VPN for privacy

[habbajabba]

I bought a year's subscription to protonvpn the other day. With the laws such that isp's are legally allowed now to monitor and log your traffic, regardless of what they say (we don't do that), it just had to get done. ProtonVPN keeps NO logs, is outside of US and EU jurisdiction, works with tor, and with p2p protocols. They even scramble the servers to mitigate VPN monitoring softwares.

Really easy to run, starts right up, and just plain works well, imo. I have tried a few others and so far the ones based here in the US are retarded if not worse. The last one I tried was ExpressVPN for one month and after a day or so of good use they decided I needed to prove who I was by sending them a picture of my CC. I told them to you know what and that THEY need to prove who they are first (idiots out of MD). The one before that was based out of CO with 'we're an American co' but their name screamed brit corruption and they throttled the snot out of any bittorrent activity (very unAmerican to say the least lol).

My cc's email address is also a protonmail email addy and my bank is super security conscious and the charge went right through without a hitch. I only disconnect the vpn for netflix and spectrumtv streams (who cares really). Youtube and whatever else is vpn'd. I have no online social media accts. whatsoever, nor will I unless I am payed to do so. I'm not paranoid, I'm just sick and tired of google thinking it can monitor your every fing move, including ALL your voice calls through whichever bought and payed for cellular clown you pick. I have charter who like to tell everyone around here it's actually spectrum and know for a fact they log every single ip address I hit, simply because when I go to watch spectrumTV itself (legally btw), I'm already logged in to my internet only acct. and have to logout/login which is ridiculous, to say the least. Plus charter says I can use my motorola surfboard but lo and behold it gets kicked off when it tries to negotiate, so that's a lie right there as well as being super suspicious to begin with.

Even getting a dna sample taken means what? It means you just payed to be put in some LLC's dna db which who knows what those retards will do with it. They should pay you for the very right to so much as look at your dna, and that is a thing now. Plus now they also want to greenlight internet sales tax (save america's malls movement-jk lol) so I guess it'll be back to money orders (no one likes more taxes but hey we still need 700billion to play war games). Not to rant but if you leave your door open... Thieves start marching in.

Some sights don't like foreign servers so connected through either iceland or switzerland back through a US server is required. There's a little lag, of course, which will take getting used to. So far so good and no bitorrent throttling at all, I clocked 12.7mb/s just yesterday. I should put it directly on my asus router but don't want to haggle the netflix/spectrumtv settings hassle. They stream for a few seconds and then the buffering games begin plus who cares what 'tv' channel you watch. It's all the regular stuff that should be private anyways.

 

[habbajabba]

Update: When you uncheck the Secure Core option, you get multiple server options for each country. I can stream Spectrum tv or the NHK live streams using the vpn this way but it's just not efficient and security wise not what VPN's are about. There are P2P servers, as well as Tor servers for all possible internet protocols, etc.. They even list when certain servers are undergoing maintenance so that you always know exactly what is and is not possible. Never fails to connect regardless of what server I pick. KEEPER for sure.

Also, it basically installs a second lan which should be configured like your first LAN, without any static ip address configurations I generally prefer.

 

[samjohns123]

The last one I tried was ExpressVPN for one month and after a day or so of good use they decided I needed to prove who I was by sending them a picture of my CC. I told them to you know what and that THEY need to prove who they are first (idiots out of MD).

Such a weird situation...Recently I considered ExpressVPN and it seemed like a good VPN
topvpnchoice.com/, but after your review I have to reconsidered my choice.

 

[habbajabba]

Just the fact they are in MD where the NSA is based is not good 'tall. It doesn't really matter how the money gets to them. What matters is the very ethics of the people who run the servers. No logs and no jurisdiction and I simply have to trust that at this point. Iceland is a bastion for freedom and I DO trust them. Express immediately charged back my card which was the only good thing about them. The other co out of CO (London Trust Media LLC) answered my phone call immediately and had an American speaking female on the other end. The software gui was not as good as proton's and there was no tor or p2p options either. The official LLC name as well as the absurd throttling told me two things. They are liars and they are logging, and I know Britain is very strict with torrents as in it's illegal if they can block it which is exactly what those ***** did. Both nonos for a vpn. As soon as I noticed the throttling I also could no longer get them on the phone. They also charged my card twice after the first month. Once for monthly as well as the new yearly fee. I had good reason to cancel those idiots.

