Topic: List of VPN Service Providers - 2023 - page 7. (Read 3564 times)

It's almost unfair comparison (whether free or paid version of Avast) since IMO their product in general is crappy[1-2] and they also have poor privacy history[3-4]. Comparing with general/speed-oriented VPN service (such as nordvpn) would be more fair.


Slightly off-topic, but very recently i found out Proton bought SimpleLogin[5] which is service to create email alias[6]. Basically it's intermediary between sender and your email address. Since you already have paid version of Proton, you also get paid version of SimpleLogin and IMO it's worth checking out.

[1] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/avast-antivirus-corrupted-my-windows-10/5004788c-e51c-410c-8dfd-90d32702a323
[2] https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=117057.0
[3] https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/antivirus-firm-avast-is-reportedly-selling-users-web-browsing-data/
[4] https://www.tomsguide.com/news/avast-avg-data-collection
[5] https://proton.me/blog/proton-and-simplelogin-join-forces
[6] https://simplelogin.io/

Discussion about browsers in this thread proves again that we need Cyber Security board!

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I don't understand why should someone block Youtube, there is nothing wrong with this platform. I would say, it's very censored and you won't see adult or violent content, the risks are minimum. There is no discussion about religion too, to my mind it's the least platform someone should ban.

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ProtonVPN's obfuscated servers are good but latency can be a problem, especially when it comes down to video streaming.
By the way, Chinese use Shadowsocks, V2Ray, Xray, Trojan, VLESS & gRPC to bypass firewall.

Alternatively, you can also use Tor Bridges, this will allow you to bypass restrictions and at the same time it will hide your Tor usage for your ISP.

So is this basically saying that Arkenfox is just a firefox build with "Do not save history and cookies" settings turned on? If that's the case then there isn't really much of an argument for using it in the first place. And even while Mulvad's browser/VPN, which you can also get with Mozilla's VPN service, is convenient - I mean who doesn't like free stuff? - I am definitely in the Proton camp here, as far as censorship resistance goes.

While other countries can easily crack down on most VPN providers, I can use Stealth Protocol and bypass all of these (except for China, but then you can use Shadowsocks for that). Regardless, for everything else, Proton works smoothly for me - recently the country I'm in decided it would be a great idea to block Youtube, and apparently the internet operator forgot to turn off the blocking switch, so I have exported OpenVPN profiles of all proton servers and imported them to all of our computers, and it works like a charm.

@o_e_l_e_o: While browsing around Mullvad Browser GitHub page[1] I've found an interesting debate regarding the differences between Mullvad Browser and arkenfox or even Librewolf[2]. In the mist of the debate Thorin-Oakenpants, the owner of arkenfox[3] who ended up working with other privacy related projects as well. According to his vision, the main differences between AF/LW vs Mullvad Browser are the following:
At the end he even goes to say that he'll use MB as a third daily driver (his other two are FF portable stable with AF + nightly). He seems to be supportive of the "hide in the crow" model adopted by Mullvad, albeit the same concern regarding crow size was also addressed by him. Either way, I believe this was a great step in providing another option to browse the web more safely - I guess that we'll see what they achieve in 1 year from now...

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[1]https://github.com/mullvad/mullvad-browser
[2]https://github.com/mullvad/mullvad-browser/issues/1
[3]https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

I've been using paid Proton VPN for a few weeks (before I used Avast, paid, and others free) and I must say that proton is 1000 times better.
It is true that I am not a computer scientist with high expectations, but the stability of the proton VPNs is really excellent and suitable for continuous use even for less experienced people like me.
Proton come with also 15 emails included, and we're not talking about gmail or Libero Mail (Italian provider that never works!  ) but we talk about a service created from CERN in Geneva!

I feel comfortable in recommending the use of proton VPN  

I wouldn't even feel comfortable in using coin control for the second option at all, but some feedback that I got in some other forums and Reddit did in fact show that some users do not care about it, as long as they have their funds consolidated in one address instead of many. I guess this goes to show that, once again, we are a minority regarding the privacy of our coins and actions within the blockchain. Most of the current users that got a hold of bitcoin in the past years are probably investors/average john does that jumped into the ship waiting for it to reach high tides and aren't really interested in what they gave away by buying bitcoin in centralized exchanges.

As for me I'll keep my eyes open from now on to use this option and method of operation. Thank you for enlightening me.

PS: Have you checked out the parent company of Mullvad - Amagicom AB - new product? It's called Tillitis[1] and both the hardware and software will be open source.

From that perspective you're right - I got no rush in consolidating them as of now so I could just push the transaction with a low fee and whenever it happens, it happens.

