What VPN do you use when you cannot use Mullvad.
from Quistermark@lemmy.ml to privacy@lemmy.ml on 30 Jun 10:59
https://lemmy.ml/post/49427050
from Quistermark@lemmy.ml to privacy@lemmy.ml on 30 Jun 10:59
https://lemmy.ml/post/49427050
What VPN have you switched to after the Mullvad situation. I have looked at nym and ivpn. But don’t know if they are any good.
threaded - newest
I am also considering either IVPN or Nym. Not sure which is best for best privacy/security. Probably IVPN? Can anyone more knowledgeable help me decide between these two?
I’ve been looking at IVPN as well. Nym seems interesting but seems very new and idk if they offer Wireguard configuration files (I don’t think they’re even WG-based? I could be wrong)
I’m sitting on Mullvad for a week to do research into alternatives. Apparently their support team is handing out full refunds far outside their typical policy because of this shitshow, no questions asked. IVPN so far is looking promising, but I don’t know a damn thing about the company and people behind it.
I have purchased nym last week.
If mullvad wasn’t expensive for me I’d stick with it.
I heard about Nym a couple of months back and #3 was a deal breaker for me. Too bad it’s still the case today.
#3 is not something I have seen before, seems an odd choice for them Their server list is over 75 pages on their website, a pain in the arse to assess, the app itself appears to give no indication of servers, you have to guess, or search.
The recent contact I have had with ivpn suggests the company is genuine, and customer service is good. Unfortunately they do not tick the boxes for me re: linux software, and southern hemisphere servers. Definitely worth considering if in northern hemisphere though, maybe even south for some.
Someone mentioned cryptostorm.is on another board, but I never heard of them before.
Any experiences here? I know a lot of VPNs like Express VPN or PIA are controlled by Israel/Mossad - so I won’t recommend tbem without a lot of research.
I’m using Cryptostorm for around two years now for seeding and browsing. Some things to know.
Generally, I’m quite happy with them. But everyone needs to make sure they are fine with not knowing who exactly is behind the service.
I switched away from Mullvad when they killed port forwarding years ago. I have used AirVPN since and it has always been pretty good!
What do you guys use port forwrding for?
I don’t personally, but generally it’s needed to keep your seed ratio high enough on private torrent trackers.
Also if you don’t have port forwarding you can only connect to those who have. With port forwarding you can connect to every peer, so you get better download rates.
Torrenting
one of the few good things about living in a fuckedup country is that I dont even use a vpn for torrenting.
yeah i’m switching to ivpn
i use proton… airvpn looks good but i still haven’t tried it
Similar issues with Proton CEO, he seems to be a Trump fan.
Furthermore, I heard it’s generally bad practice to use a VPN provider from your own jurisdiction, AirVPN mentionend above is located in Italy for example and won’t sell any accounts to Italians for that reason.
He is not: https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
begs the question of why tuta doesn’t keep accidentally praising trump and his fascists.
Going out on a limb here, could it be… ethics?
are you saying that proton doesn’t have any?
proton is greenwashing for those interested in privacy.
I was previously a customer, walked away from a 2 year subscription that still had about 18 months left on it.
i was going to become a customer until it’s ceo voiced support for trump and every single fascist-friendly incident created by proton since then has made me glad that i’ve never given them a penny.
How to get upvotes: appease the proton zombie fanboys
the people of this community are proton fanboys and the downvotes prove it. lol
Proton excel at marketing, they are greenwashing for the privacy crowd.
this makes a lot more sense than anything else i’ve heard and especially why they keep accidentally praising trump and his fellow fascists.
The reason air won’t sell accounts to Italians is because Italy has a law against using technology to view or share pirate soccer broadcasts and air doesn’t want to or can’t prevent people from doing that (also they’re positioned in the marketplace perfectly for piracy and just about nothing else).
It’s not because they believe or follow the recommendation that a provider be outside the users country of residence. Which is advice that’s situational.
Just connect to a VPN and buy it anyway! I know a friend who did
How to get downvotes: offend the proton zombie fanboys
I wasn’t aware that airvpn refused Italian customers, the company definitely has some interesting policies though: including no servers in israel, or russia, and no servers in australia because of our f*cked up internet privacy laws.
I never got around to changing from PIA when they were purchased years ago. Haven’t found any practical reason to change since, and though I get the backlash over the purchase.
My main use case is keeping my ISP from cutting me off for seeding, and it’s done that reliably.
middleeasteye.net/…/outcry-erupts-over-expressvpn…
PIA is part of that group of VPNs all owned by a dubios Israeli entity that keeps gobbling up VPN providers
I’ve also used them for years without issue.
Just remember that PIA’s owner is kape technologies, which is a British-Israeli company. Their headquarters are in London but development is done in Tel Aviv.
