I’ve used proton for a year or two now and it is fine. Great for use on my phone when I want to use public/airport wifi and it sort of kind of works with gluetun (the rotating port is annoying but it still is a forwarded port).
But I’ve increasingly been annoyed with Proton as a company and am looking to migrate my email/domain to fastmail in the very near future. I COULD continue to just pay for the vpn (60 USD a year is pretty reasonable) but also feel like this is a good opportunity to “shop around”
Checked the wiki and other FAQs (which all basically crib from said wiki) and they all basically boil down to proton or mullivad… except that mullivad apparently stopped allowing port forwarding which is a bit of an issue for any torrents and the like.
So are there any other good options?
Thanks
Not a VPN, but you may also want to look into I2P.
https://proprivacy.com/privacy-service/guides/i2p-guide
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FNp0TRDG0BQ
Basically, a p2p protocol for the entire internet.
Its considerably more complicated to set up than most modern VPNs, where nowaday’s its usually as simple as install an app with a GUI, verify some settings and you’re good to go, and i2p is also quite slow…
… but its totally free, and you can torrent over it, and as far as I know, if you’ve set it up properly, it is basically undetectable by ISPs, due to how it uses ‘garlic’ routing: basically, a whole bunch of users net requests are encrypted, anonymized, and then smashed into a big packet… so an ISP would have to untangle all of that for every packet, and afaik, none of them have figured out how.
I2P would obviously be horrible for watching streaming content though, snail speed.
I love Mullvad, but if you need P2P its not the best option. If you just need a VPN, though, its amazing. Today I just switched to AirVPN and am running it on Arch through Eddie. Have my qbittorrent set up to only allow connections through Eddie and just forwarded my first port. I’m very happy with it.
I think the only downside is that I could get Mullvad for 5eur a month on a month by month basis. AirVPN is 7eur or 15eur for three months, so I have to lock into the three months to get the same price.
Other providers who know what they’re doing include cryptostorm.is, PIA, and ipredator.se
Or make your own with a VPS with openvpn or witeguard
Worth noting that Italy (location of airvpn) hates vpns and is constantly fucking around with them, to the point air doesn’t even actually operate in Italy to preserve users privacy. Right now, theres no immediate risk, but it’ is worth keeping an eye on the political situation in Italy regarding VPN laws
I did read this somewhere before. I just have to take my chances at the moment. My other option was Windscribe, but unless you’re paying for a year+ their prices are astronomical.
Yeah I use airvpn myself, its just worth throwing that info out for full transparency/disclosure
Just throwing in another voice for PIA. Their corporate owners may be questionable, but I’ve been with them since before they sold out and have never heard a peep from my ISP for seeding terabytes of torrents. They don’t keep logs, and they are audited to prove it regularly.
EDIT: They also have port forwarding, but not for every exit server.
PIA is such a weird one. They’re massive and know what they’re doing but ownership and jurisdiction have always been questionable. I have long suspected they cooperate with GHCQ but only on legitimate national security cases not piracy.
Great for use on my phone when I want to use public/airport wifi
If you just want the tunnel encryption you can try hosting a VPN on your own home network. It’s what I do since I don’t need to spoof my location.
You are asking in the piracy community so I’m assuming you’re also using it to torrent (which a home VPN won’t help with) but you didn’t specifiy so I’m not sure
What’s wrong with NordVPN?
Mostly misleading ads
I’ll add another recommendation for Windscribe. I’ve had a lifetime subscription since 2017 and have never had issues. I use it for normal internet usage pretty much daily and the occasional torrenting.
I’ve used AirVPN for this exact setup and it works great. The port forwarding is static and doesn’t change once setup. I switched to proton because it was convenient, I was already paying for ProtonMail et all, so I dropped the extra VPN subscription when it renewed.
I’m with Azire, they have port forwarding and 10 gig servers. Note they were bought recently by malwarebytes, so it is possible things will change in the future. For the time being, things have been great. I moved from OVPN after myself and others started experiencing persistant failures.
I’ve been meaning to try out CryptoStorm. If anyone has experience with them please share.
I thought about publishing a Terraform module one time that spins up a cheap VPS, installs OpenVPN and then gives you a config with a certificate. You could run it for just a few hours at a time, and use destroy when you’re done. But then I got really bored because I have ADHD.
I really like express VPN, and the app is open source.
What’s going on with Proton the company?
Edit: ah fuck, thanks for the replies. Sigh.
Just FYI, the majority of Proton AG (which includes all Proton services) is owned by a non-profit body called the “Proton Foundation”. This are headed by a board of 5 members, including Andy (CEO) and Tim Berners-Lee (the literal father of the internet as we know it).
