Well, just that. Wich is stronger against trackers, hackers and doxxing threats? Proton VPN (I’m using this one actually), or Mullvad VPN?
Mullvad. It’s cheaper than Proton. But Proton has more servers. Like Proton even provies Indian IPs, but the servers are hosted in Singapore, which may be something people need, as Mullvad do not have any servers with Indian IPs.
You can also try IVPN, it is almost same like Mullvad, no email for account, pay using Monero etc, but you can get a one week subscription for $2.
IVPN imo, just because it offers reverse split tunneling, if you prefer having more countries to choose from you can use Proton.
Mullvad hasn’t yet shown themselves fed- friendly.
Proton has.
Mullvad is the answer.
Source please, we in the /privacy community genuinely want to learn so when such things do happen, we all benefit from factual information. Please do not assume we all know what you are referring to. It is particularly in this kind of cases when, for example with Signal what was “shared” with authorities is basically irrelevant, cf https://signal.org/bigbrother/ so we must be precise.
Proton has cooperated with subpoenas on multiple occasions leading to the user’s arrest.
While they may challenge them, the point is that they have cooperated and thus are not reliable. There are no reported cases of Mullvad doing the same.
There are ample links from multiple sources that describe this with a simple search.
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Proton has cooperated with subpoenas on multiple occasions leading to the user’s arrest.
My thinking is, if the CIA (or whatever country’s equivalent) is on to you, it’s pretty much jover.
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That’s because no one running a service will go to jail for you. None.
Not ProtonVPN, not Mullvad, not IVPN, not Lemmy Instances.
Imagine you run one of these, and you received a lawful order in your jurisdiction.
Turn over data or go to jail for a long time.
Would you go to jail to protect user privacy?
The only thing Proton does better is because they are under Swiss Jurisdiction, which has stricter control over when a court order can be issued. But if a court order goes to Proton, they can’t ignore it.
Also: Protonmail =/= ProtonVPN, they are under different laws. In Switzerland, Mail providers have to provide IP addresses upon a subpoena, VPN providers do not. If those users had used ProtonVPN to access their Protonmail, they’d be safe.
Interesting, thanks.
Please do provide a link, especially if it’s very easy to find. I’m not saying anything you say is wrong, only that if it’s not an opinion, then a link from a trusted source helps other to understand the situation.
It’s a somewhat convoluted story. Here are some links
- https://proton.me/blog/climate-activist-arrest
- https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/ydcek3/what_became_of_the_french_climate_activist/
- https://www.wired.com/story/protonmail-amends-policy-after-giving-up-activists-data/
The takeaway is when he logged into his Protonmail they logged his IP address which helped track this individual down. But note that Reddit thread I linked. I also cannot find that much information about “what happened next,” or the details of who was arrested and why.
There may be other examples, but this particular case kinda hit the rounds back when it happened.
Excerpts from your third link https://www.wired.com/story/protonmail-amends-policy-after-giving-up-activists-data/
As usual, the devil is in the details—ProtonMail’s original policy simply said that the service does not keep IP logs “by default.” However, as a Swiss company, ProtonMail was obliged to comply with a Swiss court’s demand that it begin logging IP address and browser fingerprint information for a particular ProtonMail account.
According to multiple statements ProtonMail issued on Monday, it was unable to appeal the Swiss demand for IP logging on that account. The service could not appeal both because a Swiss law had actually been broken and because “legal tools for serious crimes” were used—tools that ProtonMail believes were not appropriate to the case at hand, but which it was legally require to comply with.
ProtonMail also operates a VPN service called ProtonVPN, and it points out that Swiss law prohibits the country’s courts from compelling a VPN service to log IP addresses. In theory, if Youth for Climate had used ProtonVPN to access ProtonMail, the Swiss court could not have compelled the service to expose its “real” IP address.
Proton did not voluntarily log IPs, they were under a lawful court order and were out of appeal options.
Like I said, no one running a service will go to jail for you. None.
Not ProtonVPN, not Mullvad, not IVPN, not Lemmy Instances.
If a legal court order is received, they will conply after they run out of appeals
Imagine you run one of these services, and you received a lawful order in your jurisdiction.
You can choose to turn over data or go to jail for a long time.
Would you go to jail to protect user privacy?
That’s why its not only a company’s privacy practices you need to worry about, but also the jurisdiction. Choose a service that’s is in a privacy friendly jurisdiction.
Also, this is about Protonmail, which is under different laws than ProtonVPN.
When did Proton show themselves fed-friendly? Also what “fed” are we talking about? The Swiss Federation?
