It is 1.85 dollars a month if one pays for 3 years. I am looking into ways of saving money so I was thinking into switching. However, I am a bit worried since 3 years ago I did the same with Nord VPN and it is sooo buggy. It rarely ever works for me. I had to switch to ProtonVPN after paying for 3 years for Nord 💀.

  • moreeni@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Never go with deals like that. Only use VPNs recommended by known privacy communities like PrivacyGuides And even when you use them, keep in mind that VPN merely shifts trust from your ISP to the VPN provider, it does not make you anonymous, that’s why you should still exercise caution anyway. You can read more here

      • moreeni@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago
        1. They’ve stopped considering any of the * eyes agreements because there are so many agreements of that kind between countries that it doesn’t make sense to bother anymore
        2. They have a criteria for VPNs, the fact that Kaspersky isn’t listed means that probably it’s not audited or can’t be purchased privately or something like that. Although it’s also possible they just didn’t look much into it, it’s not like a small group of people can find every possible privacy service to ever exist
        3. Does Kaspersky even have any servers in Russia left? I thought the company left for Switzerland
          • moreeni@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            None of Iran Russia or China cooperate with (US) eyes though. If the rest of world is compromised then maybe time is now to look for places. The world of cyberspace is still dominated by US Pentagon but it is no longer totally hegemonic in the ways it once was.

            Russia doesn’t cooperate with Western countries but Russian services are generally considered not secure. It’s not like Russians can’t make good services, it’s just that nobody bothers making secure services for poorer population when you can do the same in the West and make more money. Russian three-letter agencies might help but their service is not open to the public

            As for China, I’m not sure. It’s similar to Russia but to a lesser extent. Also, I don’t think they would risk their asses and economic ties to the USA to protect some random person. But you are free to prove me wrong and find a trustable Chinese/Russian VPN service that wouldn’t leak your shit to the public because of poor security policies, or sell your data

              • moreeni@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                Insecure by WHOM? Same imperialist who say NYT is news and TASS is “Putin propaganda”?

                Yes, exactly. I only use a VPN service that was personally approved by Joe Biden. By whom I mean in general, no matter where I looked people were suspicious of such services. For example, telegram channel VCHK-OGPU wouldn’t let you message them from your Russian email, because, as they claim, data from Russian inboxes can be very easily purchased. I’m in no position to claim I’ve personally verified every Russian service so that’s why I suggested you showing me some trustable one

                Your claim about Russia being too poor is almost offensive

                I don’t consider it offensive but deeply saddening. Years of the rule of bourgeoisie made the gap between the richest and the poorest huge.

                Russian Federation government uses Kaspersky AV to defend against NATO cyberwarfare units which are best funded in the world so then I trust it.

                AV wouldn’t help them to defend against NATO cyberwarfare units, because those would most likely use 0-day exploits

                If anything, US-based services can afford to be worse because they are not targetted by US government in same way and already have backdoors for NSA.

                Source? NSA is really nosy, but I don’t think they bother with backdooring every VPN service in Western countries.

                I looked up transparency reports and they cooperate with zero governments for personal datas.

                If the US says they are the good guys you wouldn’t trust them, yeah? So why are you trusting Kaspersky claiming they don’t cooperate with governments? Telegram claims they don’t cooperate with governments, yet it does. Often. Can you find any info about third-party audits of Kaspersky VPN? On the page you linked it literally says there are cases when they will cooperate with governments. Do they do any precautions to make that data useless to be used against its users?

                However even if Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Xi Jinping were personally viewing your data, who cares? Russia doesn’t send death squads to kidnap you from your home for being communist anti-imperialist. It is the USA and its NATO pals who do this.

                So who cares if Joe Biden was personally viewing your data? Don’t make me laugh, if we think in that terms then anything goes because nobody is going to send a “death squad” after you for posting on a ML instance of 13k members

                Russia doesn’t send death squads to kidnap you from your home for being communist anti-imperialist.

                Why was Boris Kagarlitsky (marxist philosopher) arrested? Why was Kirill Ukraintsev (trade union activist) arrested at the start of the war? Why do Russian marxists have to talk very carefully about their own views, in order not to provoke their countries’ gendermerie for being a communist?

