Since IVPN and Mullvad are both phasing out port forwarding, are there any alternatives? I am not looking for something like NordVPN which is a privacy nightmare. AirVPN is also not private enough considering I’ve seen reports online of ISPs sending out DMCA letters of gold to its users.
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I switched to protonvpn recently and it seems pretty good, I was getting a lot of websites blocking me when I was using PIA and that seems to not be a problem with proton.
Personally I don’t trust Proton. I know I’m paranoid, but can’t be too sure about anything these days. To my knowledge MV and IVPN are the only ones with a nice privacy reputation. Shame they are cutting port forwarding
Proton only started logging his IP after they were legally forced to do so, just like any other law abiding company would have to do.
Proton offers an onion site of Protonmail which the activist should have been using since he allegedly committed
theft and property damage, crimes - the latter two - that enable surveillance
this is a case of user error and bad opsec, not a company bending over backwards to share their users information. If you’re going to do things that are likely going to get you arrested, no matter how noble the cause, make sure you have excellent OpSec
To add to that, email and vpn are different. It’s easy to force logging of a specific email address when forced to by law, but doing that based on vpn ip address only is more problematic
and iirc Proton took the Swiss government to court after that and won a case reclassifying email legally so that they can’t be forced to disclose IPs like that again in the future
At least personally to me it goes to show that it’s not out of the question
ProtonVPN
Personally I don’t trust Proton. I know I’m paranoid, but can’t be too sure about anything these days. To my knowledge MV and IVPN are the only ones with a nice privacy reputation. Shame they are cutting port forwarding
I think it’s worth reading Proton’s response on this and also worth noting Proton recently won Swiss court ruling (as in they paid for the lawyers and brought the case up et al.) that should help make it so proton isn’t legally obligated by the Swiss government to do such things again.
You can also avoid what happened here by using the TOR endpoint Proton provides to login to their services.
I suspect ProtonVPN will remove port forwarding soon enough. Mullvad had valid concerns with removing port forwarding, and I expect the industry to agree. I’m not sure what the answer to this problem is.
Some people here are saying i2p may be the future https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/259433 Sounds like Qbittorrent is planning to provide i2p support too. So hopefully port forwarding won’t matter as much for future releases.
The main issue with I have with how the current i2p implementation works is that it essentially creates a walled garden in the torrent network, as i2p users can’t seed out to non-i2p users, they can only leech from them. I feel like that would needlessly split the network, which relies on having as many people as possible seeding. Frankly I don’t know if its even possible to work around that, but I’ll need to see how it plays out. Also, there needs to be at least one person with a port forwarded on any given torrent. utp only peers cannot seed independently, from my understanding.
I think i2p or something similar where people can run a router and provide bandwidth to the network and help hide what other users are downloading (which is how i2p works but its not super fast sadly)
Is i2p not dogshit slow anymore? I remember it being terrible and half of my client requests were timed out. This was poetically 10 years ago though
They literally just launched portforwarding on proton vpn this year
Hi, check this comment. It seems like it will be able to work without the concerns that Mullvad has had. I suppose in theory the bad actors can use a synchronized scheme like this as well - if they realize that, ProtonVPN may still end up with the same amount of problems and need to shut it down.
I saw someone say that Proton implemented their port forwarding in a different way than Mullvad that negates a lot of the issues that caused them to axe it
Hi, I looked into this and from what I can gather, ProtonVPN gives out temporary ports for port forwarding. I’m not 100% how long these ports are leased for, but as long as you run a script like this to move your torrent client’s port around to match ProtonVPN’s, I can see how this would work. It’s not perfect, but it’s workable. I wonder if Mullvad will implement something like this to achieve parity.
Yeah that sounds right. I use Proton and the ports are randomly assigned when you connect. I just manually put the port in qbittorrent each time, it’s not too much trouble.
AirVPN! Been a customer for 7-8 years.
Edit: I see AirVPN was mentioned by op in its post. Regarding it being “not private enough” and reports of users receiving DMCA notices: I highly doubt these reports are correct, and even it they were, I don’t think it would be the fault of AirVPN. From a technical perspective AirVPN is excellent. They offer every feature you can imagine and allow you to work with native WireGuard, OpenVPN or their own client.
But this technical freedom might lead to some misconfigurations out there, like DNS leaking due to not enforcing changes to resolv.conf etc. if you’re not that technical, use their official client.
