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Ask HN: Best paid VPN?

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31–40 of 64 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best paid VPN?

#31

We've been committed to privacy in the form of a VPN service for quite sometime. The founders of PIA (including myself) were actively involved in the beginnings of Bitcoin and many related services surrounding it, and have since devoted all of our time to the proliferation of privacy. We have the most servers of all paid VPN service providers and are committed to privacy. We also support many non-profit organizations…

I've been using PIA for a year now and it's been fast and easy to use. It works without a third party client on MacOS X and iOS which is awesome.

Re: Ask HN: Best paid VPN?

#32

been using https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ for a while. pretty sweet.

I operate on a basis that the effort required of me is somewhat proportional to the resources of a potential attacker, so I don't worry enormously about whether I'm keeping my traffic secure from the US government - given an adequate budget and a focus, they can conceivably monitor all inbound and outbound traffic from any commercial VPN provider's connection points. I advise non-technical people much the same way - it's easy to keep Susie Snoopy and the Casually Curious out, harder but not much so for someone targeting you for espionage or investigation (corporate or personal) and I just assume and advise that any kind of government investigation is going to get your info even if it's just by brute-forcing passwords.

On that basis of protecting against the casually snoopy and non-targeted monitoring, I use PIA - I can connect 3 devices to it at once (phone, tablet, laptop), I can use multiple exit points though I mostly haven't needed to, it's simple to use, inexpensive, and the technology they support seems to be at least up to standard. It's also been useful in a couple of cases where I wanted to test connections to a network from outside that network - tunneling my traffic out and letting it come back in is handy, and the international endpoints let you test functionality that restricts connections based on country of origin.

If you're using a small hosting provider you may also be able to do tunneling through them, but ask first - when I was using a Linux laptop and my phone was rooted, I was using SSH tunneling through my hosting company instead because my traffic levels were insignificant compared to my monthly traffic allocation. I could certainly do the same things again, but quite frankly I'd rather just pay the $40/year or so for a drop-in solution that I don't have to spend time dinking around with.

Re: Ask HN: Best paid VPN?

#33

We've been committed to privacy in the form of a VPN service for quite sometime. The founders of PIA (including myself) were actively involved in the beginnings of Bitcoin and many related services surrounding it, and have since devoted all of our time to the proliferation of privacy. We have the most servers of all paid VPN service providers and are committed to privacy. We also support many non-profit organizations…

I used to be a PIA customer and I liked the idea that they do not log anything. However, the lack of a good third-party audits that support their claims, is something that I found weird. Is there a way you can prove that you do not log anything beyond just blog posts?

Re: Ask HN: Best paid VPN?

#37
The only reason not to roll your own VPN on some private server, is the lack of deniability. The dedicated IP of the server is tied directly to your name/credit card. A public VPN, while also tied to your banking info, usually acts as a NAT. Multiple clients exit the VPN given the same source IP address. If no logs are kept (as promised on most services), no one can (accurately) tie an IP address to your name. I personally use the BTGuard VPN for this reason.

Re: Ask HN: Best paid VPN?

#38
post #33

We've been committed to privacy in the form of a VPN service for quite sometime. The founders of PIA (including myself) were actively involved in the beginnings of Bitcoin and many related services surrounding it, and have since devoted all of our time to the proliferation of privacy. We have the most servers of all paid VPN service providers and are committed to privacy. We also support many non-profit organizations…

I used to be a PIA customer and I liked the idea that they do not log anything. However, the lack of a good third-party audits that support their claims, is something that I found weird. Is there a way you can prove that you do not log anything beyond just blog posts?

Great question - this is indeed an issue as it's difficult to prove to others that you are/aren't doing something which they cannot verify without gaining full access to all of your servers in their entirety.

However, our trust comes from the many years that we have operated this business in this fashion and the good faith of our users.

With that said, we have been in discussions with some well known privacy organizations regarding the setup of an auditing body that could verify these sort of things.

Re: Ask HN: Best paid VPN?

#40
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why have I been "flagged?"

I think it was an attempt at humour, as in the fascist party ruling the country has now tagged you as a dissenter and will arrest you. I suggest you get some hosting somewhere (location will depend on where you are, and where you're communicating too, and who you're worried about). Then install OpenVPN (requires custom clients) or configure IPSec (will work out of box on all OSes including Android/iOS).

This is what I've done. Grab a $5/m VPS from Digital Ocean, which comes with 1TB of traffic, and install OpenVPN on it. Although if you're concerned about using a US company to hose the VPS you could pick any other company and have the same results.

edit: typo

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