It sounds like you might already be aware but for anybody stumbling by.
That’s why I’m switching when my three years of pre-paid service is over.
ivpn seems like a good enough replacement privacy-wise
Proton
Is it the half finished software, the ai, the dodgy social media activity, the crap customer service, or the right wing ownership that attracts you to proton?
Cyber Ghost is also pretty good. One of the best in independent tests. Encrypted traffic, no logs, €1,59/month.
and is part of Kape Technologies an israeli company… Same as PIA, ExpressVPN and some more
Cyber Ghost is a company from Bucharest and Germany, not from Israel
cyberinsider.com/kape-technologies-owns-expressvp…
I tthink it is not so important which company bought another, if the other remain in control over their policy and headquarters. Kape is a global privacy-first digital security software provider company headquartered in London, United Kingdom.
Kape (and thus all of the VPNs they have purchased) is owned by Ted Saggi, an Israeli billionaire.
And yes, they are legally headquartered in London, but how meaningful is that? There’s hundreds of US companies that are headquartered into a handful of buildings in Delaware for legal and tax reasons. Their “development center” is based in Tel Aviv.
Cyberghost is wholly owned by kape, formerly crossrider, which was founded by veterans of Israeli unit 8200 (the cyberwarfare one!) and started out as a vendor of data harvesting middleware used by browser extensions.
The wisdom of sending today’s troubled teens to voorhees summer camp is hotly debated
Kape bought CyberGhost at some point, and Kape itself is, according to Wikipedia, a “British-Israeli company”.
www.kape.com/our-brands/ cyberinsider.com/kape-technologies-owns-expressvp…
That they don’t mention it on their website is somewhat worrying.
They have false advertisement, which is illegal in some jurisdictions including Germany, wouldn’t recommend it.
I wouldn’t recommend NYM, I tested it for multiple months, it’s quite unreliable and had serious security issues (e.g. updates weren’t available through multiple repositories they publish to).
This helps me a lot, thanks. I will definitely switch from mullvad to ivpn, and not nym.
AirVPN does good for torrenting I use it now that mulvad doesnt support port forwarding
Mullvad is still the best. For the time being, until the situation clears out, I wouldn’t stop using it.
I disagree. VPNs is all about trust because you can’t verify they don’t log. I don’t trust a company where one of the people that owns 50% have donated 450k euro to a party that is describe as a racists, fascists and nazis and apparently shares opinions like not my words wanting to deport 100 000 “welfare-Somalis”.
After reading a bit more according to Mullvad’s Wikipedia page “Flamman also alleged he later stated it was sad that the party’s remigration policy was necessary”.
Remigration is: “Remigration is a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing[1] via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry.”
Mullvad has been audited over and over again and found to not be logging.
Before they dropped port forwarding a police raid famously found nothing and confirmed that they were not recording any user information and operating as advertised, that is to say, operating in a way that not only didn’t log, but precluded the possibility of logging.
A raid where they get nothing is like an audit but it’s the real thing.
They dropped port forwarding because, in concert with an Interpol investigation, all the big content delivery networks and lots of websites to boot started blocking their endpoints.
There is not any vpn I’m aware of that has been physically raided by cops with a court warrant in hand and shown to have nothing and also dropped their possibly most popular service, port forwarding, in order to not have to comply with an investigation.
I used ivpn in the past and see it as basically an untested mullvad from ten years ago. Who knows how its people and technology would respond under the same circumstances? Could be good, could be bad.
Audits don’t prove they don’t keep logs when a company do a audit on them Mullvad give them access to what they can audit Mullvad can just delete the logs from the servers when the audit is taking place it don’t prove anything.
But the raid where the cops don’t find anything is a really good sign.
Yeah there’s a lot of questionable stuff in the vpn service security auditing “space”.
That’s why I think it’s important to look at the raid outcome to see how their systems handle a real world situation (interpol tries to get logs and install logging in order to bust an alleged global csam ring using mulvads port forwarding, user privacy and anonymity protections to trade files over windows cifs (yes, network neighborhood, pedos apparently have a reputation for lack of opsec) sharing). The raid was unsuccessful because there were no logs and the police were unable to install logging capabilities.
After that failed operation, Interpol began requesting cdns and hosts block mullvads endpoints by ip. The point of that operation was to either force mullvads compliance with the investigation, to get them to drop port forwarding, or to force them to close down.
Because at the peak even cloudflare was blocking mullvad, it became very hard to use the service when browsing or for pretty much anything that relied on internet like rss or podcasts, shoutcast or even updating your computer.
Mullvad dropped port forwarding after rotating servers for months to attempt to beat the block and giving users lots of warning.
In the months after the block request was lifted, using the service for normal browsing went back to usual.
