First off, sorry if this has been asked a million times in this community already, but the only post I found on this topic when I searched was over two years old.
I’ve been using PIA vpn for the past two years, but my subscription is ending soon and I was thinking about switching providers. I’m a fairly basic vpn user so I’m not overly concerned about advanced features and bells and whistles. I have a limited budget to work with, and I run Fedora os. Does anyone have any recommendations on what vpn I should be using?
I’ve seen Mullvad mentioned frequently, but it’s a touch expensive compared to others. I’ve heard some good things about Proton vpn too, but I know there was a controversy with their CEO not long ago. I’ve also just read something about IVPN and they look good, but I’d like opinions from more sources. I’m open too all other suggestions as well. Thanks for any and all thoughts!
The Proton CEO thing was vastly overblown. He is a privacy advocate and expressed support for Trump’s appointment for head of antitrust, as well as criticism of corporate Democrats who stand for big business which was misrepresented as a love of the Republican Party. The only mistake he made was to publish those statements using the official Proton account, which he later apologised for.
Some people, especially the American left, love to virtue signal and predictably they tried to cancel Proton as a result of this pretty minor and irrelevant social media drama. There were some good write-ups at the time which exposed how counterfactual the “pRoToN lOvEs mAgA” arguments were, but I guess feel free to skip over Proton if it really concerns you. It is objectively one of the best choices if you value both privacy and functionality (Proton still has support for port forwarding), which I think are far more relevant areas to be looking at when choosing a VPN for piracy.
Okay but his criticism makes no sense when the FTC under biden actually started taking antitrust seriously and has since lost its teeth again under trump.
And the Proton CEO tweet about Trump looking out for the little guys is such an insane MAGA echo chamber take. It throws the credibility of the entire post into question. Not to mention that it’s a Medium article. Too many red flags that it undermines OP’s point pretty quick.
@emogu @OccasionallyFeralya sorry, this comes from my ignorance, not to polarize or anything like that but, why Medium is a red flag?
Nothing against Medium inherently but it’s basically a glorified blogging platform. Anyone can get on there and write anything. The red flag comes from someone citing a Medium article as evidence that a privacy CEO can be trusted. I’d hope there would be more substantial sources, say, from a vetted publication by an established writer for example. The fact that someone’s Medium blog was their go-to source is a red flag on their argument for me.
This is such a bizarre take when your own position is based on one or two screenshots of social media posts and the reddit hivemind’s reaction to them. You are asking for someone to disprove/debunk your social media pile-on, which had almost zero substance to it, with some kind of in-depth, long-term New York Times investigation which deep down you know will never happen because this shit isn’t relevant in the real world. That way you can just instantly dismiss the evidence that actually does exist to the contrary, done by regular people and published on their blogs, without ever having to read it or engage with the counter-argument.
I have the time to read the Medium article but I don’t have the time to vet it and so I have no idea if I can trust it. I don’t know the author and they published it on a platform that has no rigor or guideline for factual reporting. Asking for a better vetted/verified source than a public blog isn’t a pile-on, it’s just thorough info gathering. Since that was the only published evidence listed in the argument, it was safe to assume that it was the best that could be found and as such a bit of a red flag.
We don’t need an NYT article on this niche subject, I agree that’ll never happen. But there are online publications and trusted sources that do travel in these circles. If none of them are saying anything about the topic I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be critical of the way it’s been presented and to expect more sources to help it hold water. I’d love for it to be true, as I’ve used Proton in the past and it’s the only one that ticks all my boxes. But I need more than a medium article to convince me to trust a company with my privacy.
So are just going to ignore the bit where your own argument/opinion is based on even less evidence and scrutiny?
EDIT: Also, what does any of this have to do with Proton’s privacy policy? If your argument has any relevance, it’s in relation to a moral objection to the CEO’s political statements. Proton AG is a Swiss company, none of this actually matters in reality.
@emogu ok, thank you. And yes, maybe another type of source would be better.
It’s not a red flag. It’s just an easy out for that person because they can run the “lol bLoG aRtIcLe” line to instantly dismiss any evidence that exists to the contrary without ever having to read or engage with it. Their entire argument is still just based on a couple of brief tweets and they have never backed their read of them up with anything, yet somehow when other people also develop a counter-argument based on a much larger and wider source of public material and collate it on a blogging site it’s a “rEd fLaG”.
It makes a lot of sense if you actually take the time to read his explanation of the context behind his position.
During the Biden administration, the Democrats lead by Schumer (whose family members are lobbyists for big tech) refused to bring antitrust bills Proton campaigned in support of to a vote. Additionally, the only invited senator to show up to a 2024 antitrust meeting was a Republican - Vance. Those are just two examples he cites of Democrats failing in this area and Republicans stepping up in their place.