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I also can't wrap my head around this one. This is perhaps a stupid question but would it make sense to put a limitation to each user to avoid being blocked by Google API due to a large number of requests if the browser ends up being massively used?

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[1]https://www.tillitis.se/

Agreed. So they should adjust their marketing a bit, and focus more on the fingerprinting than on the Tor part. Even better if they focus on tracking too.

It mostly depends on the current transaction fee. I have a 1 sat/vbyte transaction that's unconfirmed for more than a month now. I'm not in a hurry, so that's fine.

If you have multiple dust outputs on the same address, then yes, this is fine and you lose nothing by consolidating all these outputs in to one larger output.

If however you have multiple dust outputs across multiple addresses, then by consolidating them all together in a single transaction you link all these addresses under common ownership, and therefore you link all the transactions which created those dust outputs together as well. You may have reasons that you do not want to link those transactions together as all belonging to the same person.

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I don't really understand the "50 Google searches a day" thing. There are better search engines out there than Google, but if you are desperate for Google results, then you can either use Startpage or SearX configured to return only Google results. Both of these options are free and unlimited.

I messed the edit while trying to reply to both of you. Thank you for letting me know, I've fixed it.

Thank you both for the explanation, it is clear for me now. While reading the definition of "coin control" I thought that it would be a great idea to use the feature to gather all the small inputs that one has in an address and send them all to a single address and it seems that I wasn't wrong considering your thread[2] about dust LoyceV. I'll try it out as soon as possible.

At the end of the day I think that they also don't intend to compete with Tor but instead proved another solution for someone who doesn't want to use DDG or Tor browser (whatever their reasons are). The blog post[2] within Tor also supports our opinion in a way:
I imagine that Mullvad customers will at least try out this new product of the company and probably will end up being a large % of their userbase, but only the future will tell.

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[1]https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/aug-2022-mempool-empty-use-this-opportunity-to-consolidate-your-small-inputs-2848987
[2]https://blog.torproject.org/releasing-mullvad-browser/

Coin control means specifically picking the inputs you want to use (or not use) for each transaction, rather than letting your wallet decide for you. This means deliberately taking care to avoid linking specific UTXOs in the same transaction to protect your privacy.
Pay to many on the other hand is exactly what it means - an option that allows you to specify multiple outputs in a transaction rather than just one. You can manipulate this feature as I described above to redirect any change to somewhere else.

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In terms of the browser, looking in to it a bit more it is obviously not being designed to replace Tor or compete directly with Tor. Rather it has been designed to compete with other non-Tor browsers. Obviously Tor is the gold standard for privacy, but for all those people who will never use Tor due to speed, breaking various websites, or other issues, then this Mullvad browser looks like a good option rather than using some spyware like Google Chrome.

I think I'll probably stick to my multiple very hardened Firefox set ups and forks, but having more privacy focused browsers such as DDG and Mullvad on the market is never a bad thing.

Please fix your quote.

Coin Control is on the input-side, pay-to-many is about outputs.

Don't get me wrong: getting rid of browser fingerprinting has it's perks, they just shouldn't compare it to Tor. That's a whole different level.
It may cause other problems too: if users have the exact same browser fingerprint and use VPN, online casinos can think someone is using multiple accounts.

Thank you both for the tip! I'll try to explore the "pay to many" option in my next transaction and "Coin Control". Is there any difference between the two of them?
As for the subscription, I can't say that a 500 year subscription wouldn't be nice to have in order to pass down from generation to generation, but I think that I'll prefer to avoid accidentally spending such an amount .

I understand your point of view o_e_l_e_o and I'll also give it a few weeks before trying it out. As far as the valid issue pointed out by LoyceV and yourself, I did a little bit of digging within some forums and Reddit and here's[1] an interesting information:
I was hoping for a bit more but that won't stop me from testing out the browser at least and create an opinion of my own. The 50 searches per day doesn't strike me since I don't believe I'm not nearly close to that number per day, but some users may find it quite a small number. Nevertheless it's great to see more private options as far as browsers are concerned (even thought it may be a stripped version of TOR).

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[1]https://libreddit.spike.codes/r/mullvadvpn/comments/12afncj/mullvad_vpn_and_the_tor_project_team_up_to/jersmgd/

For privacy (and optimal transaction fees), you should always use Coin Control. Without coin control, I wouldn't just send large change to Mullvad.

Correct. Or something else than Mullvad.

Allow me to quote them:
This is bad! Tor literally stands for "The onion router", and the main feature is that no single party other than yourself knows all data. Mullvad now recreated the browser fingerprinting features, but that's not the main part of Tor.

