this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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God bloody dammit. I genuinely LOVE Mullvad and have tried to use their (not so cheap) services. I feel in this economy, privacy comes at a price and I was happy to do this.
Now, I realise my money is going to fund a POS far-right asshole.
Proton supports Trump.
Mullvad suports the far right.
Is there any major privacy respective service provider that isn't a bloody cunt?
also thought mullvad was legit. also want to know if there's any alternative
I’ve semi-seriously been thinking about bootstrapping a VPN service just to have one “not an asshole” service (and that’s setting the bar low - I’m definitely an asshole, just not that kind of asshole). But I’m also a US citizen living in the US, so not the best choice for the job either.
JAVS - just another VPN service, let's fucking go.
If you build it, they will come
I've been using IVPN.
I originally stopped using IVPN because of slow speeds. Has that improved?
Hey,
No.
Are you able to get through geo-restrictions on streaming services with IVPN?
Number of servers is less relevant than users per server.
Mullvad is a much bigger company so I'd expect them to need more servers.
It is, when you want to evade geo-restrictions. More servers spread over different IP blocks means there’s more chances the streaming services aren’t aware of some of those IPs yet, so they aren’t blocking them yet.
I'll preface this by saying I used to work in the industry.
The restriction evading isn't really related to the number of servers. VPN companies for streaming block evasions buy IP addresses that aren't data centre specific. Those ranges are well known and easily blocked. So for example when you browse you'll generally use a "standard" IP but while connected to the same endpoint if you fire up a netflix session it'll route that traffic out the "streaming" IP. This is also partly to try to prevent steaming companies from getting easy access to a list of those IPs
It's quite expensive to get IPs that aren't blocked by steaming services so that is a cheaper cost per user for larger companies. Where I was that cost was way more than the cost of any individual server per month (and some of those servers were hefty). That is one way that Mullvad would have an edge but it's minor.
For what it's worth I did have a call with the iVPN lads (twice I think) and found them lovely. Never interacted with Mullvad but I will never give them money after reading this. Weirdly I'm in the market for a new subscription and they would have been my go to. Their fiver a month thing is really very smart.
Thanks for the info, I learned something new. So if for example I run my tv through my VPN and I’m watching youtube. When I switch to the netflix app, the VPN service determines that I’m trying to hit a netflix IP, so it routes it out to an outgoing IP specifically for netflix geo-blocking evasion that is separate from what youtube was using?
Yeah that's exactly it. That's how we did it anyway. I guess other providers may have their own secret sauce but I have to assume it's some variation of that. We paid for a pool of, I think, 1000 non-contiguous residential / business IPs and if any of them got blocked we just immediately rotated.
Honestly we never had much trouble with it after the initial engineering work was done. I don't think the providers really give a shit beyond best initial effort to make the rights holders happy.
Its been a couple of years but I didn't have much luck with IVPN and mlb.tv but that was really the only one I tried at the time.
Proton VPN have had one of their chefs praising donald trump, but that's the worst I have heard about them. Swiss based (they have among the most protective privacy laws out there), email servers are deep down in the mountains (I don't know about the VON ones), no logs (for what I remember, maybe short lived ones?), made by the dudes at CERN.
So compared to others quite flawless IMO.
Only technical problem I have had is the VPN switches port from time to time and you have to rebind the network interface of your favourite torrent if you're running a tight ship. I have found no simple way of detecting when it happens.
If you're using qbt and gluetun https://gitlab.com/jopiermeier/gluetun-qbittorrent-port-manager
Interesting!
So it pings some entity and they send back your external port? I speed read the code (but I'm on mobile) and that's what it looks like. Any information greatly appreciated.
Fuck me, this is gonna ruin mullvad, I hope. Never saw it coming though, wtf?
Can we stop with the "proton" supports trump. This has been echoing since the tweet. I understand the initial recoil, I had it myself, but proton as an entity very clearly does not support trump.
By that logic, Mullvad is fine too, because the entity doesn't support the far right. You are just sending your money to the company which pays the people that do... so...
I mean I'm okay expanding that logic here as well for consistency. This is all on a spectrum, one of Mullvad's top employees donates millions to far right politician is on the more extreme end of that spectrum than a tweet that failed to read the room.
Taking your counterpoint even further, if you found out some low level employees at any company used a portion of their paycheck to support far right politics would you boycott? Obviously not, which should show you that you don't believe this should be a binary decision.
To be clear, I feel mullvad crossed the line here, my point was that the proton hate doesn't compare and is overblown.
Uh no? Show me where proton donated millions of dollars to fascists. Their CEO made an unbelievably stupid statement, and then walked it back, but they have not materially supported actual Nazis.
https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
Really good article, definitely worth reading
AirVPN?
Didn't air have a data mining scandal like nord and others? Cryptostorm is legit though.
Not as far as I've heard? Any links?
Yeah, I usually round Robin AirVPN, IVPN, and cryptostorm. Sometimes they leap frog each other in terms of features
Signal was started by the CIA, so dissidents in regimes they wanted to topple could communicate securely, but at least that seems genuine.
Matrix was an Israeli spy company's invention.
Telegram is Russian.
Reddit started out as the creation of Aaron Schwartz, but he got demonised and committed suicide. Then it was left to that shit eater spez, who sold his soul to the Epstein crowd making Ghislaine Maxwell a powermod among others, also hosting r/the_donald and bridging Trump's popularity from 4chan into the mainstream. Now he sells everyone's data to Google, while still not paying the manufacturers of that data anything.
TrueCrypt got shut down because it was too cool.
Do you have Signal confused with TOR?
And Veracrypt?
VeraCrypt exists
And we should be thankful that. But merely existing isn't cool.
Matrix does have fundamental design issues you would expect from cellebrite devs...
Simplex, Monero and Whonix are all as cool as veracrypt!
and the SimpleX creator is a far righter, too https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/114630877715286899
You'd think with all the trans programmers out there we would have more tech companies built by leftists...
But I suppose the leftists are the ones building the platforms for a pittance while the generationally wealthy right-wingers are the ones paying people to do all that work...
Doesn't matter as much here. It's open source and has passed two audits. Look at the code. Use different servers if you want. Reimplement the protocol if you can.
No really, please somone do it in go or rust. I don't want to learn kotlin 🥲
Same here, we're left with AirVPN at that point.