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Comment by rbritton | Hacker News Reader

I don't use Algo, but I can vouch for using your own as long as the tradeoffs are acceptable.

Pros:

  - You can choose a VPS provider close to your network for better speed.
  - Less likely to be blacklisted.
  - No connection limits

Cons:

  - Not as anonymous to governments or IP-based tracking.

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No VPN can reliably anonymize you against government agents so I think the con is a non-issue. VPNs are only really useful when the local network is hostile and/or you want some degree of privacy from the sites you visit.

Anyone with sigint capability is going to figure out who you are with a VPN. (i.e. Government agents)

This isn't about pretending to be James Bond, and "hostile" networks with "government agents" and all their "sigint" coming for your secrets.

In the real world, VPN are mostly used to download copyrighted material. They have a pretty much perfect track record in that regard. Running a cloud VPS, on the other hand, is no more secure than your ISP: they have records, and will share them when ordered to do so.

This is a trade I'm willing to accept. I trust a VPS provider more with those records than I trust either Verizon or Comcast, both of which are motivated by advertising.

Just as far as everybody knows, that doesn't mean that it's necessarily true.

There can be a distinct difference between what is believed to be true and what's actually true.

There might very well be entities that has the information, but it's sitting on it for later use.

This isn't remotely true. Pretty much every journalist uses a commercial VPN.

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