I used Mullvad for a long time, but hearing about one of the two CEOs actively supporting and financing swedish Nazis, I’m looking to put my money elsewhere. That’s the second one after Private Internet Access (who supported Gab).
I had AirVPN and Surfshark being recomnended, how do people here feel? What do you use?
Commenting so I remember to check this thread later. My Mullvad expires in 5 days.
Can always count on Lemmy to raise awareness on where to not spend money!
I think people say that AirVPN is pretty goated
ivpn and airvpn are my short list, but ivpn is not looking great for the southern hemisphere due to a lack of servers down here… Northern hemisphere they would be my top choice. I have contacted them a couple of times, and they have responded the same day, were helpful, and appear genuine.
I really like Proton. It’s fast, it’s good.
Seconding Proton. Have used it for YEARS, no issues.
AirVpn is awesome
Go to torrentfreak.com They solicit info from various VPN companies, plus report on them when they make the news.
they are sponsored by proton so…
I just dont get why anyone would willingly tunnel all their traffic to some party they dont know the inner workings of.
Escape censorship
Because it’s only one point you don’t have to trust instead of every point along the way
That’s kind of like saying you want only amazon to deliver your packages instead of amazon, FedEx, ups, etc.
In other words, a honeypot. Putting all your eggs in one basket.
It’s true that the point of failure in a VPN is the provider, which is why trusting the company is important.
It’s also true that you definitely can’t trust your ISP and government so in the worst case scenario you just wasted $70.
Exactly. And seeing is believing, I’m not trusting some for profit corp with all my traffic data lol.
Also some people dont know how to set up VPNs properly, I realize a lot have apps now but site to site seems to be an option on most. If you just clunk your way through without knowing what you’re doing, you potentially could be opening your whole network to them.
No you can’t trust your ISP either. But this is why things like DNS over HTTPS and other protocols exist to encrypt everything. And if you’re going to that length with a VPN provider, you’re just throwing money away and no better off
isps in most places are required by law to record sitrs you visit
if you use a vpn they just see you are connecting to the vpn, but the vpn can potentially see sites you visit
so it comes down to deciding: do you trust your isp or the vpn provider. a lot of cases it will be the vpn provider
Depends where you live I guess.
I am not a mullvad user, but I recently found https://njal.la/. Curious if anyone has used it before and their experience
I use them on my nas for torrenting.
- €5 per month.
- Accepts payment in crypto, including monero.
- Can only use your account on one device.
- Only one location, Sweden.
- Assigns dynamic IP address to indivdual user session and each IP address is only assigned to one user at a time.
- Any port(s) can be opened.
Most might consider it expensive give the limitation on devices and location but the freedom to open multiple ports makes it amazing for torrenting.
My nas runs 5 instances of qbittorrent and slskd all with connectable ports opened.It works reliably for what I use it for. Other than that, I have nothing to report on my experience using them and in this case, no news is good news.
how long have you been using them?
I’m genuinely curious, what does running 5 instances of qbittorrent do that 1 instance doesn’t?
That’s a valid question and I have 5 different answers. Lol. It all built out over the last 5 years.
I started with one instance and was raw-dogging the net but only using reputable private trackers (ie, teh cabal).
On GGn I was seeding about 20,000 torrents (bulk of this was Linux isos for older retro computers).
Every time ggn has stability issues (every fucking day), it would drag my entire torrent client down with it so I moved all my ggn torrents to their own instance to isolate that problem. That instance still struggled to handle so many torrents on such an unstable tracker so I split ggn across 2 instances.Then I found some things on public trackers I wanted to download and seed, the full dump of Redtopia being one example. So I created another instance that was routed through a VPN via gluetun to use on public trackers.
And lastly I created one more instance to handle my porn stash.
So that’s how I amassed 5 separate torrent clients on the same machine and more recently I moved to a different ISP who uses CGNAT and have decided that I am happy with cgnat and use a VPN that allows opening of ports to handle all my torrent clients.
Been using PIA for over a decade now. I started with them by paying with a random gift card I had laying around (Walmart maybe?) and have been paying with crypto ever since. They’ve never asked for any personal details (used a burner email address) and the service has been solid the entire time. Clients on Windows and Linux both work great and are open source with pretty decent documentation. In short, sometimes I want to reliably remain anonymous online and it has worked out well for me.
I know that a lot of people here hate on PIA but I haven’t seen any justification. So if anyone here knows why I shouldn’t be using the service, I’d love to hear about it; I’d be happy to switch to something else if it works at least as well.
Owned by kape (israel), who own many of the dodgy marketing vpn’s.
Based in the USA (the opposite of privacy)
No personal experience with them myself
PIA is owned by Israel. https://hackread.com/private-internet-access-pia-vpn-sold-israel-privacy-concerns/
EDIT: Updated link to be source article instead of shiddit post
Thanks for the answer; I certainly don’t want to send any money to Israel, if possible. Does anyone have any recommendations for alternatives? I just have two requirements: I need the connection uptime to be rock solid. I also need to be able to register and pay completely anonymously. I’m not that concerned about bandwidth.
