If you are a pirate VPN is an essential tool. I am trying to ascertain the popularity of various VPNs in piracy community. In this excerise, I will list several Popular VPNs in the comment if you use one of them just upvote that comment and reply the reason. If you don’t find your VPN listed add a comment with just their name. Reply the reason to it. This make it easier to understand the real life user cases.
P.S: I am only looking for paid VPNs please don’t mention “free vpn”.
Mullvad because they don’t need your name, and you can pay by cash anonymously.
They also regularly have independent security audits
and their servers run everything on RAM meaning the second it loses power all data is lost.Do they still not have port forwarding?
Mullavad
I used Mullvad, found them great for everything and would be my only VPN if they were big enough to facilitate streaming via other countries. Due to smaller number of servers it isn’t possible to use a lot of streaming services with them…I found this out when o/s and needing to VPN into my home country to access my geo-locked streaming service.
AirVPN
Port forwarding, relatively cheap, runs a good Black Friday sale, and I think its log policy is decent from what I remember.
The airvpn client feels pretty outdated compared to something like mullvad. This might not be a big deal for everyone and there are ways around it but I always see airvpn recommended but noone ever mentions this
I use the native wireguard client on Linux
The Wireguard client is good enough. I wouldn’t trust VPN providers’ custom apps to be as secure, privacy-focused or reliable as the official client ones.
Ever since I switched to Linux I don’t really use Eddie as much, but I agree it could be more intuitive. Even on Windows I typically only spent 30 seconds or less with the client, though, so it didn’t bother me.
I also just switched from Mullvad to OpenVPN and I’m very happy with it. I grabbed the 3-year Halloween promo.
Proton VPN
Same. Since I am a paying Protonmail user I’ve switched to the Proton VPN. It has been fine.
I see that Proton allows payment via PayPal. Is it possible to pay via PayPal anonymously? I don’t use PP much at all so IDK.
I’d be shocked if it were, as I think they zealously honor KYC/AML/OFAC.
PIA, just because I’m lazy and it’s been fine for like a decade. If there is something better, happy to hear about it.
PIA was sold to Kape Technologies a few years back and they have somewhat questionable history and that made me switch to Mullvad. Not because I thought it’s better VPN per-se, but because I wanted away from PIA and Mullvad seemed popular.
The issue is who he sold it to – the notorious creator of some pernicious data-huffing ad-ware, Crossrider. The UK-based company was cofounded by an ex-Israeli surveillance agent and a billionaire previously convicted of insider trading who was later named in the Panama Papers. It produced software which previously allowed third-party developers to hijack users’ browsers via malware injection, redirect traffic to advertisers and slurp up private data.
Yeah it’s cheap as shit too
I’m on pia too I have a seed box anyway so it’s just for https queries. The seed box transfers locally via ssh
So… at the risk of humiliating myself,
I’ve never once used a VPN in my entire life.I pirated games, movies, shows, music, software… and the worst thing that happened to me was getting a letter from Telus once or twice saying “Hey. Don’t do that.”
That was 5 years ago
I know it’s bad practice. But is a VPN 100% necessary? Even a free one?
That’s because you’re in Canada. We don’t need to worry like Americans can. It’s not really necessary for us.
I think of it like having sex with or without a condom. If you don’t use a condom, there’s a chance to get an STD (or get “caught”). It’s not a guarantee to get caught, your IP address needs to end up in the pool of addresses they collect to send out DMCA notices so it won’t happen every time. But having a “condom” (VPN) reduces your chances by nearly 100%, assuming it’s properly setup which usually is a very simple process
I’ve only gotten two strikes in my life, 7-8yrs ago. And I feel like this was because my brother was downloading then recent, popular movies (which I almost never do). But before that, never did, without a VPN, and I used to pirate a lot more. Even further back, used to have a roommate who would go on movie and show torrenting sprees. We never got strikes. And that was when commercial VPNs weren’t really a thing yet, but copyright strikes were well known. I’ve known others who’ve never gotten strikes either.
So I’d say no, not 100% necessary at all. But it’s free or cheap enough to mitigate the risk. So that’s why I use one when I do pirate, which is rare these days.
Same here. Started with IRC, then private trackers. Always force encryption. Zero issues. VPN is a waste of money for piracy.
Currently proton its decent though I’m thinking of moving to mullvad even though they’ve removed portforwarding.
I did this and found it worked way better in terms of stability. Bonus is that Mullvad has a proper Linux client whereas Proton’s is just a cobbled-together mess that’s not worth using and is no where close to feature parity with the Windows client
And in the case that your Linux distro doesn’t have a client in their repos, you can very easily use Mullvad with wireguard in the terminal.
- java ( @java@beehaw.org ) English3•1 year ago
you can very easily use Mullvad with wireguard in the terminal
To be fair, same with Proton. OpenVPN and WireGuard configurations are available.
I’ve used both and much prefer Proton for sailing the seas. Connecting through France (highest speed + p2p) with port forwarding is the best torrent speed I’ve had on a VPN. The only slight annoyance is it switching the forwarded port every time it reconnects, but I run it 24/7 anyway.
Just skip the “official” client and run it through gluetun. It’s a much better experience.
Surfshark
i see downvotes, can i know why not surfshark?
Got them because they’re cheap. Just need to hide the IP a little, arr.
Nord VPN
i will never trust a company that had so much investor money on hand to run such a massivr ad campain like Nord did.
It was missleading, agressive and anoying.
The pressure behind that ad campaim kind made me feel like the whole thing was just the biggest honeypot we have ever seen.
Windscribe. Mainly because I scored a cheap lifetime deal many years ago. It works well enough. Got two ISP copyright strikes before using Windscribe. Have yet to get another since using Windscribe (knock on wood). But I also don’t pirate as much as I used to.
This is me. Stacksocial had that lifetime deal for approx $35. I said why not?
AirVPN because of port forwarding.
Currently testing Windscribe because they had good offer for a yearly subscription and some interesting features like ad block (mostly useful for mobile). Their privacy level is sufficient for what I’m doing currently, but if I ever need I’ll just Mullvad.
Windscribe
No Non-sense VPN. Plenty of servers and decent speed. FOSS clients for all the major platforms including linux and android.
For a noob, can anyone explain why this one is getting downvoted? Is it bad?
It has 2 votes and the second comment just hasn’t been voted on. But I also use Windscribe - the only thing to know about it is that there’s been a probe. I personally feel that they handled it well and were transparent about it. Every VPN is going to have this happen to them at some point so IMO it’s about how the information is delivered to the users that determines how trustworthy I find them.
Thanks for the explanation! I saw several more downvotes at the time I made my comment, I think it was 4 downvotes for the parent comment and 2 for the second comment. Votes between instances aren’t always consistent, I’ve noticed when I switch accounts that the same comment’s votes can vary quite a lot.
Ah that would make sense lol
Anything that isn’t Mullvad will get downvoted because many here have brought over the Reddit hivemind mentality. Many of the downvoted VPS ITT are completely safe and fine, and actually offer greater functionality than Mullvad, but you can’t deny Mullvad are the top when it comes to privacy - not even using a username/email plus allowing btc payment.
Why are you replying a bunch to your own post with the name of different VPNs?
Did you read their post? They explained that they are posting lead comments with the names of different VPNs, and they want us to vote and comment on the ones we use with our reasoning.
Mulllvad VPN on my Hardened Void Linux and GrapheneOS mainly to hide my real IP address plus I use NextDNS paid version too.