!rant

Hey y'all,

Has anyone here seen this post: Don't use VPN services.
https://gist.github.com/joepie91/...

Hot exachanges.

What are your thoughts?

I've got to agree, with the fact, that most well known VPN providers are shady as all hell.
Eg, Proxy.sh advertised itself as not being able to identify a single user after he authenticated himself against a server, or log them.
However, they've proven that to be wrong, as they manipulated the Traffic of of their users to aid law-enforcement.

Also, many countries ( especially 5-eyes) have weak data protection laws, so governments can easily get all the server data they want.

I personally trust ProtonVPN.
Their mother company ProtonMail got big by providing secure email inboxes, so I'm pretty confident they wouldn't risk their users trust, as high security is easily their biggest selling point.
They're also based in switzerland, so other countries can't force them to give out your data.

It's been known for years that VPN service providers are a shady, two-faced bunch. Just about every one of the large providers have been exposed to be flat out lying about one thing or another (no logging or "protecting" your privacy usually). First offenders were VPN providers that sold the info to ad agencies. Also a fact that many "new" providers are just rebranded or sub-division based providers of larger providers that have been publicly outed to flat out lie about their service - it's done just so that the service seemingly has a clean rep while all the bs is still going on in the background until exposed again.

Just slapping on VPN is just one of the many steps you have to take to stay anonymous or to protect your privacy. Paying with crypto currencies is also not something that's going to cut it unless you aquired them from mining ir by trading in person while paying cash (not since just about every crypto currency marketplace requires you to provide valid ID).

Sidenote, ProtonVPN does seem like a rare breed of honorable VPN providers - I too haven't heard anything bad about them (some allegations here and there but those seemed to be baseless, made by their competitors in a smear campaign attempt), tho, in the end - the only VPN service you should trust is your own.

There are few VPN providers that are not engaged in shady or even clearly unethical practices. ProtonVPN has been named already (though there is some controversy) and I would like to add Mullvad.

Oh, and many VPN providers have heavy tracking in their apps ^^

There's nothing to have an opinion on here honestly. What the dude said in the gist is exactly right. VPN as a service is a scam and the only good reason to use it is to bypass country locks more comfortably than looking for a functional proxy.

Just think about it.. It's a "virtual private network"

So the main product is that they allow you to use their network? So it's like "pay me, and you can connect to the internet through my router instead of yours"... So what did you gain? Military grade encryption? Premium security? Privacy?

The answer is nothing, you just added one more node to the connection...

(Except for http sites, you gained an encrypted channel between the vpn provider and your machine, so I guess it protects you against MitM attacks on a public network for any old blog website that forgot to migrate to https, but chrome wont even allow you to connect to those anymore without warning :) )

Clickbait title, but valid enough content.

I believe @linuxxx recommends Mullvad, that's good enough for me.

@RememberMe That I recommend it you mean?

I partially agree. It entirely depends on how much you trust your ISP and your VPN provider.

In the US, some providers actively inject tracking shit into web pages and such, when using a site without https WITH VPN prevents this.

For me, it's important that my home IP isn't logged with about every service I use/visit, VPN solves this for me.

@linuxxx both the recommendation and the service (I did my own reading too of course)

Couple of years ago I was using VyperVPN from Giganews.

I was pretty satisfied, but stoped using it

Hard to trust any company, since government security services can lean on any employee and threaten them if they don't leak data to them.

Or they can just get a spy hired, since many companies don't do background checks.

I'm aware of one such company who fired a guy, and then rehired him when he changed his name, and no one noticed !

I bumped into him and he told me all this.

5 minutes later, security was escorting him out of the building. :-)