What's the most trustworthy VPN that HN users recommend? My 3 year subscription to my local one is about to run out! Looking for advice on what is trusted nowadays!
Public VPN services have to be the one of the greatest lemon markets to have ever existed:
You want people's private data? People will pay you to give it to them. Go ahead and sell the service for less than it costs due to the boatloads of data that you get.
People realize this, so you end up getting a disproportionate number of customers that don't worry about you getting their data because they're only using the service to behave abusively... which drives up costs.
So an honest provider has to deal with dishonest competition selling below cost and a customer base that is saturated with problem customers because good customers are savy enough to avoid VPNs.
Of course other VPNs don't provide privacy either. The belief that they do is due to marketing, and misunderstanding what the "Private" part of VPN means: it means that two non-publicly routable IP networks (10/8, 172.16/12, 192.168/16) are virtually joined into one network. VPN companies took advantage of this (and that the connection is usually encrypted) to imply that they offer a privacy product.
The main use of a commercial VPN is to bypass region locks and other legal controls that depend on location. Pick a VPN provider (or VPS host) in a jurisdiction that won't cooperate with your home law enforcement. Assume the VPN provider spies on all your traffic.
Privacy fundamentally is about keeping things private ... from someone.
If that someone is everyone, then nothing is private. Any sufficiently powerful entity can just overpower you, torture you into submission, guarantee a backdoor into a system you thought was cryptographically private, etc.
I for one do pay for a VPN service, because it keeps my home traffic stream private from some people - namely my ISP - with high probability.
It also obfuscates various types of traffic I generate and makes it harder, though I agree not impossible, to collate my traffic into a usable form for spying agencies.
For me that’s easily worth paying ~$100/year for someone else to manage, and if they base their business reputation on not collecting logs, etc., there’s enough incentive to trust that while also staying vigilant to verify what I can and switch providers if they are shown to be lying.
Self-hosting a vpn is utterly not an alternative for my use case, not even for technical reasons as I am an engineer who works on production web services all day. Just from a cost effectiveness / value POV, third party vpn vendors are a good solution for me.
Then don't do that.
Though VPN are not really a strong solution for hiding your identity period. Tor is a more effective tool, but hiding your identity is extremely difficult to do effectively.
> And why does a VPS have any less likelihood of logging your traffic?
They may be too but at least you should expect their business to be viable without doing that, which is better than you can say for VPN services.
You'll be stuck with the shadiest, slowest, most remote VPS in the world if you're unwilling to either give up your personal identity, or lie about it.
The amount of "private data" as a VPN operator isn't a lot. Most sites nowadays are https, so at best you're getting browsing habits on a per-site basis. On the other hand, using a commercial VPN does confer advantages in some cases:
* geo restrictions: commercial vpn have servers in multiple countries, so you can easily switch to one that works. you can achieve the same with cloud servers, but you'll have manually spin them up/down, which isn't convenient
* anonymity: commercial vpns usually have dozens/hundreds of users on one server. You can also switch servers/regions to increase your anonymity set further. This is a much bigger anonymity set than your own private server, which is linked solely to you.
* bandwidth: if you're a heavy traffic user, you'll probably end up paying more. most cloud providers only give you around 0.5TB for a cheap server (within the price of a vpn subscription)
* DMCA/abuse: they handle the DMCA/abuse letters for you. With a self hosted server you'll have to at the very least respond to the ticket they sent otherwise they'll take down your server.
It does address it, when you factor in an appropriate choice of non-US VPS provider.
Most VPS providers generally insist on recording your identity, probably with government ID, to limit abuse that would otherwise fall onto them. Whereas VPN providers have already made the choice to weather mild abuse complaints.
I have looked into bulletproof VPS providers. They're drastic overkill, expensive, and getting in bed with the wrong sorts of people.
PrivateInternetAccess has fought and won in US court, but they're also US-based.
(I use Mullvad.)
Mullvad is also the provider Mozilla is using for their new VPN service (with fewer features).
I don't have much to base it on but they seem trustworthy, and I've seen them recommended here before.
Other than the letter I sent from Morocco, I never included a return address.
https://mullvad.net/en/account/create/
That link automatically creates a new account. No names, no email address (except if you set up a PayPal subscription), not even a password. Your account number is literally all you need. They even have a FAQ that provides a generalized database schema.
https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy/#numbered
You're on a call. You lock the phone. You expect the call to continue right?
This bug is in their new browser. Its in a very early stage. So these bugs are expected
Best is to make your own, checkout https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand for an easy way to set that up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21584958
(you can google to find more-- this was just a quick result)
In their faq they state that they have previously worked on projects such as ThePirateBay... (this is a legit business and service though).
I hope I get to try their VPN soon. Other than that I usually just use a systemwide tor proxy. It's actually quite entertaining how my netflix feed randomly changes based on the current exit node.
- Cash-in-Envelope Payment.
- Chains multiple servers with onion encryption. If there were any logs, they are useless.
- Custom built for privacy, similarities to Tor. Open Souce.
- Multi-Identity: Exit at multiple servers simultaneously.
- No Blockchain! Ie. no distributed and immutable log ;)
- Based in the EU, Austria.
- Public availability within the next months.
Check it out at https://safing.io/spn/
https://blog.getfoxyproxy.org/2017/11/04/secret-service-subp...
I am giving each of my family in various locations a raspberry pi 4b with wireguard setup.
They are aware of/benefit from this cross country VPN thing too.