Hi privacy fans :) I’ve been a lurker in this lemmy-community for a while now and a “fan” of privacy for about 4 years now. Since 4 years, I’ve been on and of with VPNs. Sometimes I think I dont need one, sometimes I change my mind and start searching for one. The only one I tested (and used) so far, was Mullvad. But now reading about Surfshark, I was wondering, if there might be a better solution or if Mullvad is already the best solution for VPN. What I dont like about Surfshark is, that it is part of North Security and that it is not open-source (or at least I can find any info about that).
I hope you guy and gals have some suggestions or recommendation :)
Edit: wow… thanks for all of your fast replies. Coming from Reddit, I am used to only shitposting. Thanks for all your input. I will look into all the mentioned VPN hosters, thx 👍
Mullvad is great, I’ve been using it for some time and I’m happy with them
1,000%
Mullvad, IVPN, and Proton are the top tier for privacy respecting VPNs.
Windscribe and AirVPN are also decent options but do not have the audit history to be in the same tier as the other 3.
Most other VPNs people mention either have a dubious history or no real proof of their claims to be privacy respecting.
Plus one to Proton. They recently moved to a not-for-profit model because they believe it will help them better protect their customers interests
They also lowered prices when their costs went down a year or so ago
And they’re continuing to put out more and more apps and features without increasing prices or any of that bullshit. They grandfathered my Proton Prime plan or whatever it was called without any interruption of service when they got rid of the plan. Basically, they just do a lot of great things
Same, I got grandfathered into the unlimited plan at only $5ish a month. I really can’t beat that.
+1 for proton. Been using them for years now.
Windsribe also has a big advantage for price with their “Build a plan” in that you can pick a few locations and only spend $3 a month without needing to deal with any coupons/sales or long term purchases.
Yeah. The 2$/month port forwarding option can also be a great deal as well especially if combined with the lifetime pro memberships they used to sell for $30 back in the 2010s.
Another recommendation for Mullvad. Solid privacy options and no marketing snake oil
- another recommendation for mullvad
Mullvad is one of the best options if you care about privacy. They take privacy seriously, both on their side and pushing users towards private options. They also support fully anonymous payments. Their price is also incredibly reasonable.
I’m actually working on a VPN product as well. It is a multi-hop system so that we can’t track you. But it isn’t publicly available yet, so in the meantime I happily recommend Mullvad.
wow, that look really promising. altough I read, that you are making only your clients open-source. wouldn’t it be better to have also the server-side open-source?
I mean it is always better to have more open source. But the point of the multi-hop system is that you don’t need to trust the server. Even if the server was open source:
- You wouldn’t know that we are running an unmodified version.
- If you need to trust the server then someone could compel us to tap it or monitor it.
The open source client is enough to verify this and the security of the whole scheme.
makes sense :) well I guess I am going to join your newsletter anyway to stay in the loop :)
I’d only recommend Proton if a) you’re already paying for their suite or b) you’re not using Linux. Otherwise, Mullvad is the way to go IMO.
The proton client for Linux has improved recently. I use it on PopOS. As to your first point I agree. I landed with Proton specifically because it was cheaper to do it and email rather than separate services.
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you need to define a threat model first
well I haven’t really thought of a threat model jet (but I will do so now :) ). But in general I want a VPN, for when I am on the wifi @work and also to route my traffic through from my DreamMachine.
also consider that almost any VPN service will have all of their IPs flagged for bot/abuse traffic and many sites will block you for it
I recommended to you Windscribe and ProtonVPN as free, Mullvad and iVPN as paid option
IMHO I am not an expert but Mullvad seems the best (from what I read from others) and I would stick with it. I am using it and happy with it. I also appreciate that their monthly price do not change depending on how many months you subscribe and that there is no bullshit discount for the first x months.
You could also look at Proton VPN if you need port forwarding.About SurfShark don’t have much opinion !
Mullvad until you are often in the PCR, there I had a much better experience with ExpressVPN compared to basically everyone else.
If you need a lot of exit nodes in different countries Proton or Pure, but I grow increasingly wary of Proton these days and Pure is getting more and more enshitified these days.
So I simply use Mullvad for privacy and my own WG service for security.
What do you (think you) need a VPN for?
well mainly to route my traffic trough from my DreamMachine and for when I’m @work on the wifi
I have no idea what a DreamMachine is (and wikipedia does not help) so here’s the long answer :)
If you want a VPN tunnel to your own home, for secure access to your LAN, I’d recommend you look into NetBird and/or TailScale, which at their core are wireguard plus NAT punch-through (you can also run wireguard or openvpn directly, but it may be a pain since you most probably have a dynamic IP and possibly a CGNAT).