I remember all these details so clearly because I was a user of mullvad then and it was a relatively high profile and well publicized test of a vpn services’ capability to withstand government pressure.
As it turns out, even having no logs and no ability to add logging into your system doesn’t stop government from telling everyone else to make your system unusable.
It’s also pretty much the best possible outcome someone could expect of a service.
The point of this long ass reply is not to defend a company, although I think a person who was doing so could be forgiven for it in this case, the point is to help you understand what happened to make users of that service put their trust in it and why people like me are saying “maybe consider not ditching mullvad” when you ask what to use instead.
Sure, you are free to think that way and I’m not saying I disagree with you. I just know that, if I stop using a product or service from a company, just because I don’t agree with someone working there (even if it is someone that founded that company), it is very likely I won’t be able use anything.
If it was the acting CEO or the company posture, I would do the same, but apparently it is not the case. Until then, Mullvad still provide great service.
There’s a clear difference between a CEO supporting this, and then random employees of a company that you disagree with on more trivial subjects….
In this case neither one nor the other is supporting this. The whole debate is about the action of one of the founders (not the CEO, who already said he doesn’t support those views).
Just the founder whose donation bankrolls the entire party…
Just the founder who holds massive sway in the direction of the company…
Just the founder, who receives a lions share of the profits from our funding who redirects it towards ideologies rooted in inhumanity…
“These fascists make a really good burger. I’ll keep buying their burger and I don’t care where it comes from, I won’t look.”
wow, we really are going to extremes
Just because you don’t like facts doesn’t mean they’re “extreme” lol.
Please, tell me how any of the above is extreme. Please do use facts similar to those already covered in the comments section here which support my claims.
What facts? Just because I have a slightly more moderate and less radical stance regarding stopping to use some company services than you, you already started throwing the “fascist supporter” card. That’s usually what extremes do.
I used a hypothetical, denoted by using quotations. I never called anyone specifically a fascist supporter. You made that final jump.
But, since you asked about it, let’s look at brass tacks. What, by definition, constitutes fascism?
Merriam Webster
Just to make sure we’re not looking at a singular definition, let’s look at Wikipedia too
dear lord…
I give up. I wish you good luck in your quest.
I know you gave up. You said you don’t care where a product/service comes from or who makes it, even if they support genocide and ethnic cleansing.
And then a couple sentences, even with bolded main points, having you read 20-30 words is too scary.
Yes, I know you’ve given up and are slinking away like a coward when confronted with evidence.
I wish you luck on realizing why people would shun you for “moderate” opinions of supporting genocidaires.
Hey, what you are doing is harmful.
A person who needs privacy and anonymity shouldn’t have to justify using the vpn service that has most definitely passed the highest bar when it comes to resisting governments.
The mere presence of a service that advertises feature parity is no comparison to one that has passed the real world test of those offerings.
It’s like believing someone’s claim of steel grade and processing without test marks on the surface. Sure it’ll probably be fine for a big tractor shed, but when you’re relying on the material to hold up an apartment building it’s not worth it to take those claims on faith.
If you were living in a war zone and needed a gun to protect yourself or your family, would you turn down an ar-15 simply because of the rifles history? Of course not.
Mullvad has genuinely resisted government data requests in ways that matter and that’s not nothing. But the premise that it’s uniquely proven in a way alternatives aren’t just isn’t true and is doing a lot of heavy lifting. IVPN and Proton have both faced and resisted comparable legal pressure. The gap between Mullvad’s tested track record and alternatives isn’t as wide as your steel grade analogy implies, and that analogy only holds if you’re treating the alternatives as unverified claims with no real world data behind them.
But if we’re discussing harm, the deeper problem is the framing that ethics are a luxury position for people who aren’t in genuine danger. By that logic you can never apply moral considerations to any purchase of critical infrastructure when the stakes are high enough, which produces conclusions that don’t hold up under pressure. The gun in a war zone analogy assumes the gun manufacturer’s politics don’t affect the people in the war zone. But the people most likely to need a VPN to survive, dissidents, journalists, immigrants, minorities in authoritarian or ethnonationalist environments, are often the exact same people being targeted by the policies the Mullvad founder is bankrolling. A Somali refugee using Mullvad to stay safe is funding, through that subscription, a party that wants to forcibly deport them back to Somalia regardless of whether they were born in Sweden.
So no, I don’t think pointing this out is harmful. I think pretending it’s irrelevant because the product works well is the more harmful position, especially for the people most likely to be using it for the reasons you’re describing.
I am not aware of any other vpn service that has been raided with a warrant for any information present and had the police come away completely empty handed.
That raid I’m thinking of served two functions: one was to get any information available, the other was to investigate mullvads infrastructure in order to evaluate if it was possible to get a warrant to install logging capacity.
