I used Mullvad for a long time, but hearing about one of the two CEOs actively supporting and financing swedish Nazis, I’m looking to put my money elsewhere. That’s the second one after Private Internet Access (who supported Gab).
I had AirVPN and Surfshark being recomnended, how do people here feel? What do you use?
I think people say that AirVPN is pretty goated
Yeah, that’s what I use. Switched from Mullvad after they dropped port forwarding.
there was an article today about the entire mullvad company being blindsided by this and a lot of people being upset. with any luck the guy will leave or get thrown out.
also i think they’re technically nazbols.
also i think they’re technically nazbols.
what’s a nazbol?
A Nazi, basically.
It stands for “national bolshevism,” so tankies minus the leftism, which… yeah.
have they released an official statement about it?
not that i can find.
AirVpn is awesome
Curious about the software? at least on linux, the gui is very, very dated and it doesn’t even have split tunnelling I would rather stick to a gui app. I haven’t looked at their android app yet.
They offer standard wireguard and openvpn configs. There is no need for a “Airvpn client” gui.
I prefer a gui, and have little faith in a company that is unwilling, or incapable of providing a decent one. Mullvad has a very good gui on linux, and android, as well as a browser extension. Airvpn has a linux app that looks 20 years old and doesn’t even have split tunnelling, apparently their android app also doesn’t have split tunnelling, so wtf are they actually doing, and where is their roadmap?
List of vpns not to use
NordVPN
Facebook Onavo
ExpressVPN
Private Internet Access
Everything Kape Technologies
HolaVPN
PureVPN
ZenMate
CyberGhost
Imagine someone unironically using Facebook’s VPN service.
Why is airvpn on your list?
What’s wrong with Nord?
NordVPN is interesting because it was less about them handing over data to the government, and them just not being transparent about an attack. All the others in that post clearly were in cahoots with big gov.
NordVPN’s defense was technically coherent: because the company doesn’t store activity logs, no user browsing data was exposed. The breach was framed as a vendor problem. The attacker had gotten in through an insecure remote management system that the data center had left open. NordVPN said it hadn’t even known the system existed.
That may all be accurate. But the eighteen months of silence is the actual story.
I use Proton but I’m also in their ecosystem (ie, I also pay for ProtonMail and get the rest of their suite alongside it)
Wasn’t Proton’s CEO in some hot water a year or so ago, or was that a bunch of hooey? I know it’s impossible to find an ethical CEO, but just curious.
…sure I could look it up, but my phone battery sucks and it helps boost activity.
He made a couple of supportive tweets about a Trump anti-trust appointment (who was later fired by Trump) and the Republican Party that offended some people, mainly the American left. People seem to forget that he is not American, nor is Proton an American company, so none of this actually means anything. He cannot vote, he and his company do not fund the American right in any way and he is not someone with a huge online presence, so it’s unlikely he has much influence.
More recently a far right influencer in France signed up for Proton’s affiliate program and promoted Proton on his channel, which led to some misleading claims about Proton “funding Nazis”. Proton immediately removed him from the affiliate program upon being notified of this and apologised for what it claims was an oversight.
Personally I’m very sick of the purity tests and cancel culture on the left and wish people would slow down a bit and really consider whether these “controversies” are actually worth burning it all down for. Proton provides mainstream, easy to use alternatives to big tech and is better existing than not. Its VPN is also one of the few that retains port forwarding, which can be useful for piracy. After the attempts to cancel Proton, the left hard shilled for Mullvad and now it turns out that’s objectively worse in terms of its political influencing. Mullvad is another company that does more good in the world than bad, are we going to cancel it too?
“Why do Americans care if Ford supports Hitler, he’s not even German!”
Interesting combination of lies and unironic use of “cancel culture” in the rest of the nonsense btw.
You guys don’t even bother pretending to be sane these days. It’s just mask off from the first reply with the Hitler comparisons that used to be considered a joke in more normal times.
This dumbass is literally looking at CEOs outright supporting fascism and ethnic cleansing in a privacy sub and asking why people are bringing up the Nazis.
Btw, dumbfuck, Godwin had an interview where he tried to point out to people like you that the “Law” isn’t meant to stop people from accurately describing loud and proud fascists.
in a privacy sub
???
You don’t need to belabor your complete lack of understanding, believe me, I’m aware.
They made a very naive comment suggesting a authoritarian regime supports privacy
And doubled down then changed their comments as if the way back machine doesn’t exist in order to backtrack without having to admit they were wrong.
Commenting so I remember to check this thread later. My Mullvad expires in 5 days.
Can always count on Lemmy to raise awareness on where to not spend money!
Switched! I don’t have the time/willpower to heavily research this, and changing VPNs is easy compared to changing things like eMail or OS.
Especially easy with all these recommendations here.
I’ve been using airvpn for almost 10 years now, no complaints.
Been using PIA for over a decade now. I started with them by paying with a random gift card I had laying around (Walmart maybe?) and have been paying with crypto ever since. They’ve never asked for any personal details (used a burner email address) and the service has been solid the entire time. Clients on Windows and Linux both work great and are open source with pretty decent documentation. In short, sometimes I want to reliably remain anonymous online and it has worked out well for me.