 

[BigZ1981]

Hah. With the loss of Net Neutrality, I don't blame you. Kinda surprised that you're having issues with your Surfboard. It should have automatically put you on a site to register it on your Spectrum account. Worse comes to worse, call tech support & have them add the MAC address on the account manually as it won't work otherwise (I used to work tech support for Time Warner, which was then bought out by Charter to become Spectrum). I have to use their eMTA for my service because I have a home phone, but I have the router portion in bridge mode to use my own router connected to it. It also keeps me from having to pay the modem fee.

for VPN, honestly, I just use the Opera free plugin dotVPN for my needs. I don't need to use it much.

 

[risk_reversal]

I'm just sick and tired of google thinking it can monitor your every fing move

I too recently have been using a VPN service. I decided to try out a browser based VPN add-on and plumped for Windscribe. Canadian based so part of 5 eyes Alliance.

It also has a 'rotating user agent' function which makes it more difficult to device fingerprint (as just solely using a VPN will still allow for device fingerprinting).

In conjunction with the NoScript browser addon seems to give good protection when testing on the Panoticlick site.

Although, in my searching I have noticed that Audio Fingerprinting is on the rise.

Good Luck

 

[habbajabba]

As for my surfboard... I had 3 different techs from spectrum try to get it to work, mac address and all, and charter.net (spectrum is just a label/sticker nonsense) just kept kicking it off. I tried it myself at least 3 other times with same result. Basically, when I go to 'watch.spectrum.net' website to login to my family's acct. (to watch tv), I am already logged in and have to logout to log back in to get it to work. Like I said, that tells me two things. One, they log all my internet activity. And two, they are liars if they play the innocent 'it should work' card or give me any bs about they know nothing. Back in actual Time Warner land, the surfboard worked flawless from the getgo. So again, spectrum is just a label and is not a new company whatsoever. If my modem worked AND I wasn't logged in by default (gee how'd that happen?) I would have more trust. Since neither the techs nor the phone agents have hardly a clue about squat, it leaves very little to trust. Plus, if they want to parade the name spectrum, why am I logged into a charter acct??? BS all around.

Basically what we have are corporations that think everyone is staring at their phone aps all day and are too stupid to see what is really playing out. So to have either techs or phone agents who basically don't know squat serves them well. Me? not so much.

 

[Culbrelai]

How much does it cost? I pay $60/yr for AirVPN

 

[habbajabba]

110£ approx. I paid for year. I say £ because I never actually bothered to look at the $ amount.
Interestingly enough, ublock lists not just spectrum but charter and timewarner as links. It's like they all 3 merged but no one bothered to actually update the code to use just the spectrum name. So some people got shuffled and money changed hands but nothing new except for the merger itself. What I wonder is what are the actual true mergers we aren't being told about. Storefronts and t-shirts are cheap. In other words what's on paper and the actual connections are not made transparent. Just can't trust everybody now can we? Ergo vpn.
The laughable part is that if everyone used the vpn approach, security would be just that, secure.

 

[habbajabba]

Here is a pic of 5 different speed tests (ookla). The 5th row, "Download Test...", is the Tor server out of Texas.
The 1st row is no vpn at all. 2nd is fastest vpn (CA). 3rd is secure-core vpn (Iceland). 4th is P2P vpn (Switzerland).

They are all very useful in their own ways but I run the secure-core setting most of the time when I browse. Funny how some content on US servers is blocked from other countries here in the land of the free. In fact, when using the vpn, it blocks my connection if I try to torrent anything without first using the p2p servers.