Yep, they’re my main VPN as well. Not super good at avoiding being caught by VPN blockers though, I have proton for just sites that scream if you’re trying to use a VPN.
It’s refreshing being on Lemmy and being able to see a good discussion on vps with (unlike reddit) no bot comment spam and no users engaging in paid shilling.
What about Windscribe? They seem to have port forwarding available.
But they fixed the issue, and documented on why it happened and how it got fixed on their blog. Pretty transparent to me.
Yeah, they fixed things and owned up to it, best you can do when you fuck things up: https://blog.windscribe.com/ukrainian-server-seizure-a-commentary-and-state-of-the-industry-e71e8d205b26/. I feel like people give them too much shit for this, just like with that Proton climate activist case
Agreed. Though Proton was barely affected since everyone started to dickride them for all their other services. Unfair treatment, but that’s what the privacy community does nowadays 🤷
Is AirVPN out of the question? They’ve still got port forwarding
No public audits - I don’t trust. Italy is also not exactly a privacy (and personal rights) haven.
Would you consider server seizures by LE with no data found to be valid proof of no logging? If so there are a couple VPNs I know which you would probably like.
how exactly do you trust a company because of an audit that they dont log? they can easily just turn off logs for when they are going to be there then turn them back on afterwards
Torguard supports port forwarding. I’m not sure how it ranks in privacy though.
I bought 2 years from them a while ago but was required to:
- enter an email
- use my address to purchase
Good product though. Horrible SOCKS5 proxies though, almost 90% downtime. Not to foremention the horrible support from the admins - the normal support was amazing though.
Really up to you if you want the compromises, though there are better VPNs for privacy out there.
I moved from mullvad to ivpn and now again on the lookout. I guess i2p is “the future” but right now I’m not sure how that works with private trackers.
Whilst you can still torrent without port forwarding I don’t think seeding works right?
Seeding still works without port forwarding but uploading your owns torrents is not possible
You also can’t be the only seeder on a torrent for the same reason.
Good to know. I am on a private tracker that requires it so will test proton vpn. If they remove it then I guess I just leave the tracker. 🙁
Which one is that? Any I have seen just requires to seed with no mention of port forwarding.
Without port forwarding your tracker will show you as disconnected and not give you credit.
That’s not entirely true- you can upload your own, but you can only seed to users that do have port forwarding. On many trackers, that initial seed is all going to seed boxes with an autograb script enabled anyway, and those do have port forwarding.
There are other alternatives, mainly Blackhat/scene VPNs which have server raids multiple times because of very illegal shit being done by the users, which I doubt will remove port-forwarding simply because of DMCA lol…
maybe have ID you can put into a client to send when your downloading? or maybe just private trackers fade away out of relevancy?
AzireVPN added port forwarding, it’s also sweden based but lags the audits
IVPN is getting rid of forwards!? Shit I just bought a year worth after mullavad stopped their port forward.
You keep ports until September (forgot the date). I would recommend looking at Blackhat/scene VPNs if you want port-forwarding and a low chance of them disappearing.
Sept 30th. Ya, I set a alert. Thanks.
PIA have port forwarding.
I know they’ve been one of the top recommendations from TF for years.
they are owned by a umbrella company which owns multiple big name VPN providers so I wouldnt really trust them anymore https://embed.kumu.io/9ced55e897e74fd807be51990b26b415#vpn-company-relationships/private-internet-access
Which also used to spread adware through their applications (search Cross Rider I believe, now names Kape)
yup
I think PIA was bought by new owners who are trashing the previously good privacy.
I think they were a company that has previously purchase apps and then infected them with malware.
This happened right after my year renewal happened and I was out of the cancelation period. When company ownership happens, people should be released from these kinds of contracts. Not all contracts, but stuff like this should have a grace period.
Makes sense with what I remember. I got out of there as soon as I did basic research on the new owners, seemed clear they were the opposite of trustworthy.
Yeah, I tried hard to get a refund but could not.
I think I just used their vpn files instead of the app to connect. But I honestly can’t remember at the moment.
Honestly i don’t really use port forwarding at all but it sucks its being removed, we need more privacy in this day and age.
OVPN still seems to support port forwarding, though it’s worth pointing out they were recently acquired by Pango.
US-based is really a no-go for me privacy and piracy-wise. Paranoid, prejudiced, but true more often than it should be.
They are swedish
Wait why is nordvpn a privacy nightmare?