It is 1.85 dollars a month if one pays for 3 years. I am looking into ways of saving money so I was thinking into switching. However, I am a bit worried since 3 years ago I did the same with Nord VPN and it is sooo buggy. It rarely ever works for me. I had to switch to ProtonVPN after paying for 3 years for Nord 💀.

  • NothingButBits
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    11 months ago

    The best VPN service is to create your own. Rent a small cloud server on a far away country, and install Open VPN. This is the best form of secrecy online, that I can think of. Of course, it’s still possible to identify you. But it seems much harder to do so.

    Either your VPN server would need to have it’s connections monitored, or access to logs from the problematic websites would be required. It’s also necessary for the company which is hosting your server to disclose that your VPN server’s IP is associated with you. And even then, if you encrypt everything in it, there is still room for plausible deniability. But all of this, is a much bigger hassle to the authorities than to just use a traditional VPN service.

    With a normal VPN, especially if they have servers in NATO countries, they will provide all logs requested to them and you’re toast. Basically, you’re paying for a false sense of security.

    • Clever_Clover [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      Yes exactly this, though, I prefer wiregaurd over openvpn, instant connection times and tunnels don’t have to stay open and reconnect so you can always have it on even when moving between networks, there are certain cloud providers that can be bought from almost entirely anonymously too

  • rezifon@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    What benefit do you believe a VPN provides for you? Are you using it to fake your location for content access or do you believe that the vpn is improving your privacy somehow?

      • darkcalling
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        11 months ago

        What’s funny to me is your username is the name of a (maybe defunct, not sure) VPN service. It was known to be shitty and shady.

        Go with a company at least not located in the US. Avoid PIA, they were bought by a shady company. The ones the piracy community tends to trust would be: ProtonVPN, Mullvad, IVPN, AirVPN. Be warned Mullvad recently dropped port forwarding which really hurts torrenting connectivity and speeds. I would try for a provider that continues to allow port forwarding if you’re doing any torrent stuff.

        Privacy. Books can and are written on the subject. I’ll just say try and avoid doing things that link back to you while on the VPN. Don’t log into your bank account or email accounts (except those you have registered and only use over VPN) while on a VPN if you can help it. If you sign up for accounts on torrent sites (public or private trackers), use an email not associated with your real identity.

    • Pili
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      11 months ago

      If you’re in the EU it allows you to see content that have been blocked since article 17 was voted. Also you can also buy some things for cheaper by switching country.

  • DeHuq2
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    11 months ago

    Why not use free VPN? Theres plenty of obscure ones out there.

    • sovietknuckles [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      No VPN service is free. If you’re not paying them, they’re profiting off of you having their VPN service in some other way (like Onavo, which sold your VPN traffic).

      I don’t trust a VPN provider that I have not given a reason to not sell my data.

      • DeHuq2
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        11 months ago

        Well they usually have a small selection of slower free servers and a lot of faster ones locked behind a premium wall. Does this not substitute as profit for them?

        • sovietknuckles [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          11 months ago

          Depends on the provider, but probably they would be analyzing the traffic of the free users the very most to profit off of them. Maybe they’re trying to convert them to paying users, maybe they’re selling the data, and it could be tricky to figure out which.

          The “free” servers aren’t free, they have some specific reason why it’s profitable for them to run servers where users aren’t paying with money. They’re capitalists.

          • DeHuq2
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            11 months ago

            And what would prevent paid VPNs from selling data to have even bigger profits? Its all a gamble, be it free VPN or not.

            In the end of the day I just want to pay less

            • sovietknuckles [they/them]@hexbear.net
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              11 months ago

              It’s a gamble if you haven’t done research into which VPN providers are trustworthy. r/VPN has a decent comparison table (maybe there’s a good community on the fediverse? I haven’t checked). You can find discounts for VPN providers from that table that seem trustworthy to you at r/vpncoupons (not aware of a fediverse replacement for that either).

              The privacy-friendly VPN providers have one thing in common: they’re all paid, afaik.

              • DeHuq2
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                11 months ago

                Thanks for the link 👍

                But I am a little concerned that the most popular VPNs rank the highest