While the inability to install wiretaps (logging capacity) has not been explicitly confirmed by law enforcement like the inability to get any data was, we can assume it was impossible because rather than pursue that direction, Interpol advised cdns and hosting providers to block mullvads endpoints instead.
The reason we are able to assume a warrant for wiretapping was impossible is that the action taken, making mullvad unusable to the point that the company dropped port forwarding, has the effect of flushing the target out from the service which is not what you’d want if you were able to install a wiretap.
It’s evidence of a type of trustworthiness borne out by the effects of actions surrounding the service, not just tests, audits or press releases. That is something unique and if it’s not I’d really like to know.
That’s not just rhetoric, I’m truly interested in other VPNs whose impact with law enforcement left only cloud chamber evidence of their trustworthiness.
Your idea that people should apply the strictest ethical scrutiny to their own purchases in the marketplace really seems like it’s based entirely on the liberal assumptions that the marketplace is frictionless and has many goods of equal quality on offer.
It’s also, on another level, patently ridiculous that a person who is choosing a battle tested privacy and anonymity focused vpn should choose something they’re less sure about because they need to somehow avoid any microfraction of blame flowing to them through the market from the specific currency units they used in the transaction.
It’s cool, I know the immigration police are kicking down our door, but at least I didn’t use the gross vpn associated with a person who donated to a fascist party.
At some point you gotta recognize that not only does your reasoning not hold up to theoretical interrogation (how could blame for the effects of transactions flow down to the purchaser if everything solid melts into air, huh? Explain that lieberuls!) but is absurd in the very real life situations you bring up.
It’s like some bizarre inversion of the old “they say the next drone bombs will be dropped by a black trans woman” joke.
Mullvad being raided and authorities coming away with nothing is a great proof of concept. But you also act like there’s absolutely no other option, and you make tge incredibly ironic claim that if you use another product, immigration gestapo will be at your door to deport you…the same thing that the Mullvad founder supports. Make it make sense.
The question of whether Mullvad has the best proven privacy infrastructure and the question of whether ethical considerations are category errors in urgent situations are two different claims. You’ve made a strong case for the first one. The second doesn’t follow.
Nobody argued that a dissident with a warrant being served on their door should stop and evaluate the founder’s politics before connecting. The door kicking scenario is a real extreme edge case and in that case use whatever works, obviously. But that’s not why most subscribers are paying for Mullvad and the existence of genuine emergencies doesn’t resolve the question for everyone else making a less urgent choice.
The microfraction of blame framing also misrepresents what I actually said. I didn’t argue Mullvad users bear personal moral responsibility for ethnic cleansing. I said I personally won’t fund it when alternatives exist, and I laid out who specifically gets hurt by the policy being bankrolled. That’s a statement about my own choices given my own assessment of the technical gap versus the moral one. If you assess that gap differently because the raid evidence is uniquely compelling to you, that’s a legitimate position. It’s just not an argument that the ethical consideration itself is absurd.
What ethical consideration, the party he did donate to does not even remotely support the claims you are making. And also there is the consideration of what type of democracy we want.
Do we want one where people are free to donate and get involved with whatever party and opinion they want without prosecution?
Or do we want a democracy where you are only allowed to have opinions allowed by the state?
I can’t tell if you’re ignorant or just lying.
lemmy.zip/comment/27359847
And when did the government get involved in my ability to choose what I purchase? Am I now forced to purchase Mullvad? Its their choice to support whatever they want. It’s my, and others, choice to react accordingly and choose what products we purchase.
Seems like you didn’t check the links in the wikipedia article you sent, that you based your whole “they are def nazi”-monologue.
Giving people the option to move back to their home countries is not extreme, and as I have written before. Already something that is law today.
Here is btw the actual like to the “our politcs”-page: www.orebropartiet.se/var-politik/ note how it does not actually have any of the politics there. Yet the wikipedia page seems certain that they have some views, that I cannot see specified anywhere. Even the quote from X is totally out of context.
You can of course do whatever you want, I am just saying that we should be observant to what the party actually wants before we demand the head of a person that gave them money. And clearly you feel comfortable citing sources you haven’t even checked.
Just like Trump has offered immigrants the ability to self-deport and recieve money (which he’s never paid) right? Anyone immigrating has the option to return already, that’s not something they have to be “given.”
The National Socialists also wanted to help those who were different, especially those they said had mental issues. So they built facilities to care for them. Family members were told they would be cared for and helped, provided a better way. This was Aktion T4. They were euthanized.
I’m not saying this is what the Örebro party will do. But I will say, when there are other options available, why risk something like that by indirectly funding their rise? I am allowed to make my own decisions, no? And I am allowed to voice my concern, no? Just like the Örebro party is allowed to beautify remigration and you are allowed to run cover for them.
