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Ask HN: Which VPN do you use and why?

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41–50 of 60 posts

Re: Ask HN: Which VPN do you use and why?

#41

NordVPN, outside of US jurisdiction and (claims to) does no logging. The service used to be really spotty, but they really stepped it up lately.

Another vote for Nord. Started using it about 6 months ago and its great. Hundreds of exit nodes in many countries, no latency/bandwidth issues (other than what is to be expected proxying all your traffic).

Also works well on mobile.

Re: Ask HN: Which VPN do you use and why?

#42

The old recommendation here used to be privateinternetaccess.com I cancelled my subscription months ago. They stopped circumventing georestrictions a while ago even though it used to be marketed as having that feature. Support even fixed it a few times for me. Nowadays I just use one of the vpn scripts on GitHub and a small vps somewhere.

Which is the VPN scripts do you use? Thanks!

This is an excellent one: https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install. You run a single shell command, and OpenVPN is running in under 5 minutes!

Re: Ask HN: Which VPN do you use and why?

#44
To be perfectly honest, if someone needs to vpn for reasons that could cause real backlash, aka political dissent, the best thing to have is a owned box somewhere and tunnel through it. Add one or more layers, and or a use once discard policy... But the sad fact is thats just about the only way to raise the barrier of entry for a state level (notice I didnt say nation state) actor.

Not necessarily condoning illegal activity, just stating things plainly.

I'm pretty sure tor is under attack heavily right now, (see ioerror accusations), and I have used it very sparingly. Of course only NSA level actors can comprimise it with enough upstream fiber/exit node taps...

You must always know your enemy.

Re: Ask HN: Which VPN do you use and why?

#47
post #14

https://www.getcloak.com - works on my Mac and various iOS devices. Well designed, have been with them since the beginning with no issues.

I used Cloak but moved away because: 1) There was no real interest in expanding the list of exit points. 2) It seemed to protect only http/https traffic. 3) The whole operation felt like someone's "passive income" business (although, to be fair, the owner responded fairly quickly and honestly when I queried him about other stuff). To be fair, their OSX client tries hard to be transparent. This approach falls apart in…

Fwiw Cloak just sold: https://blog.getcloak.com/2016/04/28/cloak-joins-stackpath/

I don't know if it was a "passive income" business for them, but if it were, why would that be a reason to not use it?

It has a fantastic UX on both Mac OS X and iOS devices.

Re: Ask HN: Which VPN do you use and why?

#48
post #40
post #38

I've always liked https://mullvad.net/en/ (Swedish company, around since a number of years), especially from a privacy point of view. You never actually enter any personal information when creating an account - no name, no email, no password, no nothing; all you get is a random unique ID. They also claim to keep no logs, point being, "When Swedish law requires us to divulge information about our customers we make sur…

Seconded. Mullvad is my current go-to. I'm still essentially trusting everything they say about no logging (and trusting that it's not a honeypot) and the like but they seem to be the best I've found so far.

Hi, I'm Fredrik Strömberg, one of Mullvad's founders. I'm a frequent lurker on HN. Thank you both!

Like you said you can trust what we say regarding logging, but you are unable to verify it. Since that's true for all VPN services, may I suggest relying on track record and other signals instead?

Like rhblake said we don't ask for personal information. In fact, we were the first VPN service with that setup, and we were first with bitcoin and cash payments as well.

I'm tempted to provide a list of our security track record, but I have somewhere else to be, so my submission history will have to do :)

Re: Ask HN: Which VPN do you use and why?

#49
As I understand VPN providers make users share single IP. Doesn't it give some extra anonymity? For example if you create your own Droplet someone still can listen for your traffic (but not coming from your PC but from the Droplet) and you are quite easily identifiable (because you are only user).

Re: Ask HN: Which VPN do you use and why?

#50
post #47
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Cloak but moved away because: 1) There was no real interest in expanding the list of exit points. 2) It seemed to protect only http/https traffic. 3) The whole operation felt like someone's "passive income" business (although, to be fair, the owner responded fairly quickly and honestly when I queried him about other stuff). To be fair, their OSX client tries hard to be transparent. This approach falls apart in…

Fwiw Cloak just sold: https://blog.getcloak.com/2016/04/28/cloak-joins-stackpath/ I don't know if it was a "passive income" business for them, but if it were, why would that be a reason to not use it? It has a fantastic UX on both Mac OS X and iOS devices.

> why would that be a reason to not use it?

Mostly because you can't expect many new features or the product evolving particularly fast. Which is exactly the case for Cloak -- the feature-set was basically frozen for years. It's not a crime: if a product works fine, why mess with it? But I wanted new stuff and it didn't feel like I'd ever get it.

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