Depends on your wallet. If you are using Electrum, for example, then you can use the "pay to many" option and put Mullvad's deposit address with a ! symbol instead of an amount. This will send everything left over from your transaction to Mullvad instead of to a change address. Obviously be careful using this so you don't accidentally send a whole bitcoin to Mullvad or something silly like that (unless of course you want to buy a 500 year subscription ).

I had no idea they were launching a browser, so thanks for this! I'll definitely check it out. Based only on what you've quoted though, I'd be wary of using it immediately - a "hide in the crowd" approach only works when there is a crowd to hide in. It will initially have a very small user base until more people learn about it and start using it, so better to stick to Tor or Firefox for now.

I'm sorry for asking this @LoyceV but is this achievable by selecting the option "Coin Control"? I imagine that what you're saying is that if a user already knows that his address balance will be left with a small amount of Bitcoin at the moment of the transaction he/she should instruct for the change to be delivered directly to Mullvad address?

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Speaking of Mullvad, while this isn't related to a VPN it does still involve Mullvad - they've just launched their browser in partnership with TOR Project[1][2]. I'm tempted to try it out as I really like Mullvad as a company and I think that they are one of the few VPN's providers that are really fighting for their users and for what is right. I'll highly @o_e_l_e_o as well as I believe he'll be interested in knowing about another privacy option as a browser. According to the news being shared on TOR website[1] the main difference between the TOR browser and Mullvad one is the following:

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[1]https://blog.torproject.org/releasing-mullvad-browser/
[2]https://mullvad.net/en/browser

Thanks, I updated prices of every listed VPN. Seems, there is on average 8% increase in monthly prices but noticeable changes in yearly plans and prices.

Depends, for some people it can be a concern, for some people it's okay or doesn't even matter. For me, and I think for many people, it's a concern. When VPN company claims that it's transparent and honest and lies and only admits when it has no other choice, doesn't look like a trustworthy companion.

Also, if I were you, I wouldn't trust any audits done for VPN companies. No company choose audit company that publishes negative result for them. They choose those independent companies that publish what VPN providers want. Word Audit is just a marketing term in their case, no one should assume that these statements or audit companies are actually true and honest.

The "one-time payment address" is the only option they offer. I've never tested what happens if you create a few of them, and they confirm in random order.
For future use: don't get any dust in your wallet. Just send all small change to Mullvad directly instead of going to your wallet first.

It appears that the minimum price is $3 now ^{[at least three pro locations]}: Screenshot
^{- BTW, their yearly plan is $69 at the moment.}

Surprisingly, I didn't know about that incident even though I was one of their users at the time ^[SMH]... Personally, I have mixed feelings about the route they took after knowing that one of the servers that they were renting has been breached ^{[attacker got an expired TLS key]}, but when I look at the whole picture ^{[e.g. no log]}, perhaps it's not as bad as it sounds: Why the NordVPN network is safe after a third-party provider breach

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@LoyceV
I've been using Mullvad for the past few months, but I still can't find a way to add more credit using the dust or rather small amounts that I have in some of my addresses ^{[I'm a bit confused if I should still use the one-time generated payment address for it or I should do something else]}!
^{- Based on the current situation of the network, it might look like a bad idea, but I'm just going to use free accelerators with them.}

In table I underlined that this vpn is free and min price starts from 2$ a month. I took my link from Pricing page. When you click on Pricing on windscribe's website, you get the exact link that I put in table. I think this was right thing to do because that page also lists countries that are included in Free plan. Also, when you register, as far as I can recall, you have choice to choose either free plan or paid one or build your own plan.

If I say that this VPN is the best from privacy, it means I'm taking the responsibility on myself which I'm not because this is not my business. I filtered and provided a list of VPNs that are good. Which one to trust, it's something that you have to do your own deep research and decide yourself.
Also, I don't control prices, so, if monthly prices are the same, that's because this is open market and market regulates the prices, supply & demand.

Why will someone offer VPN and privacy for free? Think about it. Not every free VPN offers privacy, they log your data and sell it, that's how they generate profit.

How can you say that on a company that got hacked and didn't admit it till someone published their private key on twitter. Company that acts like that, doesn't care about your privacy but about its financial success.

AFAICS, they've "only" been partially audited, and I'm not sure by which firm: Has Windscribe been audited?

There's a saying that "if something is free, you’re the product"!

AFAIK, none of these two have been audited by a reputable auditing firm... In other words, you should take everything they say with a grain of salt!

• A good example of a VPN provider that cares about its users is NordVPN ^{[for what it's worth, I'm no longer one of its users]}: NordVPN verifies no-logs statement for the third time