I feel comfortable because I have. Because someone deletes a twitter post or someone updates a webpage they own shouldn’t sway you.
But first, from the article wikipedia linked
friatider.se/markus-allard-om-andra-generationens…
Just like Germany is for the Germans and America is for the Americans, right?
But yes, they’re just National Socialists, right? They want socialism, it’s in the name, right?
Trump doesn’t offer them to move, he grabs them of the street and throws them out. Regardless if they are citizens or not. Also the nazis were not socialistic.
So your argument is that they COULD BE bad, so therefore the safe option is to not give any money that could possibly end up in their hands? Lol.
The X post is not deleted, you did not check the sources. Don’t pretend like you did.
Yes, there is an actual statement from him. What he is talking about there are migrants that has not worked in all the time they have been here, do not speak the language or has been convicted of a serious crime. I do not find it fascist to throw out foreign nationals that clearly has not respected the laws of their host country.
Me personally, do not want socialism. But yes ÖP is a socialist party.
dhs.gov/…/celebrating-one-year-trump-dhs-now-offe…
Just like your Örebro party wants to “give them the option to leave.”
Also to clarify this is already law to give immigrants the possibility to move. And if Trump has that as a policy? Cool. Better than literally grabbing them of the streets.
migrationsverket.se/…/frivillig-atervandring.html
regeringen.se/…/ett-kraftigt-hojt-atervandringsbi…
You misunderstand, I am part of another party entirely. But I sympathies with having the left smear the party rather than discussing politics, which is harmful in a democracy.
You believe anything someone in power tells you, don’t you?
sigh there’s no point here
Maybe the Swedes should adopt these policies too? Sweden is for Swedes, right?
piefed.social/…/maga-advocate-calls-for-ban-on-pr…
No? I am literally politically active against my government. 😅
Sweden has adopted these policies? If you read my previous answers you would already know this?
If you mean the link it is extremely unrelated to what we are talking about.
I’m sorry, Sweden bans preganant foreigners from travel and sterilizes foreigners before entry? Wtf?
No, of course not. But they help foreigners with cash if they want to leave the country, we have already covered this.
The link you sent about maga is totally unrelated to what we are talking about and was therefore ignored.
Enough that you had to go back and edit it.
And how is immigration control unrelated?
It was just as edited when you read it and reacted to it. xD
What MAGA is doing in the US is unrelated to what is happening in Sweden…
You just said I made a strong case that mullvad has the best infrastructure then at the end said you wouldn’t fund it when alternatives exist. My whole point is that alternatives don’t exist.
A person who’s using proton is getting something fundamentally different (and in a lot of ways more featureful!) than mullvad.
I really cant even begin to address the moral/ethical angle you’re working from other than to simply call it absurd.
Oi! You got a loicense for that spending money in the marketplace without bearing the burden of others decisions?
Imagine for a second that you don’t like Donald trump. You have two neighbors, one of them is very wealthy and loves trump. Your wealthy neighbor runs the local supermarket and made a huge donation to the local campaign for trump. Your other neighbor is very poor and apolitical, well, you never heard them talk about politics. They don’t have a car and shop at the local supermarket. Trump wins your district and is elected and you find out your poor neighbor didn’t vote.
Who bears responsibility for the election of trump? Would it have been different if your poor neighbor voted?
Your analogy actually proves my point. The wealthy neighbor who runs the supermarket and donated to Trump is Berntsson. The supermarket is Mullvad. The poor neighbor without a car who has no choice but to shop there is the dissident in the war zone you described earlier. I’m the person with a car who can drive somewhere else and is choosing to do so because of where the profits go.
Nobody in that analogy is blaming the poor neighbor for Trump winning. You’re describing exactly the distinction I’ve been making the whole time. The ethical consideration only applies to people who have genuine alternatives available to them. For people who don’t, use what works.
Your technical case for Mullvad’s uniqueness is the strongest argument you’ve made and I’m not going to pretend the raid evidence isn’t meaningful. However, it is only a matter of time given our increasingly surveilled, authoritarian world. If you’re genuinely in a situation where that specific level of proven infrastructure is the difference between safety and exposure, the calculus is different and I’ve said as much.
But most Mullvad subscribers aren’t in that situation. Most are people making a privacy choice with real but not life-critical stakes. For those people the gap between Mullvad’s proven infrastructure and a service like IVPN or Proton is meaningful but not absolute, and the moral consideration can be part of the calculation. You’re arguing that the technical gap is so large it should override everything else for everyone. I’m arguing it’s relevant for some people and not determinative for others. That’s not the same as saying the ethical concern is absurd. What I find absurd is stating that the only option should be the one that funds the selfsame political parties advocating for the REASON the people you describe would need a VPN.