I guess he’s referring to this
Proton’s statement from the linked article
“We are aware of the Spanish terrorism case involving alleged threats to the King of Spain, but as a general rule, we do not comment on specific cases. Proton has minimal user information, as illustrated by the fact that in this case, data obtained from Apple was used to identify the terrorism suspect. Proton provides privacy by default and not anonymity by default because anonymity requires certain user actions to ensure proper OPSEC, such as not adding your Apple account as an optional recovery method.”
I prefer Mullvad. Regularly audited, can pay with cash if preferred, everything runs on RAM, and hasn’t had any controversies so far. The only issue for some is no port forwarding. I also like the multi-hop and DAITA features.
Mullvad.
Proton has a Trump ass kisser working in their C-suite.
Okay, but how does the political stance of Proton workers affect my privacy?
At the moment, it doesn’t. He could decide to violate Swiss law and turn data over to Trump.
That would certainly affect your privacy.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but he doesn’t have the power to do that. Proton has a board with many members calling the shots.
There are sellouts and traitors.
Andy done some bootlicking… I guess whoring for the regime is supposed to print generally but I don’t think he understands his user base lol
Imagine
Mullvad. Their servers run on RAM, and they don’t have any information about you no email, no username you can even pay with cash. However, Proton has split tunneling, while Mullvad does not.
servers run on RAM
What’s the different with zego logs alternatives, e.g. https://openvpn.net/as-docs/tutorials/tutorial--turn-off-logging.html
If, for some reason, there is any data on the server and a malicious actor pulls it physically out, the data would disappear. There are probably other pros with RAM-only servers that I don’t know.
Mullvad does have split tunneling on Linux and Android. I don’t know about Windows.
I don’t know why I wrote split tunneling, I meant port forwarding. Thanks😀. Windows also has split tunneling.
Mullvad is much friendlier to privacy, but their proxies get blocked by A LOT of stuff, they also have a very small number of proxies. Mullvad collects literally nothing about you, but that’s a double edged sword. not having any way to verify exactly who paid money into which account number means they can’t help you if someone steals your account. I also have it on good authority that mullvad isn’t very reliable at getting past more aggressive censorship firewalls. the one in china for example won’t allow you to use mullvad unless the sim you’re connecting from is a US one.
Proton doesn’t record anything you’re doing with their VPN and they’ve had to prove that many times and their “sentinel” program and the 2FA and double password you can enable make it very hard if not impossible for someone to mootch off your account. I very rarely get blocked by anything when I use proton VPN, if I ever do get blocked I just have to change the proxy I’m on. I don’t even have to change the location most of the time because proton VPN has a huge number of proxies at each location.
Proton also gives you the ability to save recovery phrases and recovery files if you lose your password(s) or your 2FA
ente auth and ageis auth are great for storing your 2FAs and they allow you to back them up to a file if your account with ente fails in some way or if you forget the password to get into your ageis
as for those recovery files and phrases I talked about. save them in text files on a small capacity flash drive that you don’t use for anything else
Who knows how to steal you mull account with out you knowing? This seems over blown atleast from that perspective. I’m sure it’s possible but unless you are incredibly slopping opsec I doubt it’s even on the list of problems. Given all other things you could be doing.
it’s just a string of numbers with no password
How would anyone get the long string though? Realistically speaking. It would be difficult and unlikely.
It’s just numbers, no punctuation marks, no letters, no math symbols. No entropy really.
For most people that’s not an issue, but some people out there can guess them.
one way to mitigate that problem is simply to not load your mullvad account with more than 1 year of time at any given time. If your mullvad account has like…10 years of time then yeah, lots of people are going to mootch if they figure out which number has that
Or even if they don’t mootch, they could just remove the devices on your account and fuck with you
Unless you are willing to do the math, “no entropy really” deserves a [citation needed]
Unless you are willing to do the math, “no entropy really” deserves a [citation needed]
what kind of password has more entropy? one with capital and lowercase letters, numbers, math symbols and puncuation marks?
or the one with only numbers?
Is there really a citation needed for that?
Entropy is calculated from the character set size to the exponent the length of the string: E = log2(R^L). A long string of numbers can have more entropy than a shorter alphanumeric string with special characters. I looked it up and apparently their account number is 16 digits. That’s 53 bits of entropy, which is not guessable. Someone brute forcing would have quadrillions of login attempts to try.
Mullvad also has hidden servers they give access to on request if you can’t access the regular ones. Can help with government censorship etc
Good to know, but how can you safely request them without giving away that you’re using them?
What method does the request go through? What happens when those proxies get blocked by the censorship firewalls too?
I just used email lol, and I don’t think it’s possible to hide that you’re connecting to a certain IP. And if they get blocked too I’ll email them again D:
the ministry of truth in china would be monitoring where those emails are caming and going at minimum.
In developed countries where people don’t get arrested for wrongthink mullvad is great, I’m just saying, be prepared if you plan on going to a place with a censorship firewall
Tor Browser
Bruh, good luck trying to watch a youtube video, or even just browse a news article.
