Mullvad, iVPN
Such a gorgeous answer 🤌🤌🤌
IVPN and Mullvad are probably the best VPNs if you simply want to transfer full view of all your internet activity from your ISP to one of these 2 companies. If you want to keep your internet movements private from everyone, use Tor browser. Its slower and doesn’t do udp, but it is much closer to real privacy than the commercial VPNs. Of course, if you are a high priority target of a large nation state, then Tor might not be enough for you, but for most people it works well for those things you want private. If you just want to watch movies, torrent and stuff like that, regular VPNs are the way to go.
Nope, use i2p and never go to clearnet
I tried IVPN recently but had a ton of trouble getting MLB.tv streams to work. Switched back to ExpressVPN for now.
This.
The answers are always going to be Mullvad, IVPN or Proton VPN. Windscribe is also a possibility.
Such a based answer 😍😘
+1 for windscribe
Mullvad VPN paid with Monero and NextDNS paid version.
Why NextDNS if you already query DNS through Mullvad?
Because I prefer the granular control that I have over my queries when I’m using NextDNS something that I don’t have with Mullvad DNS.
I use Mozilla VPN, which is just Mullvad but more expensive. I want to support Mozilla though and enjoy the integration with my multi account containers so i stick with it
I use Moz too. It works pretty well, but I do get a lot of “confirm you are not a bot” messages from Cloudflare, especially when I’m using LibreWolf to anonymize my browser headers (fingerprint).
Don’t use express VPN. They make it very annoying to cancel. I thought I canceled once and it didn’t work.
It takes three confirmations inside a hidden menu.
Excuse me for my lack of understanding, but why are there so many people looking to hide their traffic from their ISP with a VPN? Isn’t HTTPS enough? Are you afraid of ISPs resorting to DPI or MiM to spy on their users? Is customer protection so weak in the US that ISPs are free to spy on their customers using aforementioned techniques?
Edit: I just realized that I left out people leaving under authoritarian regimes, for whom VPNs are unfortunately required to evade their government.
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Because HTTPS protects only things you do on the site. ISP still knows which sites you connect to. Which YouTube video you are watching to. etc. F.E. in Russia ISP’s have to keep logs of users interactions for half of year and give it to government when they need them.
ISP still knows which sites you connect to.
Yes, because they know the IPs your packets go to, but if there are multiple websites behind a single IP they won’t know which one (unless you use your ISP DNS server, which you should probably not)
Which YouTube video you are watching to. etc.
No, because the URL is contained within the HTTP packets which are encrypted with SSL (the S in HTTPS), so unless the ISP does MiM, they cannot know which URL you are visiting.
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Oh, thanks for this precision, I wasn’t aware of this. And now that I think of it, it’s obvious that the first exchange with a server has to be unencrypted
Hmm… You have way better knowledge than I am. It seems so. Should think about this things some time later 😉
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My opinion. I can’t trust any government on this planet anymore. So much fuck ups and stupid decisions. So basically every government is kinda authoritarian for me…
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To me, the problem is you are instead giving over all of your info to the VPN company, and still be tracked by other means such as fingerprinting of devices, cookies/site data or browsing patterns. Is some random VPN company more trustworthy than my ISP and who’s to say they aren’t sharing the information? Plus, the could also be subpoenaed/NSLed if that’s the concern.
I’d be more willing to trust a VPN company with this data than an ISP. The former’s entire business hinges on providing privacy to their customers while the latter can just sell your data to whoever they want and most people wouldn’t bat an eye.
I’d have plenty of questions about the VPN company though. Some of these would be the same as ISPs, some worse for VPN companies.
- do we know if they’re compromised by our government or a foreign government?
- Are their systems actually secure?
- do they explicitly share data with a government, like they may be forced to?
- do they sell data and just lie about it?
- do they actually log data and lie about not logging or deleting it?
- what if they do something like an exit scam where it turns out they did collect all your info, and then sell it before they close up shop?
Legitimate questions, but why would it be worse for VPN companies?
The way I see it, I have no way of verifying the answers to any of these regardless of whether it’s an ISP or a VPN, but I do know that VPNs have a greater incentive to provide you with proper privacy because if they were found to fail at this, the entire business dies. ISPs run no such risk, especially since many of them are effectively monopolies.
Because my ISP stopped my internet access last time they were contacted by a copyright holder whose thing I torrented.