Hey, i make mistakes sometimes. Because of that i went back and re-read your comments to others and me and my replies. It’s not impossible that im wrong here, you know?
Except im not wrong even in the slightest.
You came in with a comparison to a fascist burger shop, which is facile in ways i find hard to articulate but here goes:
A person doesn’t need to eat burgers. Burgers are largely the same in flavor and nutritional content when compared against other foods. Burgers don’t keep you safe. Restaurants have much greater labor margins as compared to internet services.
I’m just gonna stop there because it’s clear you’re comparing apples and plutonium ingots.
As far as i can tell you were never claiming that it’s okay for some people who need it but a valid ethical consideration for others, you were saying that a person continuing to use it is a serious ethical or moral violation.
My position on your behavior is that it actively harms the people you claim to be concerned about (possible future victims of a fascism) because it frames the choice as being between being responsible for the owners actions and choosing safety.
The same arguments get trotted out when someone wants to buy a gun “oh, do you really need that?”, “more money for the murder industrial complex.”, etc.
The difference between what you’re doing and what you claim to be doing is that people who are actively talking about alternatives are sharing their experiences, you’re moralizing through metaphors aggressively at people.
If you really believe what you just wrote then make replies that help people figure out what kind of vpn they need and evaluate their safety instead of pulling out the dictionary.com to define fascism at them.
It’s metaphor bro.
And yes, many do not need burgers. Just like many don’t need VPNs. But some people do need food. Just as you’ve defined they do need VPNs. Some. Not all.
And I did. I mention Proton, I mentiom IVPN, others have mentioned AirVPN, that’s why we’re here. And that user said it couldn’t possibly be fascist. I defined why it is. Plain and simple.
I have never said that someone in a life or death position shouldn’t eat a burger. Nor not use a VPN. You did and you keep trying to force your narrative on me. For those of us that have the ability and privilege, as most of us on this platform do, we can make other choices. If you decide that only a raid by law enforcement can make a VPN worth it, regardless of what the leadership of the team that makes it decides, that is your prerogative.
It’s not mine nor is it harmful to share said opinion. I am not mandating anyone do anything. I’m simply stating my reasons for wishing to no longer support them. I am not mandating someone’s personal choice nor should you or anyone else be able to mandate mine.
And what you keep ignoring is my point that funding these ideologies, directly or indirectly, creates more victims you yourself describe who have no choice. A theoretical extreme, and as I said, use whatever you want, whatever is necessary, eat the burger, use the VPN if you need to. That doesn’t mean it won’t create more victims along the way. So I, personally, will not use it. I, personally, would even rather Proton over Mullvad at this current point. Or IVPN. Or AirVPN.
I’m out. This is pointless as you keep dodging the argument and attempt to force your narrative onto me. You are causing more harm by attempting to have individuals support a founder who supports people’s persecution. Fuck outta here man.
First things first: 👋😘
When i claimed what you are doing is harmful —and i know this is a weird concept but bear with me— i was talking about replies you already made, not replies you would make in the future.
When i just now called back to that part of our conversation it was to explicitly point out that you’re not here trying to help find a solution, you’re here pointing at the dictionary and moralizing at people.
When i broke it down you shifted your tone and started all this “oh, i never said what people should do, only what i would do.” nonsense.
You’re the hot dog costume man irl.
Refunded because I want mullvad to do the right thing, and to continue as a legitimately ethical vpn.
.
I’m trying to figure out what the purpose of Nym is compared to a network like Tor or I2P. It seems to perform a symilar function, except it’s a paid product.
I’ve been pretty happy with Windscribe. They are headquartered in Canada, but they have also proven they don’t keep logs. cybersecuritynews.com/court-dismisses-criminal-ch…
If you’re looking for a good comparison, I found the Techlore comparison table helpful: vpn.techlore.tech
They also threatened to leave Canada if Bill C-22 passes, which I take as a good sign that they’re serious.
Airvpn… few servers, but reliable on different machines and no problems.
Personally I’m not using any of them that haven’t been raided and proven not to keep records and as far as I know Mullvad is the only one who fits that bill.
I’m a happy IVPN user. Small team, privacy enthusiasts, transparent, great products. Just a heads up, some IVPN subscription tiers offer MailX (email aliases, like SimpleLogin), ModDNS (like Contro-D or NextDNS) and Portmaster (app firewall, and SPN network, inspired on TOR). It’s hard to compete!
I care more about the results of privacy audits than I care about moral purity tests and bandwagon boycotts.
I am paying for a service. I’m not tithing to a religion.
Audits don’t prove they don’t keep logs when a company do a audit on them Mullvad give them access to what they can audit Mullvad can just delete the logs from the servers when the audit is taking place it don’t prove anything.
So you have to trust the vpn provider. And i have a hard time trusting a vpn provider where the person that ownes 50% donates to a party that is pretty close to a Nazi party.