Tor only works for a small number of sites.
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I haven’t really played around with VPNs to make the comparison. Tor breaks for a significant number of sites, but it’s still a pretty small minority; “only works for a small number of sites” is a comical untruth.
If Tor breaks more sites than VPNs do (which I think is likely), I think it is because Tor is secure. It is easier to do malicious things behind Tor because you have, for all intents and purposes, an unbreakable shield of privacy while you are doing those malicious things. And so, site operators tend to block it more readily than they do VPNs.
Whether you want to make the tradeoff in favor of convenience or genuine privacy is, of course, up to you. It’s not surprising to me that the Lemmy userbase is more or less unanimous in favor of convenience. Of course it is fine if you want, but you don’t need to misrepresent how things are to make it the only possible choice.
Why isn’t the Tor browser more popular here?
It’s generally slow as fuck
See my other comment; I think the same user contingent that likes VPNs tends to also want maximum convenience, which isn’t Tor. Of course they frame convenience as the only relevant factor, instead of acknowledging that being the tradeoff they’re making.
100% Mullvad
A VPN is a VPN, having a different IP address is equally effective against those things no matter which IP it is. The issue is whether or not anyone can associate that IP with yours, and what that comes down to is how willing they are to give up their records when the government asks nicely (or, even more importantly: not so nicely.) I’m not familiar enough with either service to be able to speak to that, but everyone else seems to be talking about features, prices, politics, etc when none of those directly address your questions.
False and fake information.
lol, k, I definitely respect the opinion of someone who drops a half-assed comment like that without bothering to offer what they believe to be the correct information.
I can’t presume to know what they meant, specifically, but I think they’re probably referring to the fact that a VPN provider has access to all of the data you’re transmitting through their exit nodes, and a malicious one could harvest and sell it. Or work with LE and hand over all tracking data, all information about your browsing habits for the past year, all of the times you visited PornHub and Grinr, how many times you visited that trans support website… everything LE could get by surveiling your behavior if you weren’t using a VPN.
A VPN is only worth how trustworthy the VPN provider is. Mullvad, for instance, claims to keep no logs, so a search warrant for logged data is useless. This is not true of all VPN providers.
If that’s the case then both of you failed to read the part of my comment where I explicitly addressed that:
The issue is whether or not anyone can associate that IP with yours, and what that comes down to is how willing they are to give up their records when the government asks nicely (or, even more importantly: not so nicely.)
I admit I didn’t include the possibility of the VPN operator themselves being malicious, but it seems weird to call me out for not addressing the issue of record security re:governments/LE when pretty much the entire point of my comment was to address that specific issue because no one else was, no?
You start with “a VPN is a VPN.” However you qualify it, it’s not true unless you’re merely stating a tautology, which doesn’t seem constructive or helpful.
You ever notice how it sometimes helps to read the whole sentence to understand what some part of it means in context?
A VPN is a VPN, having a different IP address is equally effective against those things no matter which IP it is.
There’s a comma after that second VPN so obviously it’s related to what follows, which is the part where I describe exactly how a VPN is a VPN: in terms of getting a different IP address. This is twice now you’ve gone way out on a limb here trying to back the play of some fucking troll who didn’t bother to explain themselves and I’m not sure if that’s where you want to be. Picking through my comment and taking bits out of context to feed back to me as ‘evidence’ to back up your pedantry and assumption that the rest of the text of that same comment shows you to be wrong about is not a good look. If you’re going to nitpick my shit to death then you should at least try to read the whole thing and understand how each of the parts relate to each other first, otherwise people might mistake you for some fucking troll too (albeit a clearly slightly more intelligent one since you can actually elucidate what your issue is with what I said, regardless of whether or not it’s remotely accurate.)
Wow. You are a capital-D douche.
Mullvad of course. Proton is American right?
Proton is Swiss.
Exception when gargling orange.
Ok. Better.
Maybe try both!! I love both VPNs
I like Mullvad better
I have and use both.
Without choosing some sort of dns based ip blacklist (offered by both providers btw), neither one really does what you asked about.
What are you actually trying to prevent? If you don’t know what language to use, just describe the situation.
Do VPN’s actually protect against any of that? They’re basically only useful if you want to get around your country’s internet filters, log into a website that has blocked your IP, or hide your traffic from the government (and in the latter’s case, Tor is probably a better pick).
I guess it may help with tracking, but there are so many ways in which your tracked, is your IP even one of them?
Precisely this. Consumer VPNs are not tools for security or anonymity. They won’t protect you from most kinds of fingerprinting or tracking beyond IP-based tracking. They have relatively specific uses. I recommend Privacy Guides’ article on them for further reading: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/vpn-overview/