AirVPN
What reasons drove you to land there?
Personally, I switched from Mullvad after they dropped support for port forwarding. I’ve found AirVPN is easier to use on that front as well.
Port forwarding, got a good deal, reviewed well. It exports Wireguard and OpenVPN files easily, so you are not tied to their Eddie client. I’m happy with it so far.
Good reasons 👍🙂
Private internet access. It’s super cheap too
I switched to Proton from PIA when I learned of PIAs sketchy new owner Kape Technologies
Fair. But afaik their privacy policy hasnt changed. i will probably drop em asap if I catch wind of something concretely nefarious tho.
I might be wrong, but couldn’t their privacy policy stay the same but their internal policies of complying with government requests change with new ownership?
Mullvad and Cryptostorm
Cryptostorm is a honeypot that was discovered years ago. I’m surprised anyone even talks about it still
Sources for it being a honeypot?
It was a big controversy years ago. You can take or leave the info. I don’t have the time to look it up.
Douglas Spink was arrested. He was then removed from the team, no longer having access to anything. Df has been the main guy for the past couple years - but that’s cryptostorm becoming a honeypot, in your opinion?
Doesn’t hurt to be overly paranoid, but this is to the extreme.
I have nothing invested in proving it one way or another. It is something I saw a few years ago, and thought I’d mention it now to warn others. If you think it went from honeypot to non-honeypot, then by all means use it. At the end of the day, you cannot fully trust any traditional VPN because they can do what ever they want and we’d be none the wiser, despite all the big claims. VPN’s are for watching geoblocked movies and stuff like that. That’s about it. If you want privacy, you’ll have to look into other things.
If you think it went from honeypot to non-honeypot
I don’t think it was ever a honeypot, they contributed a lot to the early VPN communities, following both perfect-privacy and blackvpn.
VPN’s are for watching geoblocked movies and stuff like that. That’s about it.
I do not believe so, but to each their own.
Do you work for Cryptostorm?
May I ask why do you think Cryptostorm is a honeypot?
It was a big scandal some years ago and I don’t have the time to look it up for you. You can take it as you like.
Proton
Very good option!
Selfhosted DigitalOcean VPS with SOCKS 5 SSH tunnelling for masking my home IP when web browsing and OVH VPS with OpenVPN server for masking my home IP for my local seedbox server. I don’t really need commercial VPNs since I only really need basic functionality to mask my IP and I don’t really need a shared service to do that.
YMMV, of course.
Did you care about traces that you left behind and can be linked directly to you? Is a nice setup but if you pay DigitalOcean VPS with PayPal for example or credit card all your efforts to hide your real IP that is linked to you is useless. I don’t know if this is a major concern to you, of course.
Yeah, I’m aware it’s dedicated and not shared, and there’s billing info etc. It’s just so that websites, particularly forums etc cannot have my home IP just like that. It’s an additional layer of protection.
I trust my ISP more than a random VPN provider. I use HTTPS for everything anyways.
Ssl will hide the contents but not the metadata. It’s easy enough to build a profile on you just by understanding what sites you visit.
Correct. But a VPN provider can also build a profile on that metadata, and transparency is often lacking in the VPN business. I live in a country with fairly good privacy laws for now and much prefer my ISP to have my metadata than someone else.
You are lucky in this regard 🙂
Why do you trust some random VPN provider in a different country more than your local ISP?
Because my ISP is in a country where they can legally sell my data. My VPN is not.
And my VPN provider doesn’t know who I am.
Because ISP’s are nearly always garbage connected directly with government. So hell no, Mullvad, IVPN, Proton are way ahead local ISP’s.
How do you know? You don’t control either the ISP or the VPN company
Everything in this regard is based on trust. IVPN f.e. asks pretty big amount of money for their service so there is no reason to sell/share this data to someone. Also, they do everything they can to prevent this behavior (countries with good laws, open source, audited, no marketing bullshit, affiliate links). So I heavily trust them. There is no single reason to trust my ISP though. Good resource for VPN comparison.
But you can’t trust them. You aren’t the only running their machines.
Admittedly your not running the ISP’s machines either but VPN’s cost money. It seems simpler to use encrypted DNS and https
That’s what I’m saying
ProtonVPN. The VPN works great. I’d use some of their other services but they’re pretty restrictive unless you’re on more expensive plans than I’m on.
Long time AirVPN user here - never had any issues.
