whatiswrongwithyou

I’m all over the other recent thread telling people there isn’t one. Especially for what you describe there isn’t one.

I have used mullvad in a similar way and can’t recommend anything else for it.

I can recommend the book aesthetics of resistance to help apply balm to the soul of a person who wants to switch.

I have used ivpn in the past, before apps, and have some accounts for its present iteration that are not tested yet.

The biggest problem I see with ivpn is how complex its offerings are and by extension how difficult it is for even a user who has passing familiarity with VPNs like myself to make good choices.

While recently it’s been made the default, the user can still opt to create a username and password that are subpoenable pii, if that’s a word. Able to be subpoenaed.

It is not immediately clear what the security surface is on their various product tiers. I won’t go into all of them but the top features a third party firewall program called portmaster that’s developed by a different vpn company called safing. Perhaps this is useful to you. I found it to be another fractal galaxy of loose ends to tease out.

The above stuff is largely the same boat proton is in. You can set up a simple vpn account. Will you? They would love to give you a good deal on a big bundle…

Mullvad avoids this with a single product offering, no additional attack surface (except for their now ubiquitous version of the vpn app) and no way for the user to put them in a situation where they ever even have your information.

What remains to be seen is real strongly investigated results of a legal action against ivpn. Those legal actions have happened but they’ve largely been what get called “fishing trips” by exhausted public defenders in procedural dramas. There hasn’t been anything on the scale of what’s been pointed at mullvad and with the Byzantine stuff on offer by ivpn in comparison to mullvad it would be a real hoot to dig through that disclosure if and when it comes along.

It may behove you, as it once behove me (is it really spelled the same in past and future perfect tenses, like a read/read situation?) to disregard guides or recommendations and instead look into the information directly and draw your own conclusions.

For example: Often times, a guide or recommendation is formatted as a spreadsheet and the best option is the one that accumulates the most check marks across its row. That type of decision making system would give an advantage to services that support the use of the openvpn protocol since it’s one more check than those that don’t. Except for the common modern use case of openvpn is embedded edge devices like routers that may not support safe openvpn configurations.

So presence of footgun is a plus in many systems used to recommend VPNs and that’s just a simple example.

Everyone’s different and everyone’s needs are different.

There isn’t one.

If you don’t need to have a legally tested system to protect yourself and can yolo it and also understand how to navigate their sites to pay cash only and not set up a normal account then both Ivpn and proton are fine.

Don’t use air for privacy. They’re a piracy service. They’re really good at that though.

Don’t use nym for a while. Even if they were trustworthy their tech is green and relies on the same systems that proof of stake cryptocurrencies do.

Safing is a little too complicated to recommend.

Just be safe with it. I don’t trust them yet but as a pool of IPs to let ml systems proxy https through they’re fine.

There isn’t one with feature or operations parity and a similar history of success.

If you are actually concerned for your safety or legal status or something then I wouldn’t switch from them.

If you’re trying to accomplish something else there are good alternatives. Air for example is a great piracy vpn but I wouldn’t trust it for my own safety.

If you’re using wrt or pfsense or something (no word on if their tomato guide works for freshtomato devices yet), you’ll probably like ivpns router support: https://www.ivpn.net/setup/router

They even have instructions for asuswrt-Merlin which I always thought of as niche.

Hey I made a big reply about this to someone else a while back but if you trust the news and what the police say then mullvad is safe.

A long time ago they had port forwarding and pedophiles were allegedly using it to trade csam back and forth. Interpol got together with Swedish cops and did a warrant raid and came back empty handed. They had every legal ability to record user data and wiretap the servers but were unable to. Eventually Interpol pressured cdns and major providers to blacklist mullvad servers and rather than give up user information mullvad stopped offering port forwarding. A lot of people left them because of it.

If you don’t trust what the cops say or what mullvad does then you still gotta see mullvad as safe.

Why would the police put pressure on cdns to drop mullvad traffic if it’s a honeypot? That doesn’t make sense. If it’s a honeypot then why would mullvad drop port forwarding and lose tons of customers who rely on it for piracy? That also doesn’t make sense.

As far as why anyone would ever pay a company to act as a proxy vpn, it’s to anonymize the traffic. Some vpn companies don’t have “accounts” with username (tied to email) and passwords, it’s just one secret, the account number. They might also take anonymous cash payment as well. In that case they can’t really do anything to give you up because they don’t know who you are.

Like anything else it’s a negotiation of what degree of trust you accept. Many small metal shops around here are run out of a commercial type building next to the owners house. My favorite small fabricator is in a little building nowhere near his house (I found out because the neighbors dog was running loose and came up to get a pet and said “is this your dog?” And he said “I don’t even live on this road”). If you trust the people you do business with to not bother you at home then there’s no problem with them knowing your home address. If they never know it to begin with then you don’t need to consider or accept that level of trust.

I made a couple of accounts with them but havent messed with their config generator or apps yet. Still trying to figure out how to allow a pc to select a vpn server but never drop the vpn even through root user intervention.

| is usually my solution.

Quoting variables in scripts is my other go to before I actually start tracing what went wrong.

Ivpn, how’s it working out?

I am once again posting a reply to help users of lemmy understand that there is no alternative to mullvad unless you can accept a lower privacy, anonymity and security standard of service.

That doesn’t mean if you leave mullvad you will be harmed, only that you will be losing safety margin.

Your decisions are your own: you may know better than me, you may be willing to suffer for your principles, you may believe your actions in the marketplace will have a tangible effect on the world but if you read this you can hopefully make those decisions yourself with clear eyes and understanding.

How’s I been treating you?