What VPN have you switched to after the Mullvad situation. I have looked at nym and ivpn. But don’t know if they are any good.
Airvpn… few servers, but reliable on different machines and no problems.
I’ve been pretty happy with Windscribe. They are headquartered in Canada, but they have also proven they don’t keep logs. https://cybersecuritynews.com/court-dismisses-criminal-charges-against-vpn-executive-affirms-no-log-policy/
If you’re looking for a good comparison, I found the Techlore comparison table helpful: https://vpn.techlore.tech/
AirVPN does good for torrenting I use it now that mulvad doesnt support port forwarding
I wouldn’t recommend NYM, I tested it for multiple months, it’s quite unreliable and had serious security issues (e.g. updates weren’t available through multiple repositories they publish to).
This helps me a lot, thanks. I will definitely switch from mullvad to ivpn, and not nym.
Proton
I switched away from Mullvad when they killed port forwarding years ago. I have used AirVPN since and it has always been pretty good!
What do you guys use port forwrding for?
I don’t personally, but generally it’s needed to keep your seed ratio high enough on private torrent trackers.
Torrenting
i use proton… airvpn looks good but i still haven’t tried it
Similar issues with Proton CEO, he seems to be a Trump fan.
Furthermore, I heard it’s generally bad practice to use a VPN provider from your own jurisdiction, AirVPN mentionend above is located in Italy for example and won’t sell any accounts to Italians for that reason.
the people of this community are proton fanboys and the downvotes prove it. lol
I am also considering either IVPN or Nym. Not sure which is best for best privacy/security. Probably IVPN? Can anyone more knowledgeable help me decide between these two?
I’ve been looking at IVPN as well. Nym seems interesting but seems very new and idk if they offer Wireguard configuration files (I don’t think they’re even WG-based? I could be wrong)
I’m sitting on Mullvad for a week to do research into alternatives. Apparently their support team is handing out full refunds far outside their typical policy because of this shitshow, no questions asked. IVPN so far is looking promising, but I don’t know a damn thing about the company and people behind it.
I have purchased nym last week.
- I got the 1 year plan which came at a great price (price is really important for me atm)
- its apps arent as robust and good as mullvad, use more resources. But still do able.
- They dont offer config files
- It’s speeds seems pretty promising. Better than mullvad
- It takes it a while to connect. Maybe up to 1m. While mullvad connected immediately.
If mullvad wasn’t expensive for me I’d stick with it.
I’m trying to figure out what the purpose of Nym is compared to a network like Tor or I2P. It seems to perform a symilar function, except it’s a paid product.
ivpn seems like a good enough replacement privacy-wise
yeah i’m switching to ivpn
I never got around to changing from PIA when they were purchased years ago. Haven’t found any practical reason to change since, and though I get the backlash over the purchase.
My main use case is keeping my ISP from cutting me off for seeding, and it’s done that reliably.
Just remember that PIA’s owner is kape technologies, which is a British-Israeli company. Their headquarters are in London but development is done in Tel Aviv.
It sounds like you might already be aware but for anybody stumbling by.
I’ve also used them for years without issue.
PIA is part of that group of VPNs all owned by a dubios Israeli entity that keeps gobbling up VPN providers
Someone mentioned https://cryptostorm.is/ on another board, but I never heard of them before.
Any experiences here? I know a lot of VPNs like Express VPN or PIA are controlled by Israel/Mossad - so I won’t recommend tbem without a lot of research.
I’m using Cryptostorm for around two years now for seeding and browsing. Some things to know.
- We don’t know who is behind Cryptostorm. It could be a honeypot. I personally think this is unlikely because they basically don’t advertise and their website is way too uninviting for the “casual” criminal user, but who knows.
- PGP-encrypted mail support works well and is (likely) handled by a dev with competence. (Very sure there is no specific “support” person.)
- Server and client code is open source on their GitHub, but they only have an OpenVPN client for Windows. For other systems you need to use the provided WireGuard or OpenVPN configs.
- No PII is required for signup.
- Their blog posts are very good and go into detail about their system and what they are doing.
- IP blocks are somewhat common, and you don’t have streaming servers.
- Speeds are fine (not the best, but good enough) and can vary from server to server.