I know that a lot of people here hate on PIA but I haven’t seen any justification. So if anyone here knows why I shouldn’t be using the service, I’d love to hear about it; I’d be happy to switch to something else if it works at least as well.
PIA is owned by Israel. https://hackread.com/private-internet-access-pia-vpn-sold-israel-privacy-concerns/
EDIT: Updated link to be source article instead of shiddit post
Owned by kape (israel), who own many of the dodgy marketing vpn’s.
Based in the USA (the opposite of privacy)
No personal experience with them myself
I am not a mullvad user, but I recently found https://njal.la/. Curious if anyone has used it before and their experience
I use them on my nas for torrenting.
- €5 per month.
- Accepts payment in crypto, including monero.
- Can only use your account on one device.
- Only one location, Sweden.
- Assigns dynamic IP address to indivdual user session and each IP address is only assigned to one user at a time.
- Any port(s) can be opened.
Most might consider it expensive give the limitation on devices and location but the freedom to open multiple ports makes it amazing for torrenting.
My nas runs 5 instances of qbittorrent and slskd all with connectable ports opened.It works reliably for what I use it for. Other than that, I have nothing to report on my experience using them and in this case, no news is good news.
I’m genuinely curious, what does running 5 instances of qbittorrent do that 1 instance doesn’t?
That’s a valid question and I have 5 different answers. Lol. It all built out over the last 5 years.
I started with one instance and was raw-dogging the net but only using reputable private trackers (ie, teh cabal).
On GGn I was seeding about 20,000 torrents (bulk of this was Linux isos for older retro computers).
Every time ggn has stability issues (every fucking day), it would drag my entire torrent client down with it so I moved all my ggn torrents to their own instance to isolate that problem. That instance still struggled to handle so many torrents on such an unstable tracker so I split ggn across 2 instances.Then I found some things on public trackers I wanted to download and seed, the full dump of Redtopia being one example. So I created another instance that was routed through a VPN via gluetun to use on public trackers.
And lastly I created one more instance to handle my porn stash.
So that’s how I amassed 5 separate torrent clients on the same machine and more recently I moved to a different ISP who uses CGNAT and have decided that I am happy with cgnat and use a VPN that allows opening of ports to handle all my torrent clients.
Damn. I couldn’t fathom a possible reason. It’s obvious reading this it was because I wasn’t thinking even close to your scale. Thanks for the reply!
It’s Mullvad. This whole thing, in my eyes, overreaction to one asshole being an asshole, and not anywhere near as bad as so many other assholes.
That’s my opinion, you’re 100% valid in voting with your wallet and I respect everyone that draws the line here.
For me, though, Mullvad is the only one worth their salt if you actually want the best of the best for privacy, and there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism so this feels like an exercise in futility.
Have we really reached a point in which we have to stick with the “least bad” option? I don’t like this.
No, we haven’t. There are several good alternatives.
I’ve been using Windscribe for 10 years and have been nothing but impressed. Always surprised they don’t get mentioned more in these posts.
They are talking some good shit about this too:
Since I use it only eventually instead of running 24/7 I like Surfshark. If I’m not mistaken it’s under Netherlands jurisdiction, which makes it much more trustworthy than USA VPN providers. It also has good cost benefit and good performance overall.
I never looked into it too deeply though. But as I said, for sporadic use I am definitely satisfied.
Now apparently owned by NordVPN. And based in Panama according to another commenter.
I’m still using mullvad. I don’t care enough about political morals at this day in age. I wouldn’t be allowed to operate life if I boycotted every service that went against my principles. I do tend to agree with the statement that while it may not be in my interest. What a co-founder does in a company isn’t reflected on the company as a whole. If Mullvad was actively donating to structures or was advocating for it I might care more.
Being said, it goes without saying for me that, considering this picked up news trend in the US and is being shared across every news site and seems to have a massive following on X, which is a known bot platform and hive mind. I’m taking the entire thing with a massive grain of salt, as nothing is allowed onto US news without it being to some advantage of the current government structure. Which means that it’s more likely this is being pushed as a nothing-burger with the intent to dissuade people from using a service that has no government controls.
I’m not saying he didn’t do it because he has openly admitted to it, but I’m just saying I expect that the entire situation is being blown out of proportion if it’s gained trending on US news sites
I’m sticking with it. This cancel culture needs some balance. Someone at this company is an idiot. Doesn’t make them all idiots. Yet.
Too much knee jerk going on these days.
not just someone, the co-owner, you are choosing to fund the political party.
that is either apathetic, or…
I don’t think its cancel culture to not want to indirectly fund fascism. The guy is one of the CEOs so if you subscribe then it goes into his pockets
Anyone spouting the phrase “cancel culture” unironically is making it pretty clear where they stand tbh
Cancel culture or vote with your wallet?
Agreed, in my opinion it is the best VPN provider, with Mozilla (rents infrastructure) and Proton as next best