Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also donate to FLOSS on a semi-regular basis.
FLOSS?
[deleted]
Ask HN: What VPN service are you currently using?
291–300 of 344 posts
Re: Ask HN: What VPN service are you currently using?
#292PIA (Private Internet Access) and am a happy customer for 3rd year running. Why do I choose them? Besides the ease of use over multiple platforms, they are the only VPN (I am aware of) that has held up in court that they do not store any logs when asked to handover personal information. Sources: [1] https://torrentfreak.com/private-internet-access-no-logging-... [2] https://www.scribd.com/doc/303226103/Fake-bomb-thre…
I'm a happy PIA customer but their app certainly lacks polish and has crappy icons - if you care about that stuff :)
Yeah it looks like an android figure so PIA would use some new designs for sure to stand out in the market a bit. Their website also looks bit too clip-art fakey. Otherwise good service and been using it also
Re: Ask HN: What VPN service are you currently using?
#293I've been using NordVPN for a few years now and I like it. They recently added some optional adblocking via vpn which is a nice option when I am off my own network. I've considered PIA, but I don't like that they're based in the USA, and Nord has frequent deals where you can get a few years of service for stupid cheap discounts.
+1 Nord is awesome.
I know from experience that it works.
Re: Ask HN: What VPN service are you currently using?
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you will bottleneck at ~300Mbit\s. Any idea where the bottleneck was there? CPU use? Protocol latency? I'd be interested to see some test results around that if you know of any that have been published. A little anecdotal information: some years ago I did a CPU-load test with OpenVPN on a diminutive Atom-based netbook as the client, and it maxed out at around 95mbit/s on a 100mbit/s network (actually a gbit network…
You could start here: https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/Gigabit_Networks_... >It is easily possible to saturate a 100 Mbps network using an OpenVPN tunnel. The throughput of the tunnel will be very close to the throughput of regular network interface. On gigabit networks and faster this is not so easy to achieve. This page explains how to increase the throughput of a VPN tunnel to near-linespeed for a 1 Gbps…
Earlier you claim you will only ever hit ~300Mbit, but then you link to an article where the author hit 885Mbit throughput after tweaking a few settings and ensuring OpenSSL was using AES-NI.
Re: Ask HN: What VPN service are you currently using?
#295Like a few have commented here, I just use openVPN on a DigitalOcean instance. I thought of just paying for a service, but decided that set-it-up-once and paying for an instance is good enough for me. After all, in my view, the purpose of a VPN is not to send traffic to some host which I don't have control of. I can "trust", but trust != control.
Re: Ask HN: What VPN service are you currently using?
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you read the code? It's woefully unparallelisable and is written to support more platforms rather than work better on any single one of them.
> woefully unparallelisable It certainly doesn't use multiple cores for a single connection, though I've never tested (or reviewed the code) to see if it does manage to spread the computational load of multiple connections over more CPU resource. I've not read the above linked article in detail (no time ATM) but there seems to be mention of offloading AES calculations to compatible hardware, so the bottleneck would a…
Does using multiple cores on a single NIC actually speed up a network connection? If you're doing gigabit with 1500 byte packets, you get 12 ms to encrypt and process each packet -- I'd expect any cross-CPU synchronization to easily blow through that.
Re: Ask HN: What VPN service are you currently using?
#297PIA (Private Internet Access) and am a happy customer for 3rd year running. Why do I choose them? Besides the ease of use over multiple platforms, they are the only VPN (I am aware of) that has held up in court that they do not store any logs when asked to handover personal information. Sources: [1] https://torrentfreak.com/private-internet-access-no-logging-... [2] https://www.scribd.com/doc/303226103/Fake-bomb-thre…
I'm a happy PIA customer but their app certainly lacks polish and has crappy icons - if you care about that stuff :)
Try the new client, its a vastly upgraded UI
Re: Ask HN: What VPN service are you currently using?
#298My personal preference is Surfshark. It's a relatively new VPN but over several months it was improved a lot. They released native apps for all major platforms, unblocked Netflix and other streaming services for various countries. Went through an audit by Cure53 to test their browser extension security (got a good review at that). The only setback I can think of is the number of servers, 800+ so that's not a lot comparing to some other providers. Overall IMHO it's a high quality software.
Re: Ask HN: What VPN service are you currently using?
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting that you paint ISPs, which have been constantly and repeatedly caught collaborating with governments, selling your data to advertisers, intruding in your communications, infringing your privacy, etc., it's interesting that you paint them as professional regulated companies, while VPN providers with credentials as "running in someone's basement".
"interesting", used in this context, implies that I am perhaps a shadowy figure in the nefarious employ of "big ISP". Would that it were so simple! My opinion is not that ISPs are correctly regulated, or even well regulated, but that they have more than zero amounts of regulation applied to them. They also tend to be larger and slower to do things like collapse and rename themselves. This leads them, in my mind, to b…
I will echo the point that someone else made elsewhere in the thread. Due to the laws in my country of residence, I know for a fact that my ISP is 100% spying on me. So if there is a nonzero chance that my VPN provider isn't selling me out, I'm already better off. Furthermore, my VPN has no incentive to do that. I already pay them 10$ a month, why would they want to risk it all for pennies more? They aren't in a police state jurisdiction like the UK or Australia, so they don't have by law to turn in stuff to the police at their will.
PS: By "interesting" I did not mean "paid shill", like you seemed to assume.
Re: Ask HN: What VPN service are you currently using?
#300PIA (Private Internet Access) and am a happy customer for 3rd year running. Why do I choose them? Besides the ease of use over multiple platforms, they are the only VPN (I am aware of) that has held up in court that they do not store any logs when asked to handover personal information. Sources: [1] https://torrentfreak.com/private-internet-access-no-logging-... [2] https://www.scribd.com/doc/303226103/Fake-bomb-thre…
PIA's offer and their policy on retention might be good, but they're still a US company and they still tried to smear several other VPN companies (including ProtonVPN). Their clients are also messy memoryleaky electron apps with outdated chromium embedded.
I just about dumped PIA for the same reason. Downloaded their newest update, and it is soooo much better.