Generally, I’m quite happy with them. But everyone needs to make sure they are fine with not knowing who exactly is behind the service.
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Mullvad is still the best. For the time being, until the situation clears out, I wouldn’t stop using it.
I disagree. VPNs is all about trust because you can’t verify they don’t log. I don’t trust a company where one of the people that owns 50% have donated 450k euro to a party that is describe as a racists, fascists and nazis and apparently shares opinions like not my words wanting to deport 100 000 “welfare-Somalis”.
After reading a bit more according to Mullvad’s Wikipedia page “Flamman also alleged he later stated it was sad that the party’s remigration policy was necessary”.
Remigration is: “Remigration is a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing[1] via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry.”
Mullvad has been audited over and over again and found to not be logging.
Before they dropped port forwarding a police raid famously found nothing and confirmed that they were not recording any user information and operating as advertised, that is to say, operating in a way that not only didn’t log, but precluded the possibility of logging.
A raid where they get nothing is like an audit but it’s the real thing.
They dropped port forwarding because, in concert with an Interpol investigation, all the big content delivery networks and lots of websites to boot started blocking their endpoints.
There is not any vpn I’m aware of that has been physically raided by cops with a court warrant in hand and shown to have nothing and also dropped their possibly most popular service, port forwarding, in order to not have to comply with an investigation.
I used ivpn in the past and see it as basically an untested mullvad from ten years ago. Who knows how its people and technology would respond under the same circumstances? Could be good, could be bad.
Audits don’t prove they don’t keep logs when a company do a audit on them Mullvad give them access to what they can audit Mullvad can just delete the logs from the servers when the audit is taking place it don’t prove anything.
But the raid where the cops don’t find anything is a really good sign.
Yeah there’s a lot of questionable stuff in the vpn service security auditing “space”.
That’s why I think it’s important to look at the raid outcome to see how their systems handle a real world situation (interpol tries to get logs and install logging in order to bust an alleged global csam ring using mulvads port forwarding, user privacy and anonymity protections to trade files over windows cifs (yes, network neighborhood, pedos apparently have a reputation for lack of opsec) sharing). The raid was unsuccessful because there were no logs and the police were unable to install logging capabilities.
After that failed operation, Interpol began requesting cdns and hosts block mullvads endpoints by ip. The point of that operation was to either force mullvads compliance with the investigation, to get them to drop port forwarding, or to force them to close down.
Because at the peak even cloudflare was blocking mullvad, it became very hard to use the service when browsing or for pretty much anything that relied on internet like rss or podcasts, shoutcast or even updating your computer.
Mullvad dropped port forwarding after rotating servers for months to attempt to beat the block and giving users lots of warning.
In the months after the block request was lifted, using the service for normal browsing went back to usual.
I remember all these details so clearly because I was a user of mullvad then and it was a relatively high profile and well publicized test of a vpn services’ capability to withstand government pressure.
As it turns out, even having no logs and no ability to add logging into your system doesn’t stop government from telling everyone else to make your system unusable.
It’s also pretty much the best possible outcome someone could expect of a service.
The point of this long ass reply is not to defend a company, although I think a person who was doing so could be forgiven for it in this case, the point is to help you understand what happened to make users of that service put their trust in it and why people like me are saying “maybe consider not ditching mullvad” when you ask what to use instead.
Sure, you are free to think that way and I’m not saying I disagree with you. I just know that, if I stop using a product or service from a company, just because I don’t agree with someone working there (even if it is someone that founded that company), it is very likely I won’t be able use anything.
If it was the acting CEO or the company posture, I would do the same, but apparently it is not the case. Until then, Mullvad still provide great service.
There’s a clear difference between a CEO supporting this, and then random employees of a company that you disagree with on more trivial subjects…
In this case neither one nor the other is supporting this. The whole debate is about the action of one of the founders (not the CEO, who already said he doesn’t support those views).
Just the founder whose donation bankrolls the entire party…
Just the founder who holds massive sway in the direction of the company…
Just the founder, who receives a lions share of the profits from our funding who redirects it towards ideologies rooted in inhumanity…
“These fascists make a really good burger. I’ll keep buying their burger and I don’t care where it comes from, I won’t look.”
wow, we really are going to extremes
