My Surfshark subscription just ran out.
I found it a little sus when they removed their Russian endpoints after the Ukraine war started, so I don’t want to renew with them. If they’re going to bend the knee when it comes to US policies against Russia, where are they going to stand when the three-letter agencies ask for backdoors?
Open to any and all suggestions!
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I won’t recommend anything because it’s impossible to guarantee that they don’t keep logs, but Privacy Guides (formerly privacytools.io, fairly well-respected AFAIK) recommends IVPN, Mullvad or ProtonVPN. To me the first two seem like the best options (ProtonVPN may be fine, but Proton’s been shady with their mail service)
PrivacyGuides is one of the most harmful groups out there as far as their moderation goes. Its head Jonah stole off $10000 ($17,500 in all) PTIO donations and put it into his private account, they seized PTIO subreddit which is locked to this day, they made a malicious GrapheneOS figurehead Tommy a moderator immediately after he published a faux hitpiece on me (which trended on PG for a month), and they protect toxic GrapheneOS devs/mods fervently to promote Google and Apple (mods/heads all are American/Canadian nationalists).
You can find more here, and upon reading comments in here: https://old.reddit.com/r/u_lo________________ol/comments/1314x2x/why_did_i_do_this/ji5l5uz?context=300
Also their advice regarding ProtonVPN is nonsense. They just regurgitate the common notions of privacy community and are thus a useless entity. You will hear the correct advice from one of us people who are deep into this stuff. The current VPN picks are Mullvad, IVPN and AirVPN, and Windscribe a close second, with OVPN being a distant third (got bought by Pango/HotspotShield recently), and the rest are far below.
Edit: I see someone is downvoting me even here… I wonder if its just an ignoramus here, or is it witch hunting taken to another extreme…
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do you know of something similar to PG without suspicious moderation?
I hate to be a shill, but r/privatelife, what I created years ago out of frustration from r/privacy and the usual mainstream privacy subreddits. You can take a look yourself at whatever I have written being basically the only large scale vigilante acts in privacy community in the past years.
For very crude and deep stuff you could take a look at Shadow Wiki for stuff like HAM Radio (USA related). We have been friends for few years, since we are darknet aficionados.
For VPNs, r/VPN offered me to become a partner, but I found their affiliate linkings not very confidence inducing, so I just prefer r/VPNTorrents. No partnership.
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A Reddit link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same location on Teddit and Libreddit, which are Reddit frontends that protect your privacy.
Mullvad is widely used by cybercriminals which might be a good recommendation (they kinda need relatively good privacy and anonymity)
I use IVPN and have never had issues. I don’t pirate a ton but I pirate enough for it to be worth it.
I’ve never had serious problems with mullvad while 🏴☠️ing, although in Italy, if the draconian anti 🏴☠️ law doesn’t pass, 🏴☠️iracy isn’t really a crime, it is but it’s not persecuted, we 🏴☠️ed movies at school so, for my limited uses, I can suggest mullvad, you can pay in cash too, both at local stores and via mail (to Sweden, so you gotta wait a bit) they accept PayPal too so it’s convenient
I hear about mullvad a lot - checking it out, thanks!
definitely not SurfShark feels like I paid money for a fucking inconvenience half the time. though to their credit EA sent me a cease and desist email for ☠️ the Sims 4, but after turning the vpn on and resuming my torrents I didn’t get one again, so it technically works I guess. I’ve heard they still give data to fiveyes tho.
Mullvad seems to be generally recommended. 🏴☠️’s love it and they tend to be fairly demanding/taxing on VPN resources. I’ve also seen it recommended in other spaces that range from white hat to not so white-hat.
Please keep in mind there is a chance many or all no-logs claiming major VPN providers are either intelligence fronts themselves, or compromised by western intelligence in some way. So please avoid using them as the only means to “secure” your communist party’s counter-intelligence and operational security committee meetings or whatever. Basically don’t do crimes and use them as the only thing keeping you anonymous. I’d encourage not committing crimes anyways that aren’t thought crimes (party participation/activism). Also of course caveat that ‘crimes’ like piracy aren’t of high concern and obviously these services would protect you from that as intelligence agencies care about a billion times more about preserving an operation/cover than providing service to help Netflix and Disney.
is it better to host your own vpn on a server?
It brings with it a host of issues like reliably hosting server, choosing to and having multiple servers or not, these servers being offsite and not at your home, maintaining logs, maintaining the self hosted service as well, in case of it being rented VPS how to manage anonymous payments, and so on.
Getting a good VPN provider’s subscription is preferred for this reason.
