What do you think about VPNs?

[Like Ra]

Let's have a look at VPNs. Do you use VPNs for accessing Internet sites? Experience? Is it worth it?

(Thanks to @"Sofia_B" for the idea)

Related threads:

[essanym]

I have a yearly subscription to Private Internet Access. I don't normally need to use it but I keep the Socks 5 proxy login details in whatever torrent client I'm using. Also, there are a couple of times where I was being blocked from browsing a site and had to turn the VPN on in order to proceed normally.

[Anne]

Most people I know use VPN for the wrong reasons. I used to have a ssh tunnel to a VPS I was renting to get passed blocked sites at work, they blocked gmail, youtube, spotify... Now I'm working from home so I don't need it anymore 😊

[dustymoon1]

Many VPN's are not that secure - many have flaws that give a false sense of security,

https://www.top10vpn.com/what-is-a-vpn/v...dvantages/

https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/23/corpor...laws-risk/

https://www.revbits.com/blogs/beware-of-...rabilities

[bondagetom1]

Mullvad. Every time.

[Lancer]

I used to be a VPN fanatic due to the Great Chinese firewall, it allowed me to watch YouTube in China which was of great help to my ability to speak English. Of all the VPN that existed at the time expressvpn was the best at that job.

When I arrived at the US it honestly became useless, I don't have anything that needs hiding beyond my search history from being seen by people around me. That is as trivial as using your phone to do the deed.

[Penguin]

The "revbits" link above is really no more than a camouflaged advertisement for the service of the outfit who owns that site, so you should discard it immediately and without further consideration.

5 years ago, there used to be a fairly reliable resource, ThatOnePrivacyGuy, who ran a site where he posted a fairly large and painstakingly assembled spreadsheet comparing the key features and security/trust metrics for several dozen VPNs.  But it appears that he basically sold out sometime after July 2019.

Choosing a good VPN is important and the data that ought to drive your decision is not well proliferated.  And it's easy to chose a shit VPN that isn't worth used toilet paper, let alone a monthly fee.  Consider the content of this link to be a warning: Who owns your VPN? 105 VPNs run by just 24 companies.  VPN space is loaded with people who'll happily take your money without tendering anything of value in return.

The only good news, and it does appear to be usefully good, is that a Reddit community, r/vpn appears to have picked up the baton that ThatOnePrivacyGuy dropped.  Among other things, they now maintain the VPN Comparison Table as a Google spreadsheet.  Alas, the maintainer seems to have turned off copying, so you can't pull the data to a local spreadsheet and push it around until you find an optimum, as I'd do without a second thought.  But highly useful information can be pulled directly from the very first table.

For openers, bondagetom1's confidence in Mullvad seems to be fully justified by the data at r/vpn.  One thing that's not apparent at their top level page is that Mullvad supports both major flavors of pf hardware firewall, pfSense and OPNsense.  If I decide to set up a VPN, Mullvad is probably going to be my first choice.

If you aren't running one of these two firewalls aeady, you should.

The base cost is maybe $100, for a 15 year old junker with about 2 GB of memory and no video card, but you'll probably have to pop for an extra NIC interface card (about $5-10) since a true firewall needs two interfaces: one for the trusted network and the other one connecting directly to your cable modem.  The only real caveat about the board is that it ought to have a gigabit NIC, and of course your NIC card should also be gigabit.  Intel NICs are best.

Since all the hardware tech here hit the market at least 15 years ago, a visit to eBay should suffice to procure any hardware you don't aeady have.

The OS/firewall combo is free.  And it backs up your host firewalls in very useful ways.  The "pf" firewall was originally developed for OpenBSD more than 20 years ago, but it ports to other flavors of BSD without apparent problems.  The firewall itself is controlled by a management GUI visible to web browsers inside the "trusted" LAN it protects.

Both pfSense and OPNSense have decent third party documentation, as does the pf firewall they both run.  But pfSense has more books in print about it than the more recent OPNsense port.

[Lycalopex]

I pretty much only use a VPN to hide my IP from a given site.