Proton is fine.
routing traffic through Israel is not fine.
Please elaborate
Omfg why even discussing andy pathetic bootlicking when this is a fucking cia honeypot… Their business plan was way too similar to google.
Proton recently closed their masterdon account because of the mutual hostility
*Mastodon
if anything they’ve reopened their account with Master Don
Andy yen praising trump is one thing and I kind of don’t care about that so much. What I do care about is how proton practices predatory sales to cash in on FOMO. Or if you subscribe for one month it’s an auto renewing subscription. Or that the best rates are if you sign up for a year. It’s weird for a not-for-profit structure to do billing like this
Mullvad doesn’t play games. A flat price and you get what you pay for.
Andy Yen may have praised one situation, but doesn’t seem to support Trump overall. https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
Their CEO praised Trump/the Republican Party. He got widely criticised for it. Proton released a damage control statement but later deleted it after it made things worse.
People are now moving away from Proton as a result.
The CEO doesn’t own Proton, for what it’s worth. He may have founded it, but he does not have complete and total control over anything that Proton offers, as some here may believe.
For fucks sake. I just started to move to proton last year…
https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e worth a read regarding that situation.
Wow! Add me to that group. I need to cancel my annual family plan.
I unfortunately bought a subscription before dickhead made his statement. Looks like I’m with them for a year >.<
I haven’t done it yet, but if you cancel your and contact them, I’ve heard you can get a refund for the months you haven’t used. Even if you cancel but don’t contact, you still can use the service until the end of your subscription.
My biggest thing stopping me rn is moving my emails away from proton mail and simpleogin (switched to mailbox.org and anonaddy free) and trying to convince myself I don’t need port forwarding 😭
The CEO said that Trump chose a great pick and sided with Republicans and there was a firestorm over it, he doubled down on his position through the official Proton channel.
https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e worth a read regarding that situation.
Ffs I literally just got proton. Fuuuuuck that
Like basically all tech companies, the leadership are libertarian tech bros. It sucks, but whatever. The problem is also that the CEO (?) has been making public statements to try and cozy up to the trump administration over the past few months
Some of that still falls under the LTB effect (These policies benefit the company so fuck everyone else, etc) and it DOES make sense for a company to try and earn themselves an exception for the upcoming hellscape in a market that will REALLY want VPNs. But it still leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
Not in an “I MUST LEAVE PROTON NOW” state since I like the products because they tend to be pretty honest about what they will and won’t do when the goons come a knocking and that mostly boils down to “cooperate. So do X Y and Z to protect yourself by preventing us from having the information they want”). But that, plus protonmail being kind of a shitshow if you want to keep offline copies of your emails, is motivation to shop around.
I wouldn’t exactly call Tim Berners-Lee a “libertarian tech bro”.
“libertarian”
AirVPN, IVPN, Mullvad, Windscribe
AirVPN
I have been a happy customer with them. Not a fan of their GUI Client, but you’re not required to use it. Very easy to share access with friends too whenever they need it.
The requirement for port forwarding narrows that down to AirVPN and Windscribe, which is an unfortunately small set of choices.
What exactly does port forwarding do and why is it better for torrenting like I’ve heard? I’ve been using Mullvad for a couple of years now but if I could get faster torrent download speeds that would be great
One port must be open for a torrent connection to work.
Down: open, Seed: Open = instant connection Down:closed, seed: open = connection takes a second to work Down open: seed closed = down has to wait for seed to renounce to trackers. A few minutes to an hour. Down closed: seed closed = no connection
Just adding onto the good answer you already got, but the thing that made this click to me was understanding that if you’re not port forwarding, you’re limited in the connections you can make to other peers. Specifically, you can only connect to peers who are fully available. Whereas if you’re port forwarding, then you can connect both to people who are limited, and to people who are fully available.
I imagine you would get faster download speeds if you were port forwarding, but my impression is that this mainly is a factor for seeding, which matters more if you’re on a private tracker that requires a certain download/upload ratio; it’s way harder to keep that ratio above 1.0 if you’re limited in the peers you can connect to.
Port forwarding lets you connect with other hosts peer-to-peer which a VPN would otherwise block if both sides are behind one. For torrents you’d get more peers (which doesn’t matter if you’re just downloading the latest and most popular stuff) and be able to seed more effectively.
And the way that many (most? (all?)) private trackers implement their monitoring kind of requires an open port.
Not all torrent sites require an open port. E.g. MAM works without an open port. It majorly impacts your ability to seed) but that isn’t a problem because of how much bonus points you get. TL does not either.
Thanks!
