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Comment by teamhappy | Hacker News Reader

Free product, free support, no logs. They're either lying or trying to turn this into a freemium product at some point in the future. Everything else just seems unlikely.

Furthermore, their domain is protected by WhoisGuard (Panama). If they (the people involved, not the servers) were sitting in Sweden this would be unnecessary (compare IPredator). The IP address behind the website points to the same Swedish datacenter(s) that the services surrounding The Pirate Bay use as well (Portlane). IPredator itself seems to have moved to Cyprus though.

Uppercase and underlined "anonymous" next to plain text passwords via email is just unprofessional.

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I can't tell you how happy I am to see this as the top comment.

Free is a con.

If you want a cheap VPN that you control (and that's faster than Tor), set up an endpoint on something that takes Bitcoin payment and pay with Bitcoins obtained via an anonymous route. This list might be helpful.

https://www.exoticvps.com

Depending on your needs, you can just roll your own with Amazon EC2. I use it for an SSH tunnel, mostly to use while at work. Not that I'm doing any weird browsing, I just don't like the thought of my employer keeping a log of what I am doing on my free time (https://xkcd.com/303/).

I wrote a script to spin up a new instance when I need it, and to terminate it when I don't. It should cost less than $10/mo, and I only pay for what I use.

Can you share the script on a pastebin or something? Sounds like an excellent solution.

Here it is in all its Bash glory. It works locally on Linux Mint / Ubuntu. I hacked this together just yesterday so I'd be happy to see any improvements.

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/223853355d67123fdda8

This assumes that you are somewhat familiar with EC2 and have already set up a keypair and a security group that allows incoming port 22. Just read the instructions at the top and change the settings to fit your needs.

Set your browser to use SOCKS host 127.0.0.1, port 5222 (or whatever you change it to). This allows you to have a browser using the tunnel and everything else using your native connection.

Let me know if you have any questions.

That's a VPN but not anonymous. Amazon knows who you are.

Exactly, which is why I said "depending on your needs". It is great for use on public wifi, etc, to keep your traffic secure, not to keep you globally anonymous.

There is always a server that knows who you are. Whether it's an OpenVPN server hosted on an EC2 instance or a TOR entry node.

Hosting you own VPN server seems overkill for this kind of use case. There are many trustworthy VPN providers that I'd recommend for use cases unrelated tor BitTorrent. A couple of years ago people recommended SwissVPN over and over to me, though I've never used it. I was a happy IPredator customer for quite some time.

If you want to host your own VPN server (let's face it, servers are useful anyway), I'd recommend cloud providers other than Amazon. Iceland, Sweden and Germany are very friendly countries.

> There is always a server that knows who you are. Whether it's a OpenVPN server hosted on an EC2 instance or a TOR entry node.

There's a fundamental difference here. With EC2, you get a server that knows who you are and what you're saying (at least they know who you're talking with, if you use HTTPS). The TOR entry node only knows who you are, but knows nothing about who you're communicating with or what you're saying.

    There is always a server that knows who you are. 
    Whether it's an OpenVPN server hosted on an EC2 
    instance or a TOR entry node.

Correction: the TOR entry node only knows the data came from you, but there's no way for it to know whether the data originated from you or not. For all it knows, you could be a relay and the data came from someone else.

My bad, this is actually an important distinction.

Right, but the discussion is about anonymous VPN use.

There's always a server that knows something - but using EC2 means it is extremely easy to tie to your identity through your credit card, shipping and billing addresses, etc.

And Amazon is in bed with everyone VPN users might want to stay anonymous from - so EC2 is an exceptionally poor choice if you care about anonymity.

> [..] and that's faster than Tor

Okay but please don't mention 'Tor' side by side with VPNs they are essentially different services/solutions, for different needs. Even on HN I see that many people are so confused about Tor that consider the traffic encrypted by default (when it's not not) or they use tor to perform the usual daily web operations (Facebook, twitter, email, etc.) which totally beat the purpose of Tor but would be excellent use case for a (paid or self-hosted) VPN.

I like BTguard. I get about 2mbps reliably. No issues and I have been on it for at least 6 months.

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