• Aradina [She/They]@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    Mullvad or Proton.

    Remember that VPNs are mostly only useful for preventing region blocking and don’t offer much in the way of additional privacy.

    • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      When we talk about privacy, we have to think of it in terms of privacy from whom. No, a VPN will not offer you any meaningful level of privacy from intelligence agencies, but it will keep your ISP from sending you nasty letters and cutting off your service for piracy.

    • Odo@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      Could you expand a bit on how they don’t offer additional privacy?

      • MedicareForSome [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        Basically, your VPN just replaces your ISP. So for example, if I want an ISP that’s okay with piracy a VPN can be3 a good option.

        Your IP address is not how you are spied on for the most part. It’s more browser fingerprinting. So a VPN can offer a false sense of security when really enhancing your privacy is a lot less passive than that. Overall it can help but it’s not a magic privacy button.

        Also entities like the NSA with a “god’s eye view” can just track you anyways. Even if the VPN service wasn’t compromised, they can just watch traffic going in and coming out and correlate it to you. It offers basically no protection from high-resource adversaries.

  • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    AirVPN. You can create an account without using a real email and pay in a variety of different formats. Supports port forwarding, DNS blocking and wireguard with a variety of locations across the world.

    They also released their own libre VPN client program but you shouldn’t use that and just use their wireguard config generator.

  • CloutAtlas [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    Mullvad is my go to when going to China. It’s cheap, bypasses the firewall so I can dunk on white people.

    LetsVPN is also decent.

    • Krem [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      this is useful information, remembering this for when i’m going back.

      express used to switch between acceptable and unusable (and expensive), asdrill was recommended to me by obnoxious people so i never tried it (also expensive), and nord was completely unusable

      • CloutAtlas [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        Express is owned by an Israeli billionaire

        Nord, Surfshark et al don’t work in China

        Astrill does work but has fairly frequent downtimes and is overall mid (in China at least)

        Lets VPN was up until recently very reliable but there’s reports of users getting banned by AI that deemed the users were committing crimes. Does have Chinese users because they’re one of the few that bothered to have Chinese language support

        Mullvad is my go to, as previously stated

        • Krem [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          Express is owned by an Israeli billionaire

          ooooooooooooooh forgive me father for i have sinned. i bought at least a couple of yearly subscriptions.

          my hard earned xibucks have been eaten by a settler parasite

          at least i managed to get some free months by complaining about how much their service sucked