By paying for it you are indirectly funding a party that is pretty close to being a Nazi party.
According to Mullvad’s Wikipedia page “Flamman also alleged he later stated it was sad that the party’s remigration policy was necessary”.
“Remigration is a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry.”
And your phone was built by child slave labor. By using it to type that you’re basically a slaveowner.
Or…
We can think like adults. Paying for the best utility is not a virtue signal. End.
Not the guy above and I tend to agree to your opinion. You can avoid this issue buying second hand / refurbished phones only
I’m doing it since 2016.
While I generally agree, you know that right wing political beliefs directly correlate to shady corporate practices. I can no longer trust they aren’t pulling a fast one and cutting corners.
So audit them
I’ve worked IT in finance for over twenty years. I’ve been through many, many, many audits.
I don’t rely on just that.
I get what you’re saying as there are many examples of excessive reactions to relatively minor and subjective ethical infringements. But it’s pretty ignorant to say that unwillingness to sponsor right-wing parties is unjustified.
I want privacy and a decent planet.
Im broke as hell so I’m using pia right now, I very much regret it I will probably switch to nym as soon as my subscription runs out.
What’s to regret?
.
Toxic and potentially risky ownership.
Kape Technologies.
???
Owned by a company with dubious motivations, who owns multiple VPN’s under different branding as what is undeniably an effort to deceive people, and based out of a country famous for selling spyware.
Generally dodgy marketing (prioritising sensationalism over truth), also owned by an Israeli company. (yikes)
American based VPN providers are a no no.
I use Proton VPN, but also exist self-hosted VPNs which is better
From what I understand, the use case for a self-hosted vpn is pretty different
Yes, u can choose remove logs, and more privacy options :3
You can benefit from both a commercial VPN provider as well as at-home hosted.
My Asus WRT router, which I flashed with Merlin firmware, has a feature called “VPN Director”, I can connect to 5 different VPN clients at a time and forward my devices connections individually through each one.
My Asus router also has the option to host a WireGuard Server which i then forward through one of the VPN clients with the VPN director.
Essentially creating a multi-hop network, the flow goes a little like such;
Device -> WireGuard Tunnel -> Home Network -> WireGuard Tunnel -> Commercial VPN Server
The commercial VPN is my endpoint therefore what the internet sees when I browse however I also benefit from my PiHole which handles my DNS queries an blocklists.
How does a selfhosted VPN work? I thought the purpose was to offload the connection so the ISP only saw the company IP…which is this case is an IP toed to your location?
Yes, a self-hosted VPN could reveal your IP, so you must hire a VPS server to host your VPN, so the IP you reveal is that of the VPS server located somewhere else, in turn you can configure proxies to mask the same IP of your VPS
Is this then not essentially the same thing, paying for a remote access IP to mask your traffic?
I am not against it or anything I just dont get the difference.
That’s true, but without VPS u should configure a good proxies
ivpn is the only one on the list privacy-guides recommends other than mullvad and proton - obviously their recommendations aren’t law but a good starting point for looking into things yourself
Host one yourself on a cloud host that accepts cryptocurrency and asks no questions, if you want to do piracy. Otherwise if you’re just trying to get your traffic cloaked for privacy reasons, a digital ocean droplet or a hetzner instance running OpenVPN is plenty.
maybe a dumb question but isn’t a hetzner instance directly connected to one’s identity? I remember when setting up mine, they asked for ID verification. If so then the outgoing IP which is public is linked to my ID and would be a bigger risk of itself. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Yeah, but if you want privacy, it’s a fine idea to prevent public networks and such from examining your traffic patterns. My personal main use case for a self-hosted VPN is for using public networks for private traffic, and I wouldn’t suggest doing hardcore high volume piracy through such a thing.
The idea of using one for piracy is more focused on finding a VPS provider that can accept cryptocurrency and doesn’t require your personal details.
Edit: whoops, realized I got the premises backwards in my earlier comment. Sorry about that.
I’ve been using nym for a few month now. It generally works and I’m convinced by the project. However, they are still implementing features and there are often small issues (slow connections, no servers found, needs new permissions on Linux after update, etc.)
I use AirVpn as they allow port forwarding and are reasonably priced. They are no logs and allow payment through non-bank methods
AirVPN is great, I am using it right now. Paid with crypto and signed up with an anonymous email address
I switched from Mullvad before this because they thought I was paying 5 EUR each month to solve a captcha on their website. Proton VPN is what I’m using rn.
Tell me more, are they asking you to authenticate often?
Not OP but I solve a ton of Captchas…
if you want even more, use fextralife. outside of that I rarely see them with mullvad
It really depends on whether you care or not about State Surveillance.
