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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

What's the intended audience for this? As a tech-savvy person, reading his commentary on TunnelBear completely discredited his site in my eyes. He talks about things that are completely irrelevant and are incredibly silly to even remotely care about from a VPN provider.

Despite his listed criteria at the top, the star ratings and rank order seem to be based on how the provider made him feel, and has nothing to do with actually how secure and privacy-protecting the provider is. (To be fair, though, without inside knowledge, it's hard to evaluate how up-and-up they are.) Based on his own metrics, PIA should be listed as #1, not #8; it's the only one that hits all nine of his "Important" list.

I'm completely baffled as to why this list was constructed as it is.

On a side note:

"First, I'm upset at Private Internet Access because I had to modify this site's CSS just for their needlessly long name."

Are you kidding me? Really?

View on HN

TunnelBear - 5 stars, because "it's just so much fun to use."

I hate being a cynical ass (I really do) but this guy has no business at all running this website.

I'll not preach the long form of my usual VPN rant (briefly: they introduce another man-in-the-middle - who is probably anonymous to you, one who is very likely not subject to and utterly unaware of data protection laws, which makes you less safe rather than more).

People will read this site, think he knows what he's talking about, and get themselves into a lot of bother because of the bad advice this dude is giving out. He really needs to read up on what he's advocating here, as he clearly has no knowledge of the critical security factors behind these services.

You might think to yourself:

"Easy on, maybe he's writing for folks that don't care about security and just want US Netflix unblocked in their country."

And you would be right if not for the bottom of the page saying this:

"If you've found this site useful, please share it with a friend who you think would benefit from safer, private browsing."

So yeah, actively encouraging the spread of this terrible security advice is probably worth calling out.

Also:

Unreviewed VPNs

The following VPNs were not reviewed due to their website experience being poorly designed. This can mean heavy use of stock photos, utter disregard for detail, difficult navigation, excessive and hard to follow text, non-defaulting to HTTPS, and overall poor usability.

At least he understands what's important in a VPN. Kudos for excluding services that use stock photos in their website design.

of course there is no causal relation between website quality and VPN quality. but there is definitely a statistical relationship. setting up a secure and fast VPN is very complex and it's hard to see why somebody would then neglect the entry point to that service. actually I'd assume that this negligence would be likely when the VPN is actually only supposed to serve as a malicious MIM. hence I accept this as a valid heuristic.

You may be right but I think his own website is poorly designed too: he says that "Private Internet Access" is too long because forced him to modify his CSS, and as a "forum" (link at the bottom of the page) he uses GitHub's issue tracker.

There are so many bad websites for good projects. Case in point: OpenBSD and OpenSSH websites looks like ugly colored plain HTML from the 90s but they are still killer projects.

> The one thing I didn't like was that P2P/torrenting is blocked. They claim that to enable torrenting, they would have had to enable logging.

Wait, if Tunnelbear are throttling P2P connections, where is the red flag?

Regarding NordVPN: I’ve used them a few years ago and their service was terrible. Disconnects upon disconnects, servers not working for days — I gave up eventually.

Never tested any other VPN he reviewed, however, I’ve written a guide[1] how to pick a VPN provider without throwing numbers and reviews around me, if anyone wants to give it a read.

[1] https://lifesimply.rocks/vpn-for-digital-nomads/

PIA has a surprisingly broad reach, financially and in some cases structurally supporting Freenode, Snoonet, Fight For the Future, EFF, Software Freedom Conservancy and many more.

Its actually unnerving how many of the same projects and groups they support, in some cases being the main benefactor.

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/companies-we-spo...

What is unnerving about it exactly? It seems to me that's exactly the type of thing you'd want from a company who focuses on privacy. It gives the appearance that they actually, truly care about privacy and aren't just in it for the money (and I have no idea if that's actually true or not).

Unnerving is definitely the wrong word. If you want to be negative about it, this is just really good advertising to a tech savvy audience. I honestly just switched my VPN subscription over to PIA after reading this list...

AirVPN similarly supports many projects including tor, ooni, opennic etc., but this "tech-savvy" guy conveniently chooses not to review it and many others including tor guard, due to issues in site navigation.

I agree so much. I almost stopped reading when I realised his first complaint about PIA was their name was too long for his off-the-shelf CSS.

It's a struggle to keep the criticism of this site constructive.

The intended audience is whoever will click the affiliate links.

Garbage like this is why I wish there was no affiliate business on the internet. You can never assume good faith if someone tries to earn money from you.

But none of the links are affiliate links? I mean, I agree that this is far from the best, most comprehensive VPN review site, but you can't just make things up like this.

Build links first, monetize later.

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