The crazy thing is that Yen’s argument, that the Democrats have been captured by the corporate donor class, would be supported in any other context by people on reddit and particularly Lemmy. It’s the same thing you guys constantly complain about everywhere else (i.e. Sanders), yet in this one specific instance you ignore all of that and pretend that the Democrats are the good guys who can do no wrong because the idea that they could be as bad as, or worse than, the Republicans in this very specific area triggers you so hard.
Democrats are bad. Republicans are worse.
If you aren’t concerned with flashy setups, AirVPN might be something to check into. In terms of cost, 3 months of AirVPN cost roughly about the same as 1 month of PIA.
AirVPN has served me well the past 13 years. Their config generator is great, as well as the port-forwarding.
I tried AirVPN for a couple of weeks but it’s just painfully slow. Bad servers and the better ones are always full.
I will stick to Mullvad.
That’s a valid reason. AirVPN is slower than Mullvad or PIA. AirVPN does fit some use cases better, like multi-port forwarding, but that’s not going to be what everybody is doing. PIA does offer port forwarding but only single port for single instance. To do multiple, you’d have to have multiple sessions running which doesn’t really work well from one machine.
So, if speed is your only criteria, don’t use AirVPN. Better options exist.
Just go with Mullvad
It has its issues but so far the most reasonable.
(If you are in a censorship heavy area, go with something else, Mullvad relies on standard protocols that are easy to inspect and shut down)
Nope. Do your homework!!
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GDPR is not relevant to state monitoring. Article 23 provides the provisions to explicitly restrict data protection rights for the purpose of eavesdropping, detection, crime prevention, etc. Its wildly open ended to the point that it makes no difference in choosing a VPN: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-23-gdpr/
I’ve been happy with Windscribe, though I don’t really feel that knowledgeable. They had a case dismissed against them recently, that was suing them for evidence of a user’s activity. They couldn’t provide it because they didn’t keep logs, as advertised
I tried airvpn, but found it confusing in some regards. ProtonVPN is easier to use and it has served me well, despite the recent controversy around it. The only real annoyance is that it randomly selects a new port to forward every time you connect, so you have to manually update that in your client. Quantum is a nifty tool that will read your ProtonVPN logs and automatically complete this step for you, if you use qBittorrent.
What you should also consider, do you need a VPN. If you just want to avoid region blocking, (any) will do. Just need to check if their IP range is blocked by the provider. For normal https traffic you don’t need one. Enable dns over https in your browser and your traffic is as secure and anonymous as with most commercial VPNs.
VPNs have their use cases but we now have a decade of scareware ads from VPNs that implied our traffic is as insecure as it was in 1980. but it isn’t, you’re paying for a lava insurance. And let me say this, you can still be tracked if you use a VPN. It’s just a bit harder, like marginallyI ended up self hosting my own in a privacy-friendly low-cost VPS after trying everything in some censorship heavy locations (SuperVPN, NordVPN, Mullvad, Surfshark, Frog{something}VPN …) & rotating the address from time to time (I using a domain name so I don’t have to change all the clients). My private one uses whatever new obfs protocol pops up and some other things to make fingerprinting very hard. Combining this with residential proxies & TOR+private bridges for browsing works like a charm EVERYWHERE.
Commercial VPNs all fail because they use standard protocols and are very easy to fingerprint if you try enough.
Must be expensive to use residential proxies, nah? If I can ask, what’s your host?
Unless you’re not doing anything illegal and just using some friends’ IP and stuff
Regarding residential proxy, it will be okay, 1usd per GB in packetstream.
For VPS, I use AlexHost as they dont require id, plus crypto payments (I wish I could use something else, capsul.org is overpriced and much lower quality)
Thanks
When you say you would prefer using something else, it’s about crypto or the host not being good?
I meant AlexHost, if you find something with similar specs and pricing I would love to jump to it. AlexHost treats customer like garbage. Plus, only use shared instances, dedicated instances are terrible (terrible internet speed and host performance) check TrustPilot.
You might want to check YottaSrc
they’re not really known but seem worth the risk if you’re okay with it
Thanks for sharing!
From an initial look it seems like a reseller, I guess it will require identification + has some restrictions. I run some trading bots so that’s out for sure.
yup but they told me some of their servers was theirs
The thing that I like is that they resell hetzner for crypto, at a very small extra, which I haven’t seen elsewhere
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Depending on your ISP and router you might be able to install WireGuard on it. More generally self-hosting a VPN is pretty straightforward.
i use expressvpn with a dedicated uk server for streaming (as an anglophile) and mullvad wireguard on my gl ax1800 with port forwarding on the router for educational archival purposes and historical academic studies of long john silver and ive been happy.
i have been trying out windscribe paid but not sold on it
Surfshark, cheap and fast.
They dropped shadowsocks support and now mostly standard protocols like the rest. Plus logging activity like supervpn. Bro advice: Skip it.
Surfshark does not log anything actually. No-logs VPN: what you do online is your business - Surfshark https://share.google/bvvVGtjs4JCs4HlJn
My mistake, thanks for correcting me.
