Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjdowney | Hacker News Reader

Since there is so much criticism here of NordVPN (in general, not for open-sourcing), what are the VPNs that people like?

View on HN

I am not related to them, I'm just a user of it. But Mullvad.net is the only decent VPN. (They're the one Mozilla chose to provide their VPN infrastructure)

They've been audited https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/6/22/vpn-server-audit-found...

I have no financial incentive to vouch for them. But what do you care, I'm just a random guy on the internet.

Never forget though, Auditing is only proof that it was secure at the moment of the audit. That applies to all VPNs and services.

Rather, auditing is only proof that the parts the auditors looked at were secure against what the the auditors knew to look for, at the moment of the audit.

Auditing might not even cover the entire codebase.

For example, this is the writeup of the DeFi Euler hack yesterday by one of the sites listed auditors, who didn't actually audit the code that caused the bug...

https://medium.com/@omniscia.io/euler-finance-incident-post-...

That's true. Good point.

How about ProtonVPN?

Same company (no matter how hard they try to hide it), so unless it has better pricing or features, if you don't trust Nord, there's no reason you should trust Proton.

Though I do trust both, as Tesonet is based from here (Lithuania) and from my experiences with people who worked there, they have full trust in them and continue to use their services years after leaving the company.

> Same company (no matter how hard they try to hide it)

Do you mean that NordVPN and ProtonVPN are the same 'spiritually' in that they're both companies selling a VPN for profit? Or is there genuinely some business connection between them that I've missed?

In the sense that there's a huge overlap of people who created Nord that are now working on Proton. Might be under the same employer indirectly (Tesonet or whatever they're called now). Whether officially they're under a different company/jurisdiction, that's a different thing.

From Tesonet[1]:

>We also provided ProtonVPN(opens in new tab) with operational and HR support when they decided to open an office in Vilnius.

>Contrary to all the myths and rumors, operations by different services have never been related to each other. The only common resources are the centralized HR and legal teams. We have strictly relied on this philosophy from the beginning in order to avoid any possible conflict of interest.

[1] - https://www.techradar.com/news/moving-the-vpn-industry-forwa...

None of them. No really read that again: None. Of. Them. https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29

Especially not after Kape Technology bought up review sites and VPNs and updated reviews to shill the ones they own.

Kape Technologies was formerly known as Crossrider before it was acquired by Teddy Sagi, an Israeli billionaire that has spent time in jail for insider trading. Crossrider itself never had that great a reputation itself, what with their primary product being a development platform through which they were frequently used by third parties to invade ad platforms to serve up malware. They are now the owners of ExpressVPN, PIA, CyberGhost, and Zenmate.

https://restoreprivacy.com/kape-technologies-owns-expressvpn...

And then j2 global owns a bunch of others.

https://www.techradar.com/news/pc-mag-owner-j2-global-buys-s...

I'm 99% sure every VPN on the market is a honeypot or data broker at this point.

Mullvad is mostly liked by everybody. Including me.

Mullvad is a great example of how all VPN companies who promote privacy should behave, if only for the signup process itself. Zero personal information required.

Take a look at Mullvad for a VPN done right. Completely anonymous usernames, randomly generated, accepts cryptocurrency or cards purchased anonymously at a physical store with cash.

One concerning issue is the Swedish jurisdiction. The nordic countries are better at privacy, but Sweden is a 14-eyes nation. But I can't say it's better or worse than NordVPN's... Panama.

As long as people still realise that regardless of whether they pay with cash in an envelope or directions to the end of a rainbow, if they connect with their own IP to mullvad’s servers and there’s some compromise of these promises (court order, etc), it’s trivial to be owned.

Or if you wanna pay by cash, just send it to them in an envelope. No need to buy a card first then using that, when you can pay by the alternative that gives you the most privacy.

If you're up to trying something new, we've built a technology to replace consumer privacy VPNs: https://safing.io/spn/

Technical summary of the SPN (Safing Privacy Network):

- A Privacy Network aimed at use cases "between" VPN and Tor.

- Uses onion encryption over multiple hops just like Tor.

- Routes are chosen to cover most distance within the network to increase privacy.

- Exits are chosen near the destination server. This automatically geo-unblocks in many cases.

- Exclude apps and domains/entities from using SPN.

- Change routing algorithm and focus per app.

- Nodes are hosted by Safing (company behind Portmaster) and the community.

- Speeds are pretty decent (>100MBit/s).

Just so everyone knows: only Safing hosts exit nodes. Only relays (the intermediate hops) can come from the community.

Thanks for providing additional information to readers. However, this is not entirely correct. Let me clarify:

- Community nodes are used to diversify server ownership and strengthen the privacy of connections.

- Community nodes may technically act as entry, middle and/or exit nodes.

- Community nodes will never be used for unencrypted connections, only for encrypted connections. We are thinking about a concept of trusted partners, which will also be allowed to handle unencrypted connections - but this is currently not the case.

- We publish advisories [0], which are automatically applied by all clients. This gives us the ability to quickly react to changing situations. Currently, community nodes _are_ being selected as exit nodes, but not as entry nodes.

I hope this cleared things up. I am happy to go into more detail.

[0] https://github.com/safing/intel-data/blob/master/spn/main-in...

Mozilla/Mullvad seem to be liked well enough. It's what I use, but I am doing it for geolocation issues and occasional scraping, so I am less concerned about logging/security.

I set up my own VPN with https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

Hosted on DigitalOcean and the setup was completely automatic, it deletes its own access after its done.

Note you're still beholden to ToS of your host, but tbh they don't seem to care no matter what I do with it.

I know it from here.

One that is not from my country or the political alliance my country is in.

A tonne of people here recommending Mullvad, which is great - they're great - but they don't offer the main selling point of most VPNs, so I feel this question needs qualification:

What are you looking for a VPN for. As much as the ads misrepresent the security & privacy aspects of NordVPN, &c., the vast majority of people use VPNs to watch region-restricted media. Mullvad does not support this.

So ... who's the best provider for watching region-restricted media?

NordVPN honestly seems like a very competitive option here

Mullvad is excellent. No email required, all sorts of payment options including cash in an envelope. Can even get gift cards now.

Perfect Privacy. VPN chaining, setting so your IP address always changes to be the one closest to the server, no logs (audited), stored in ramdisk, unlimited connections and bandwidth because they don't even know who's connecting.

Cons: it can be slow and have issues with disconnects sometimes.

Perfect privacy was at least in the past run by austrian neonazis: https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2012-09/neona...

I didn't know that, but it almost makes me trust their service more. While I don't share their views, I do think technologically capable extremists are probably who I'd most want behind a service that I use as a layer for anonymity and privacy from everyone including government agencies.

They do have reasons to stay private though, you must give them that.

Mullvad

I use AzireVPN because they were one of the first providers to support the WireGuard protocol.

https://www.azirevpn.com/

+1 for Mullvad, I usually only buy time when I'm traveling to secure my traffic in airports/hotels/etc

ProtonVPN

Freedome VPN by F-Secure

Reply on news.ycombinator.com