I've been using iVPN for the past few months and the connection is total dogshit. I find myself turning it off every now and again to get things to load and that defeats the purpose of having a VPN.

Proton VPN

I have found Proton to be extremely reliable and fast

AirVPN has always been reliable for me. It's very cheap to try for a few days too.

Well, out of what I've used for any length of time, mullvad, nord, air, and proton were all reliable for me. Then again, ivpn was too. Ivpn was slow as hell compared to mullvad and nord for me though; as slow or slower than free tier proton. I've tried others, but never long term enough to feel comfortable saying anything beyond that you do get what you pay for with a VPN. The super cheap ones tend to be molasses, or have other service issues.

Which, it's weird as hell that ivpn was so slow compared to mullvad because a lot of their exit servers are the exact same. Most of the European exits, and as near as I could tell, all of the U.S. ones were in the same data centers. Iirc, mullvad rents hardware directly, whereas ivpn does it via software? Maybe? It was a struggle finding useful information with the way search engines have turned so shitty (even the better ones).

I think I had the least problems with air and mullvad, overall. Air, my only real complaint was their clients suck. The service was flawless, but you either set things up on your own, or deal with horrible ui and ux on their clients (with the android one being worse). Mullvad, I have zero complaints about their service or clients. It's the political shit I have issue with

Use proton, Nord, mullvad if stability takes precedence over privacy

IVPN is a good VPN

• We are in a war even Professor Mohammad Marandi is having issues with VPNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eou-MKbL5sc

• Power cycle the router I have it hooked up to a wireless non wifi connected switch to aid in turning on/off

• https://blog.corenexis.com/how-to-fix-internet-vpn-connetion-issue-in-linux

Out of curisoity, what would you recommend for privacy then?

I can second AirVPN. I've never had an issue with it, at least one that wasn't ultimately user error.

If youn want privacy, Tor is the only thing even close. But also the 333 compromised exits are glaring :(

I like private Internet access

airs software is what has kept me away from them, a well known issue. Hopefully they do something about it soon. As far as I am aware air and ivpn are the only ethical ones left.

Same feeling here

On Linux and Android, for servers in north and south america, ivpn is by far the worst compared to mullvad and proton. After 2 months using it, I'm not trying it again for another year because I'm better off with either alternative.

I have been happy with windscribe. They have a unique sense of humor too..

V2ray, Monero-bought vps (xray + amnesia)

do you know it's owned by an Israeli company?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kape_Technologies

I am very happy with the stability of Mullvad.

Happy with Proton here as well.

Update: I just wish they would stop consistently disappointing me.

Yep, I remember that was what caused me to stop watching LTT after they decided to keep promoting them due to trust is such a big part of VPNs. Convinced me none if their opinions are worth listening to and they are modern day infomercials.

Proton and nord, sure. Did I miss news about mullvad? they've always had a solid track record on privacy as far as I know

proton has good connection that barely cuts out even on the free tier. moreso a problem when websites block you or get cloudflare challenge often, but that's a problem with all commercial VPNs. i just switch the node then, usually works.

port forwarding on the commercial plan is neat too for me, because i am behind CGNAT.

We are on a privacy forum so i feel the need to say that VPNs are only good for privacy if your ISP is spying on you (or they're forced to by law enforcement), not much else. IP is a very fragile fingerprinting metric, most people get dynamic IPs as the "default" option. You're basically trusting a VPN company instead, they have access to the same info as your ISP would without one; Proton has been audited multiple times at least, so there's more backing to that no log policy than [[insert ISP here]]

A few months ago air updated their android client Eddie. It's...better now. Not great, but better. It remembers profiles and you don't have to click the connect button twice anymore, just once now. Oh and the speed is better now too. I used to only get ~5mbps, now I can hit ~100mbps. Should still be faster, but it's better.

Have they improved their Linux support? It's the first one I tried years ago and I had to go make individual openvpn configs for each server which was such a pain (unless I wanted to just use the same few all the time).

There was probably a better way to do it but that was just solved for me when I switched to another provider.

You are asking in the privacy comm so the answer is mullvad.

You are asking for someone to say nord though.

If you need to pirate use air. Do not rely on them for privacy.

Article is locked behind paywall (reader mode doesnt bypass for me), so I couldn't get much info from the link...but checking "how they use AI" is not necessarily bad, it could also be to verify if it is used in responsible ways.

Thanks for the info! I thought they only did business in Israel. Looks like that Kape technologies own a bunch of them.

https://archive.is/GG1Br

mullvad and ivpn have been solid for me.

i think they support wireguard

afaik some higher up at mullvad had ties to some 'controversial' political party. my memory is bad so please lookup yourself tho

Oh, agreed. I would have to trust the VPN to actually not collect my data. That's why I'm curious what VPNs people trust these days.

Tor is great. I used to run a middle/guard relay in the past, thinking about doing so again. The problem is that reuglar people shouldn't run exit relay at home. And there aren't many companies that would allow exit relays on their servers/in their datacentre. I get why, but that leaves only a (relatively) small number of exit relays and it's so much easier for bad actors to control a significant number of them. :(

The privacy of mullvad doesn't seem to actually have suffered or shown to be lacking in any way. The issue some people have with Mullvad is that one of the founders donated money to a right-wing political party.

One of the co-founders, Daniel, donated around a half mil USD to a far right political party in Sweden. They have ignored calls to remove Daniel.

I read the leaked email sent to Proton staff. It reads like 'use ai or else'. The thing I don't like about this is the more a human uses AI for coding, the more deskilled they get. Eventually, the AI will add something that the human doesn't have the knowledge to recognize as an error.

My current employer has a "we'll teach AI to all the support functions to better automate backend processes" and then they made it part of the KPIs of the senior leadership of those functions, which is miles better than "use AI or else".

I understand why using AI has benefits in certain tasks, but I don't see why there has to be the threat of people losing their job - unless it maybe was a KPI for some time for process enhancement and now things are coming to a head? I dunno.

Thanks for clarifying. That's disappointing to hear

Have you considered that the issue is on your end?

A few percent packet loss is hardly noticeable when you have 1 Gbps bandwidth, but once you bounce around to proxies all over the world, it becomes magnitudes worse.

Do some international network testing. Ignore speed. Pay attention to packet loss, jitter, and buffer bloat

If you have anything more than 1% packet loss, call your ISP tech to fix it. You may need to pay them for a business line to get priority on their network. Tell them you have a lot of IP phones.

Wouldn't recommended. There literally isn't a button to choose a random server, so it degrades your privacy

Xray isn't on fdroid, which is a red flag

I've been happy with Windscribe

Wish they accepted monero

Got a cheap deal on SurfShark, so moved to them from ExpressVPN. Both worked great, got good reviews etc. Happy to be re-assess if anyone has information to the contrary, or tells me they're affiliated with the clans or something, but so far so good.

Kape Technologies plc is a British-Israeli information security company owned by businessman Teddy Sagi. Kape owns the VPN service and cybersecurity companies CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, ZenMate, ExpressVPN, and Intego.

They actually do now

Very easy to script this though, if it's important to you.

So I was right to move to Surfshark?