If you don’t and only really care about general privacy and things like not getting letters from lawyers demanding money because you torrented something, then any no-logs VPN will do:
If, however, you care about State Surveillance, then merely a no-logs VPN isn’t necessarily safe anymore. You see several countries, such as the US and UK, have special surveillance courts (such as FISA courts in the US) which can issue court orders to facilitate data access for mass surveillance WHICH THE RECIPIENTS CANNOT PUBLICLY ADMIT THEY’RE UNDER. In other words, the wiretapping equipment/software to allow bulk tracking of what users are doing might already be installed at the no-logs VPN (and they cannot tell you about it otherwise they’ll literally end up in jail) so it’s not in fact no-logs because the likes of the NSA is actually logging it all. Any VPN hosted in such legal jurisdictions can be the target of it, any company registered in such legal jurisdictions can be the target of it and it doesn’t matter how honest and pro-privacy the people in those companies are - I vaguely remember the case of a secure e-mail provider in the US (forgot the name now), who tried to fight one such court order and ultimately the only way they found to do so was to close down the service and their company.
So if you VPN company is for example registered in Gibraltar (which is a British jurisdiction) or the US and they’re still operating, they’re very likely compromised and even if they’re not, they can silently be compromise at any time.
If you care about avoiding mass surveillance from actual governments, then beyond the usual autocratic nations you’ll want to avoid VPN exit points in and VPN providers based in or registered in at the very least the US, UK and Israel and any of the regions under their jurisdiction (for example Gibraltar and the Channel Islands for Britain, Puerto Rico for the US), probably more broadly all the 5-Eyes nations (so, the first 2 plus Canada, Australia and New Zealand).
So check were that “wonderful no-logs VPN” company is registered and were is based and avoid those in countries with insane civil society surveillance legislation like the Patriot Act and even avoid exit nodes of other VPN companies in such countries.
It was Lavabit. The interview witht the founder about that whole fiasco is legendary I’ll try to find and link it
m.youtube.com/watch?v=spW0q-g2BxU&pp=ygUXTGFkYXIg…
Do you happen to have more info on that? Which UK government agencies would need to have jurisdiction over their Gibraltar counterparts for this to work?
The English Law Act 1962 stipulates that English common law will apply to Gibraltar unless overridden by Gibraltar law. This means that amongst others the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 as well as earlier and later laws around surveillance, apply in Gibraltar by default.
I supposed one would need to find legal counsel in Gibraltar to determine if Gibraltar has passed laws that nullify English laws on surveillance powers, and until proven that Gibraltar has passed said laws the most logical expectation to have is that the same surveillance laws that apply in Great Britain also apply in Gibraltar because that’s the case for most laws.
Got it! I also found this IVPN blog post back from 2016 (keeping in mind that it’s old and may be biased) and this recent Privacy Guides forum thread for further reading.
I have to say: all legal area is a grey area if you legal hard enough, but British Territories are on another level. I feel like I’m changing their legal system by observing it.
I use self-hosted on a cloud bought by crypto, but it’s primarily because my relatives living in a country with almost all VPN solutions and protocols blocked, so you always need to figure everything out yourself and try something new.
What cloud service would you recommend? Maybe I’m over thinking I but I was looking into offshore VPS. But don’t know if I really want to go through it all.
I wouldn’t advertize anything, but some criterias to filter by: crypto payments available (that’s a good scrutiny even if you don’t pay with it), server location and legal address not in the vault 7 if that matters. The VPN installation itself is pretty easy, you can find guides on the internet or ask AI. I believe, on the official OpenVPN pages there might be a simple guide as well. You just need to use terminal and that’s all.
I have 5 days left, looks like I’m not gonna renew.
I find the support of that political party pretty disturbing.
I think I am just going to use tor for general browsing. Mullvad IP addresses get blocked just as much as tor these days anyway.
On Android you can use InviZible Pro to get Tor, I2P, and DNSCrypt
Aaaaaaannnnnd just like that, I have a new toy to play with.
What an epic recommendation. Thank, I haven’t heard of InviZible Pro before.
Had a bad experience with Nym. It’s not compatible with GrapheneOS. It runs, but there’s a data limit that in my experience kept getting artificially hit by the forming and breaking of connections that occurs when switching GOS profiles. Maybe this happens less on stock Android?
Regardless, I had to keep contacting their support for extensions. In 6 years, I haven’t yet had to contact Mullvad support. It just works!
I experienced DNS leaks when Nym claimed it was ‘fully’ connected. Mullvad.net could ‘see’ where I was located. That’s not considering that in general the connection with Nym was much slower than Mullvad. Nym offered me an extended free trial, but I haven’t claimed it yet. Reckon they’ll need another couple of years to iron out the obvious issues.
In summary, Nym felt like a very early prototype much more than a production-ready service.