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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

My favorite is IVPN. It's true that I've written stuff for them. But that's in part because I've known the CEO, Nick Pestel, for several years. And to the extent that I trust anyone, I trust him. But also, they're one of the older VPN services, and one of the first to accept Bitcoin. And their apps are well designed.

I also like AirVPN, Mullvad and PIA a lot. I don't know anyone there personally, but they're all strong privacy advocates.

I'm concerned about relationships between Tesonet and NordVPN and ProtonVPN. So I wouldn't use them.

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Thanks for introducing me to IVPN. Seems like a good VPN, uses WireGuard.

Can you elaborate on the problem with the relationship between Tesonet, NordVPN and ProtonVPN. Also does your problem with ProtonVPN extend to protonmail? Should I be considering switching to a new email?

There's an old HN thread about it. Basically, the ProtonMail and PIA CEOs got in a catfight, and traded accusations. I don't recall what PIA was accused of. Maybe connections with China? But I've seen nothing more about that.

The PIA CEO basically claimed that Tesonet operated ProtonVPN for the ProtonMail team. And then additional articles appeared, detailing the connections. And adding NordVPN to the mix.

But many of their HN posts were deleted. And much of the other online coverage disappeared, presumably because of pressure from NordVPN and/or ProtonVPN. But I found caches for three of them.[0,1,2]

Maybe it's all bullshit. But it leaves me suspicious. And I gotta say that ProtonVPN's responses seemed evasive.

0) VPNscam.com: NordVPN, ProtonVPN, ProtonMail, Owned by Tesonet CEO Darius Bereika https://keybase.pub/mirimir/NordVPN%2C%20ProtonVPN%2C%20Prot...

1) best10vpn.com: Proof that NordVPN is Owned by Data Mining Company Tesonet https://keybase.pub/mirimir/Proof%20that%20NordVPN%20is%20Ow...

2) airvpn.com: Why You Can’t Trust NordVPN https://keybase.pub/mirimir/Why%20You%20Can%E2%80%99t%20Trus...

Edit: Also FYI

Lawsuit names NordVPN, Tesonet in proxy data extraction scheme https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17873164

HolaVPN (luminati) is suing NordVPN (Tesonet) for stealing p2p proxy patents https://drive.google.com/open?id=1_AlNxNN-fiIVW64-605c_OJO0C...

Well that blows. I just set up a proton mail account and was going to migrate from gmail.

There might really be nothing to it, as the Proton* people claim. Or at least, just a somewhat iffy roll-out of their VPN, using Tesonet staff.

But on the other hand, I gather that Mozilla has picked ProtonVPN for its integrated VPN testing. And they seem competent and privacy-friendly.

Also, whatever they did with ProtonVPN, there's no reason to believe that there's anything wrong with ProtonMail. That's arguably their core competency. And they arguably brought in Tesonet because VPNs were not part of their core competency.

I'm not sure why Mozilla is still held on such high esteem despite multiple gaffs.

It's largely desperation, perhaps.

But they do seem more privacy-friendly than most.

If you are migrating away from a centralized email provider you should move to a personal domain. That way you won't be trapped by any service in the future. There are numerous companies[0] that you can point your domain to and they will handle everything else. This costs a bit of money but it means that you will be the customer rather than the product.

[0] I use migadu.com but fastmail.com seems to be very popular with the HN crowd.

Good thread to read up on it. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/protonvpn...

I recently switched to IVPN from Nord (a month or so ago), and I'm very glad I did. Great interface, and it never goes down.

NordVPN is always advertising their massive server network, but I was always getting booted off and having connection problems. I rarely have these problems with IVPN.

Just FYI, but "massive server network" often means a bunch of VPS in a few data centers. With devious cross-AS announcements to make servers geolocate as desired. It's easy to discover the truth, by using numerous ping and traceroute probes, and doing triangulation.

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