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.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
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.
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
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.
Gibraltar (which is a British jurisdiction)
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 everything thing passed in Britain also applies by default in Gibraltar.
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.
It was Lavabit. The interview witht the founder about that whole fiasco is legendary I'll try to find and link it
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
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.
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.