Mostly it’s a US based company and has to comply with US laws/surveillance
Does that matter if they have none of my data? I mean, they could log unencrypted traffic but for web browsing you should be forcing https wherever possible, so traffic logs would be mostly irrelevant. No doubt, they can see what you torrent but I can’t imagine it matters that much if they have no data about you. They could certainly build a fingerprint based on torrents and unencrypted traffic but I feel like it may be too weak to be relevant. Maybe people worry about using the official clients? But you don’t need to use them either, you can just establish a raw OpenVPN tunnel.
It’s an Israeli and US company. If anyone is somehow MITM snooping your TLS traffic, it’s them.
I use nym. Works well in my experience, though my Linux experience hasn’t been the best. I run a hardened system though, so take that with a grain of salt.
I’ve heard good things about this service. Haven’t tried it myself though.
I had SurfShark years ago but really do not recommend them. Constant problems with all traffic just stopping and then I had to call someone up to cancel my subscription as there was no option online.
Switched to AirVPN which I don’t see talked about much but it’s great. The Android app is looking a little dated (the icon in the app drawer is in a tiny circle because they have added support for adaptive icons still) but functionally I can’t complain.
+1 for AirVPN. I’m a little worried of what happens if it becomes more mainstream (see what happened to mullvad and their port forwarding features), but they’re rock solid and still support port forwarding for p2p. They also do good black friday sales every year, you can get a steal on the 3yr package around that time.
I’m sticking with it. This cancel culture needs some balance. Someone at this company is an idiot. Doesn’t make them all idiots. Yet.
Too much knee jerk going on these days.
not just someone, the co-owner, you are choosing to fund the political party.
that is either apathetic, or…
Agreed, in my opinion it is the best VPN provider, with Mozilla (rents infrastructure) and Proton as next best
Cancel culture or vote with your wallet?
I don’t think its cancel culture to not want to indirectly fund fascism. The guy is one of the CEOs so if you subscribe then it goes into his pockets
Anyone spouting the phrase “cancel culture” unironically is making it pretty clear where they stand tbh
Way back, I used to use cryptostorm.is They had an interesting way of separating your payment of the service from the actual use of the service. Where you buy tokens, available from third party vendors even, and then you can use those tokens to authenticate to the vpn service.
Not sure how unique that feature is compared to other providers, I haven’t felt the need to run one in a good while. Also don’t know if they’re still legit or not.
If someone else has some insight on them I’d be interested it hearing!
It’s Mullvad. This whole thing, in my eyes, overreaction to one asshole being an asshole, and not anywhere near as bad as so many other assholes.
That’s my opinion, you’re 100% valid in voting with your wallet and I respect everyone that draws the line here.
For me, though, Mullvad is the only one worth their salt if you actually want the best of the best for privacy, and there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism so this feels like an exercise in futility.
I would rather be a decent person.
To be clear, by your judgment using Mullvad precludes me from being a decent person?
No, your own words “preclude you from being a decent person”
apathy is evil.
So then yes, right? I’m not trying to be a dick only understand what your stance is for the sake of discussion.
My position is not apathetic, it’s a reluctant acceptance that chasing idealism is a fleeting goal and, in my experience and belief, that energy is much better spent on doing things that will make the world a noticeably better place instead of getting riding the high denying a hundred-millionaire 5 quid a month.
I think paying massive telecoms for internet access is measurably worse for democracy and ethics than a mullvad subscription, but there are some things we have to be okay with for advancing a greater good. Mullvad is the only VPN to my knowledge that’s been proven to resist pressure from every government and has passed the subpoena test multiple times.
I’m not tryna say I’m right and you’re wrong, and I’m not trying to argue in bad faith to get a win; I’d much rather we share ideas and come out with greater understanding. Tone and authenticity are hard to convey in forums so please trust me when I tell you my intent is to do the most good with the least bad.
Have we really reached a point in which we have to stick with the “least bad” option? I don’t like this.
The lesser evil is what a lot of duopoly voters goes for, the concept isn’t new, even though it is of course ridiculous.
It’s been this way since choosing who to buy copper from in Mesopotamia, probably longer.
Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp. We’ve been there for a while. People suck.
No, we haven’t. There are several good alternatives.
Being in the proton ecosystem I use their VPN, and it’s been working great thus far.
proton are right wing. your comment is ironic here.
Weird to say Proton is the lesser of the two evils, but not by much.
Mullvad donated to a actual right-wing fascist party.
Proton’s owner complimented the US government and gave away customer data.
proton is purple google, an ai company, manipulative and dishonest on social media, and proudly right wing.
This article breaks down the Proton controversies. I believe this comment overly abstracts them, but read what actually happened yourself: http://thoughtportal.org/2025/02/26/proton-mail-says-its-politically-neutral-while-praising-republican-party/
Same here, haven’t had any issues with the free version so far.