                Your last paragraph is hilarious. There is one small issue with your point — Russia is still a bourgeoisie country, it doesn’t like marxists. It only likes you for as long as you support it and not its enemies but it wouldn’t fight for you and the very moment it gets rids of its enemies the bourgeoisie state will go after you.

      • moreeni@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        It’s not like you’re going to audit everything yourself to ensure a service isn’t compromised. You have to put some degree of trust into some entity like that anyway. Also, the community is really nice, you can join their Matrix room or a forum and ask why a specific service is listed, if you want to know more

  • NothingButBits@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    The best VPN service is to create your own. Rent a small cloud server on a far away country, and install Open VPN. This is the best form of secrecy online, that I can think of. Of course, it’s still possible to identify you. But it seems much harder to do so.

    Either your VPN server would need to have it’s connections monitored, or access to logs from the problematic websites would be required. It’s also necessary for the company which is hosting your server to disclose that your VPN server’s IP is associated with you. And even then, if you encrypt everything in it, there is still room for plausible deniability. But all of this, is a much bigger hassle to the authorities than to just use a traditional VPN service.

    With a normal VPN, especially if they have servers in NATO countries, they will provide all logs requested to them and you’re toast. Basically, you’re paying for a false sense of security.

    • Clever_Clover [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Yes exactly this, though, I prefer wiregaurd over openvpn, instant connection times and tunnels don’t have to stay open and reconnect so you can always have it on even when moving between networks, there are certain cloud providers that can be bought from almost entirely anonymously too

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    1 year ago

    What benefit do you believe a VPN provides for you? Are you using it to fake your location for content access or do you believe that the vpn is improving your privacy somehow?

      • darkcalling@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        What’s funny to me is your username is the name of a (maybe defunct, not sure) VPN service. It was known to be shitty and shady.

        Go with a company at least not located in the US. Avoid PIA, they were bought by a shady company. The ones the piracy community tends to trust would be: ProtonVPN, Mullvad, IVPN, AirVPN. Be warned Mullvad recently dropped port forwarding which really hurts torrenting connectivity and speeds. I would try for a provider that continues to allow port forwarding if you’re doing any torrent stuff.

        Privacy. Books can and are written on the subject. I’ll just say try and avoid doing things that link back to you while on the VPN. Don’t log into your bank account or email accounts (except those you have registered and only use over VPN) while on a VPN if you can help it. If you sign up for accounts on torrent sites (public or private trackers), use an email not associated with your real identity.

    • Pili@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      If you’re in the EU it allows you to see content that have been blocked since article 17 was voted. Also you can also buy some things for cheaper by switching country.

    • sovietknuckles [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      No VPN service is free. If you’re not paying them, they’re profiting off of you having their VPN service in some other way (like Onavo, which sold your VPN traffic).

      I don’t trust a VPN provider that I have not given a reason to not sell my data.

      • DeHuq2@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Well they usually have a small selection of slower free servers and a lot of faster ones locked behind a premium wall. Does this not substitute as profit for them?

        • sovietknuckles [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Depends on the provider, but probably they would be analyzing the traffic of the free users the very most to profit off of them. Maybe they’re trying to convert them to paying users, maybe they’re selling the data, and it could be tricky to figure out which.

          The “free” servers aren’t free, they have some specific reason why it’s profitable for them to run servers where users aren’t paying with money. They’re capitalists.

          • DeHuq2@lemmygrad.ml
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            1 year ago

            And what would prevent paid VPNs from selling data to have even bigger profits? Its all a gamble, be it free VPN or not.

            In the end of the day I just want to pay less

            • sovietknuckles [they/them]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              It’s a gamble if you haven’t done research into which VPN providers are trustworthy. r/VPN has a decent comparison table (maybe there’s a good community on the fediverse? I haven’t checked). You can find discounts for VPN providers from that table that seem trustworthy to you at r/vpncoupons (not aware of a fediverse replacement for that either).

              The privacy-friendly VPN providers have one thing in common: they’re all paid, afaik.