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Comment by CapitalistCartr | Hacker News Reader

Anyone here recommend a VPN, for personal information safety and security rather than hiding porn?

Mullvad is the best, but last I saw, they had to disable port forwarding due to bad actors ruining it for everyone else.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36113215

They also work with Tailscale which makes per-device setup easier: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/tailscale-has-partnered-with-mul.... Tailscale was using a bit too much of my iPhone battery last I tried it out, but they're at least aware of it.

After mullvad disabled port forwarding, I switched to AirVPN and it works fine. I trust it slightly less than Mullvad but I'm avoiding copyright trolls, not three letter agencies.

I've been using AirVPN for a few years now, seems fairly trustworthy so far.

Not to sound snarky, because this is a genuine question, but what does that even mean? Unless you’ve been brazenly selling child porn over the VPN and been getting away with it for years, I don’t really know how you would establish a VPN is trustworthy vs you just haven’t been targeted for your minor torrenting, or whatever.

Well, it's been operating for a while now without any major outages, no issues with torrents, exposes way more "techie" features than any other VPN I've used (customizable port forwarding, dynamic dns and customizable subdomain names on those ports, different device profiles, customizable dns filtering lists, all sorts of stat graphs for their various nodes, script generators for openvpn which allow choosing all sorts of protocol related details) works fine for bypassing region locks on the obscure music sites I care about and they've been completely fine with an anonymous Monero payment (well, as anonymous as you can be to what is effectively your ISP).

They have a good record of responding to various restrictive legislation around the world (eg pulling out of Italy after they passed an overly broad 'anti-piracy' law) and also haven't had any open scandals. That's about as good as I can really expect considering that I'm mostly just not interested in my local ISP knowing what I'm up to, and am not doing anything hugely illegal or pirating at a large scale.

For reference, the VPN I used before then offered no real controls besides a limited country selection and a randomly assigned port forward. It was bought up by a company owned by a guy known for running scams, after which I switched out. Now having seen all the customization I was missing out on, I can't really go back to a simpler VPN.

(Tailscalar here) I identified a big chunk of the background drain on iPhone recently, and so drain just for being on in the background is much reduced now. There’s still more to do, and we still end up with accounting for dns if you force dns via us, but things are much improved.

Fantastic news on that battery work. (Also the third party app beta!)

Our iOS users also report random delays turning it on, sometimes half a minute to connect. Sometimes full restarts are needed before connect.

And random ask -- could you enable a toggle for video conferencing to stay outside the tailnet? Teams, Zoom, WebEx, etc... You'd have to take on maintaining the IP lists, so users didn't have to. (This can be done today with features you have, but most users and even IT admins don't realize that.)

ProtonVPN is easy for split tunneling on my Androidish device. Linux requires a little CLI configuration.

I wish they had just disabled TCP port forwarding. Based on the description of bad actors it sounds like that would have been enough, and at least torrent clients would have continued to work.

I use VPN for bypassing blocks created either by government of the country I currently live in or established as a sanctions by another governments.

I set up wireguard and unbound on VPS in Amsterdam and share with 10-15 people by posting wireguard config in private telegram channel.

Ironically enough, but I block porn access using StevenBlack hosts converted into Unbound config by awk script, so porhhub dot com will return REFUSE dns response from unbound.

I know, that is not impressive idea of how to utilize computing power of the VPS, but I also used it for running tor snowflake (disabled because of eating too much ram), running tor obfs4_proxy (would also eat much ram, but that can be adjusted, I don't remember clearly why I disabled it at one point) and I used it as a server for Postgres that I tried to use for uni's coursework on databases.

Maybe I am too lazy to setup tools like zapret for bypassing deep packet inspection locally on my laptop or on router. But still there should be a ton of things that can be done on the same vps.

A VPN so you can hide your IP address and whatnot? Mullvad.

How are these two use cases different? Are there vpn services that let you do one and not the other?

Presumably GP's fear is that there are a lot of VPN providers, and they all claim to offer security, etc (or if you google for a "$VPN_provider_name review" there'll be dozen of shill sites saying how secure this particular VPN provider is, click here to get a discount using our referral code), so it all feels like shady business.

For bypassing Sharia-state firewalls like Texas', any VPN provider should be good enough, but GP is asking for recommendations for providers who can be trusted to ensure privacy.

If the need is for passively visiting a few handful of websites a week, I would recommend tor browsers. Takes a bit work to learn when to refresh routes, and how to handle websites that blocks public vpns, but easy to get started with. Pretty good when visiting websites that deal with medical information since tracing data from those are exceptional valuable to data brokers.

If it is for more regular use or if the occasionally slowness/vpn blocking is too much, I would likely pick mullvad but I have not used their services. They do seem to spend some money on pro-privacy activism, so that is at least a point in their favor.

What are you trying to protect yourself from?

I've been using Windscribe for several years and have no problem at all with them.

The best VPN provider is one you control and is hard to ban.

I set up an OpenVPN server on DigitalOcean for a friend visiting China. It took 10 minutes with the template in the DO marketplace.

It even allows downloading a client with the parameters baked in.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/

Why not just AWS EC2? That's probably where most of these commercial VPNs are hosted anyway, just with an additional cost on top.

I rather enjoy using a pVPN (personal VPN) by just setting up wireguard on my server.

They are usually equally suitable for both. Are you asking for a friend?

iCloud private relay

To those skeptical, it’s the only VPN / proxy like service you can use without frequently getting blocked trying to use online banking and stripe merchants. Captchas are less common than with Mullvad too.

It’s not for every use case, but it’s helpful for me.

Can private relay be used by torrent clients? Or is it Safari only?

Tor?

PIA

Note that PIA constantly triggers captchas, even for basic google searches. And not the easy captchas; multi-step "no, you're wrong" ones. Can't speak to the prevalence of this with other services.

Tor Project.

The tor network is really not built for streaming and you slow it down for everyone else when you do.

GP didn't mention streaming.

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