VPN discussion

I've been using Mullvad for a little bit over 2 years now. It's fast, not too expensive and I trust them.
It works great on my phone with OpenVPN and the desktop client they provide has some nice extras.

6 months later

ProtonVPN is quite good. It's from the maker of ProtonMail and of course they're trusted.

2 months later

I'm not well informed when it comes to VPN's so I just use Mullvad because it is easy.

2 years later

I bought a subscription for Private Internet Access a few months ago and have been pleased with it so far. However, they got bought out by a sketchy company so i guess it's time to jump ship. The price point on PIA was one of the greatest things about it so that really sucks to lose. I've been thinking of ProtonVPN since I used it for a little bit before I got PIA and thought it was decent and it seems well recommended. I can't help but be suspicious of Nord and Express given the extent to which they've been shilled everywhere this whole year, never mind the former getting hacked.

7 months later
Loko wrote
floattube wrote

I'm not well informed when it comes to VPN's so I just use Mullvad because it is easy.

Also been using Mullvad. It hasn't let me down yet 🙂

I just signed up for Mullvad myself! It's already come in handy when I was trying to watch a YouTube video that's available in the UK, but not here.

Copyright laws are amazing, aren't they? xD

Loko wrote
Backlash wrote
Loko wrote
floattube wrote

I'm not well informed when it comes to VPN's so I just use Mullvad because it is easy.

Also been using Mullvad. It hasn't let me down yet 🙂

I just signed up for Mullvad myself! It's already come in handy when I was trying to watch a YouTube video that's available in the UK, but not here.

Copyright laws are amazing, aren't they? xD

They sure are something! Glad to see someone on the Mullvad train.

Hmmmm~ I wonder if Loko happens to work for Mullvad~

4 months later

I'm not sure what magic Mullvads got, but their vpn (but not wireguard) gets past my work's firewall. I tried running  openvpn on my VPS, no dice. My seedbox comes with a vpn, still nothing. Mullvad? Connects without a problem. Now I can connect to my seedbox and watch Plex just fine in the hours of downtime I have. It doesn't look like they are running orbot or anything fancy either.

Erika wrote

I'm not sure what magic Mullvads got, but their vpn (but not wireguard) gets past my work's firewall. I tried running  openvpn on my VPS, no dice. My seedbox comes with a vpn, still nothing. Mullvad? Connects without a problem. Now I can connect to my seedbox and watch Plex just fine in the hours of downtime I have. It doesn't look like they are running orbot or anything fancy either.

Heheh, niice love! And thanks for the tip!

I'm guessing they don't closely monitor the network traffic? Just saying~, I'd be pretty sus about a couple gigs of encrypted data downloaded daily from a single address.

My work was also pretty harsh regarding VPNs. No NordVPN, nor PIA, or anything else I tried a while back, so I resorted to making my own home VPN on a RasPi I had laying around.

Spent a lotta time chatting with a friend over IRC. Good times, good times... ^~^

Backlash wrote

Heheh, niice love! And thanks for the tip!

I'm guessing they don't closely monitor the network traffic? Just saying~, I'd be pretty sus about a couple gigs of encrypted data  downloaded daily from a single address.

My work was also pretty harsh regarding VPNs. No NordVPN, nor PIA, or anything else I tried a while back, so I resorted to making my own home VPN on a RasPi I had laying around.

Spent a lotta time chatting with a friend over IRC. Good times, good times... ^~^

I've sort of mitigated the single address issue. The OpenVPN app has a shuffle option if the profile has multiple servers. Just choose a city that Mullvad has a bunch of servers in and you're golden. Toss in mac address randomization, the fact that damn near everyone in my building has similar amounts of downtime, that half the customers and techs that come in are on video calls the entire time and my tablet's network usage looks fairly normal. Management is also fairly lax when it comes to us. If they did find out that I'm bypassing their firewall it would just be "please stop that, I hate having to write up/fire people" and I'll just have to download Star Trek and my anime of the week instead.

I might revisit running a my own instance of openvpn though. I have some ideas, mainly that I have to run it as root to get onto a port under 1024 because a lot of ports are blocked.