Mullvad, IVPN and
Nym(not tested with audits yet, do not trust as much as the other two).For clearnet browsing. PIA, AirVPN and Windscribe for torrenting. Windscribe and PIA are probably good for either but this is my classification, take it as you will
I agree on this with the exception of PIA.
- Marketing is BS like most VPN
- Company is based in the USA
- They do analytics
- You cannot register “anonymously”
It’s not the worst VPN you could choose but there is better options.
Wait don’t they take crypto? Just fake your details
They also take your IP.
Like every VPN company that operate their own entry nodes…
Over TOR?
Using VPN over TOR greatly reduces performance. Also, for most cases TOR is enough,. Why would you slap a VPN on top of it?
Ah I thought you meant during signup. I thought they were audited and provided proof that they don’t log anything? Is that fake?
They’ve been audited twice:
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/privacy-audit/
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/security-audit-2024/ (PDF)
deleted by creator
PIA user here. It gets the job done
I would not put Nym in the same category as Mullvad and IVPN. It is a new and immature product. I have not heard that they have passed any sort of audit, their claims about non-log policy have not been tested yet.
Their infrastructure is decentralized only in name. In fact, they have the same problem as session, the cost of maintaining a server discourages decentralization so much that no one does that. As a result it nullifies any advantages their mixnet might offer, as chances are all your hops are between the servers of the same owner.
Yes, Nym is new. Their mixnet has a lot of similarities with TOR.
What do you mean by “cost of maintaining a server”? I don’t think resource requirements are any different from TOR relays or exits.
It is possible in theory but I assumed they weren’t lying when they said over 800 nodes exist in their network.
Yeah maybe I should’ve put Nym as “of interest” rather than giving off the impression that it’s at the same level of reputation as Mullvad and IVPN
They do require to invest a certain amount of crypto to connect your node to blockchain. This in theory is done to prevent Sybil attacks.
Does TOR suffer from Sybil attacks? I admit I don’t know what that is, I’ll have to read about it
TOR by design is vulnerable to Sybil attacks. In fact, there have been attempts to exploit this vulnerability “in the field”. It is not clear how successful they were. There are some measures taken to prevent such attacks, but none of them guarantee safety. I2p and other p2p networks also suffer from the same problem.
In fact there is only one known way to mitigate Sybil (and alike) attacks. It is to expand the cost of operating in the network so much, that it would not be financially viable to perform it. There are two major way to achieve that: proof-of-work and proof-of-stake.
PoW is what majority of cryptocurrencies do. To operate in the network you need to perform significant calculations. The more calculations you perform the “stronger” your position is. For that you have to invest huge amount of money in hardware and energy to “outperform” other actors. That is what mining basically is.
PoS requires you instead to invest a crypto (or whatever, does not actually matter). The more crypto you invest “the bigger your ‘bank’ account is”, the “stronger” your position is as well. This is what nym and lokinet (technology behind session messenger) do.
Thank you for the explanation. It would suck to put down money just to run a nym relay. I was interested in lokinet too but I wouldn’t want to spend more than a small VPS, really
Still using Private Internet Access (PIA).
Honestly, dunno why they’ve fallen out of fashion due to the FUD about being owned by an unsavoury parent company, but the most important matter to me is if they keep logs, which they don’t. One of the few VPN companies tested on this, in court, and in a recent audit. Plus still extremely cheap (if you go for 3yr+3mo).
Port forwarding works with with this docker NAS stack. Doesn’t use gluetun, but there’s a specialised docker-wireguard-pia container as part of the stack, with a script that handles port changes. Been flawless.
Can you link to their court hearing, specifically where they refused to provide logs?
Also, do they accept crypto?
Yes to crypto, via Bitpay.
I’m curious now, though - what’s stopping a US court from ordering all US-based VPN services to retain logs?
They would shut their servers down in US. The reputable ones that is.
Sure, but I’m curious why it hasn’t already happened. Wouldn’t it be spun as “destruction of evidence” or whatever? Or could it be argued that since their “no logs” policy was established prior to any particular suspect utilizing their services, that it would not be destruction of evidence as there would’ve been no evidence to begin with?
I’m genuinely curious, this shit fascinates me.
If they end up forcing logs on US based companies then people will simply switch to European ones. Bringing something like this takes a lot of effort for barely any use.
That’s a fair point, and I suppose the majority of people who use VPN services regularly (outside of a corporate environment) would be the ones to immediately jump ship if such legislation was even mentioned.
I’m using gluetun with PIA and it works like a charm. Gluetun even has a template on their GitHub.
If you mainly do torrenting, AirVPN is a good option. I have recently moved away from ProtonVPN; it’s too expensive.
Plus it’s run by Swiss Nazis.
Swiss nazis?