If you want to hide your traffic while connecting through networks you don’t trust (such as the work one or some cafe’s wifi), you can either use NetBird/Tailscale as above and connect though your home (well, assuming you trust your ISP of course) or some third party VPN which connects to their servers (I’d say look into Proton first).
Keep in mind that VPNs actually do very little for your online privacy (ie. it’s not like google or facebook can’t track or fingerprint you). They do is prevent man-in-the-middle traffic analysis from your ISP (or the admin of whatever LAN you are using), but then the VPN provider can do the exact same things, so… make sure to double-check the privacy guarantees of your VPN provider and compare them with those of your ISP.
sorry :) A DreamMaschine is the Firewall from Ubiquity :)
well the thing is, that after reading more into all the option, people gave here, I tougth the same thing. I am basicly only hiding my traffic from my ISP and move the information to another entity 🤷♂️ For work this might not make that much sense. All I do there is listen to music and check my back-account so nothing my comoany doesnt already know :D
and at home (after planing my threat model) a VPN does not really make that much sense, since I already use stuff like PiHole and Unbound for my whole network.
but thx for your input, it really made things clearer.
I use proton through my dream machine and it works great.
oh ok, good to know. are you using the paid service or free?
Paid currently, I use several of their other services as well
A VPN is not for privacy. It simply put your front door to another location. There needs to be more done for being “private”. But Mullvad would be a good start.
Would you elaborate on this? Encrypting your traffic and not accessing sites from your actual IP address sounds pretty vital to privacy for me.
Yes, your traffic is encrypted through the VPN tunnel, to the other location, but than you need to get access to the internet again. SSL traffic is already private, so there you don’t need an VPN for. Yeah, you get another IP, but you browse on the internet (same fingerprint) your pc has access to the internet (same hardware ID) and so on. So you can be tracked still. There are multiple videos on YouTube telling you a VPN on its own is a private method to access the Internet. Look for it.
Ok, I think I misinterpreted yout comment to mean VPNs are not necessary. Thanks for the clarification.
AirVPN
Only if you need (cheap) port-forwarding.
What do you mean? Are they not good for privacy or security? They seem definitely more zealous about that on their FAQs and forum pages than, say, ProtonVPN, for sure.
As far as I know they don’t have audits done, so who knows about the logging. Both IVPN and Mullvad pass those. Could still be fine though, but I’d rather trust Mullvad or IVPN.
So, I just looked it up and apparently their official stance is that auditing is questionably effective and thus unnecessary:
Our software is free and open source, while we repute at the moment [it’s] not acceptable to provide external companies with root access to our servers to perform audits which can not anyway guarantee future avoidance of traffic logging or transmission to third parties. On the contrary, we deem very useful anything related to penetration tests. Such tests are frequently performed by independent researchers and bounty hunters and we also have a bounty program.
In other words, their reasoning seems to be:
- Their software is free and open source, so if it does logs anything, the community would find out, so in this sense the community is the independent auditors;
- There’s no stopping an audited party from ceasing to log right before the audit and start up again after the audit ends, so an audit is kind of toothless anyway;
- Regarding penetration tests, they already have independent testing done as well as a bounty program.
Personally, I don’t entirely agree with points #2 and #3 (though I can see their points), but point #1 is fair I suppose. In my opinion, though, it should not be up to the users to hold the company accountable; and there is a difference between penetration tests and log auditing, as the former I believe are merely to check the resilience against outside hacking.
My end impression is that judging from their other documentation and forum posts, the fact that their software is fully open-source, and their past behavior in accordance with their stated values, I think I’m inclined to believe them. However, it is somewhat worrying nevertheless that there isn’t log auditing involved regardless of their actions.
Edit: Clarification
But what about server side logging? Even if the server is open source how can one that they are actually the code they publish without changing anything if there are no audits?
There’s a certain point where it just comes down to trust. And if you distrust a company enough that you think they aren’t posting the same code to the git repository that they say they are, then maybe that’s when you shouldn’t be doing business with them.
This is the case with all organizations, corporate or otherwise.
audits are invalid as soon as they finish, there’s absolutely no way to trust any of these companies.
Been using Mullvad for years. Love em, glad to see everyone else does too
Tor.
And the correct term is anonymizing proxy. Having the term VPN overloaded to mean two completely distinct things is rather annoying and/or confusing.
