Any recommendations on a vpn service for privacy?
(no i don't trust nordvpn)

ProtonVPN, Mullvad, TRUST.ZONE

Self hosted. Unless you want to move between servers (geo locations)

@magicMirror just buy 20 servers 🤷‍♂️

@metamourge ProtonVPN belongs in the same bin as NordVPN.

@alexbrooklyn Or go the not-so-whitehat route and get some servers you can use instead

thank you everybody!

@kescherRant yeah i've read that there is a big vpn cartel with many brands owned by one company. And i suspect that pseudo review sites like https://www.vpnmentor.com/ or https://www.top10vpn.com/ are all owned by the same syndicate to bad mouth the legit competition via search engine optimization and marketing.
On top of that there are many cheap ones operated by Intelligence agencies mainly from china to spy on you. So it's not easy to chose one service. Selfhosting is not an option for me.

@heyheni Why isn't it?

@heyheni Most definitely. I haven't yet found one website that wasn't awful for VPN reviews.

As for the service itself, I highly recommend Mullvad.

A VPN is useless for privacy if you're using it to browse sites in which you've logged in before. If they can already associate you from your login data, your IP becomes irrelevant.

The only thing it can protect you from (if used correctly) is your ISP snooping in, but it still exposes you to other stuff (like your VPN provider snooping in - unless you go selfhosted, which you should, though in that case your server provided could potentially be looking in that case).

Basically, the only way a VPN could ever really be useful would be if you actually owned the entire network. Anything less than that is a potential leak of information.

People assume that a VPN is some sort of magic bullet for privacy, but never actually stop to think what's really going on at the networking level

@heyheni there are self-hosting options that are way cheaper and better than most commercial VPNs out there.
A small VPS on Hetzner will give you 20TB (yes, terabytes, not gigabytes) of monthly traffic on a solid 100Mbit connection for less than 3€/mo, and you can pay by credit card.

They seem to have a pretty good security policy too, since they allow TOR relays on their network

@kescherRant what's the link between Proton and Nord? What's wrong with then?

Windscribe

@Jilano
https://thatoneprivacysite.net/
(this site is pretty good for vpn comparison...)

The only weird thing with Mullvad - you just have an account number. Nothing else... no password, no other authentication.

@Haxk20

and you are the sole user?

@alexbrooklyn you just descibed my day job. You can also.move the servers around as needed - aws allows this for instance.

@endor There was a rumor that ProtonVPN and NordVPN were owned by the same company.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item/....

This rumor was dismissed as far as I know.

5 bucks a year: https://i-83.net/
with installer script: https://github.com/angristan/...

or mullvad

I've been using torguard for about a year. Mainly just to mask torrent traffic from my isp but it's running on my ftp server so all of its traffic funnels through the VPN. I don't really download much unless I need cartoons for kidlet because we'll be away from internet access. And yeah netflix lets you download some stuff but it doesn't always work properly.

@Potanic

"Torguard" is that one of those VPNs with Tor integrated? If yes:

Don't torrent on it. You slow the whole network down.

Depends on how you perceive privacy. For many people it's a catch-all term that can mean many different things. I'm going to do a write-up about this soon as well.

If you're looking for anonymity towards websites you visit, a VPN of any kind is not the way to go. Tor would be what you're looking for, but the IP's in it have horrible reputation for reasons that should be obvious - abuse.

If you're looking to hide from your ISP what you're doing, any encrypted traffic will do. However, a VPN connection will encrypt all of it.

If you're looking for a silver bullet.. you're out of luck.

Commercial VPN leverages a coincidental effect of using "a real VPN for what it was meant to be used". You don't know how they treat the data flowing in and out. However, many users can give a sense of "anonymity". Still the wrong tool for the job but yeah.

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Self-hosted VPN gives 0 anonymity. You're the only user and your IP usually does not change. My IP's are still the same as they were 2 years ago. When those VPN's are in use, I'm very well aware that I'm making it extremely easy for others to correlate and know who I am. That is not something I'm uncomfortable with, if anything it's something I like because it means that the reputation of those IP's is for the most part under my control.

Self-hosted VPN will hide from your ISP what you're doing however, and will give you the benefit of being able to communicate across VPN clients as if they were in the same network (hence virtual private network). This is the original intended use of VPN's and why I built the ones I built. Do I use gateway forwarding to make my traffic flow out of those servers? Of course, but it's a side effect.

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It will not give you anonymity, but it will allow you to fine-tune every parameter about the VPN network, including things like the cipher that's in use, firewall etc. Consider it a network rather than a "pipe of privacy".

@theKarlisK
It's tor like torrent not project tor. Incidentally sometimes I use tor over torguard just because I can.

@theKarlisK a much better project via ansible: https://github.com/StreisandEffect/...

@JoshBent Yes this. I also wrote a script (modified the script you linked to) to automatically deploy a vpn server on i-83.net servers :)

@linuxxx awesome also look into ansible for future scripting, playing around with it right now and it would've made so many of my initial server setup scripts obsolete and easier 😊

I've used torguard for years for their torrent proxy. It's really cheap with a coupon code, and they give you that price as long as the service doesn't cancel. I pay like $15/yr. They don't tell you this (for obvious reasons), but you can use the same credentials for the proxy in their vpn app and tunnel all your traffic through it. Must be an oversight on their end but I'm not complaining ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

nice one torguard shills now go take your payroll and fuck off lol

@JoshBent lol that's why I pay with crypto and fake name/address and only connect to offshore servers. It may not be a bulletproof offshore anon vps, but it's reliable for when I need to proxy my traffic

@person crypto that isn't washed, vpn that requires name to begin with, offshore that is most likely a virtual location not physical, lots of horseshit which does fuck all, could've spent it on a guy fawkes mask instead to have more 1337 hacker cred.

@JoshBent hmm interesting I didn't consider virtual locations. But again, I'm just tryna avoid dmca letters and it sounds like you're looking for something more robust. Just layer that shit with public WiFi > vpn > virtualbox running whonix > Tor > socks5 > so on > so forth > etc

@person fingerprinting

@person if you wanted to just avoid DMCA, then using a vpn that doesn't even ask for any personal identifier is best, eg. mullvad

Thank you everybody!
I choose mullvad, seems nice and it works on my smartTV via openVPN. Now I can watch norwegian, swedish and danish television without geolock. Awesome!

Yeah, unfortunately the vpn became the necessity in my job. I am working with Windscribe

I don't have experience of working with this service, but I also work with VPN for a long time. Well, I can tell you that VPN can actually provide pretty good protection to you, and that's why I use https://namecheap.com/vpn/... to avoid getting any problems. You can check it out as well, and I'm sure that if you had this VPN, you wouldn't have to struggle with something like that, so you should at least check it out.

Advise me a good VPN service so that I can use it with the whole family and without problems. To be able to visit any sites with high speed.

To choose a good VPN, you need to look at several applications first, review the characteristics of each VPN service, check which devices are compatible with the application so that everyone in your family can use it, and only then you should choose. We use a VPN https://www.hostzealot.com/vpn from this company. It is very convenient, the connection to the servers is fast, the choice of servers to connect to is sufficient, and most importantly the cost is reasonable. I like using Wireguard more than 3rd party applications because you can clearly see what is going on with your traffic.

Senks