding via our USA point of presence. You may use the USA node for browsing, FTP, SSH, et cetera.

The only other option we evaluated was shutting down this node completely, which would obviously be worse for our customers.

We encourage you to use our node in Russia for all things related to torrents and P2P.

We are pleased to inform you about the new possibilities of our services. Now you can monitor the work of our service in real time at your Control Panel. This page is designed to keep you informed of known problems and scheduled maintenance that may affect our services. When possible, we will provide you with an estimated timeframe in which we expect an issue will be resolved.

Ivacy Monitor is a Windows application which will help you to create a VPN connection, monitor your expenses, automate connection proccess and much more. New version contains several bugfixes and improvements. Read more about Ivacy Monitor.

Our users asked us to implement the automatic proxy settings detection from Internet Explorer, and we've just did exactly that. New version of our Firefox plugin tries to detect the proxy upon the start and routes all the traffic - already encrypted, of course! - thru it. This feature is quite handy if you use it with Firefox Portable on USB flash drive in a college campus or at work.

As you may already know, our US servers have been shut down by hosting provider due the substantial abuse. According to our logging policy, we can't sniff the user's traffic for a signs of potential abuse, but changing our hosting provider every month is not the way to go. We are forced to impose the limitation on our test accounts, which, we suspected, were used for above mentioned abuse. US node will become available to paid customers only effective today.

We glad to announce that our firewall-breaking extension is now available on all major operation systems, Linux included. So you may use Ivacy no matter which operation system you use — Windows, Macs and Linux. Go to Ivacy Firefox extension page to learn more about how it may help you.