Having a hard time settling on a VPN (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by DonnieDarkmode@lemm.ee to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

44 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I torrent (on the same PC that I run a Plex server from), but also auto connect on my devices whenever I’m on public wifi, so speed and avoiding blocks/captchas is also important. From what I understand having port forwarding will make a big difference in my torrent transfer speeds and ability to connect to peers.

I’m currently using Nord, but I’d like to make the switch to a company with a better privacy track record. I’m still really drawn to PIA because of the speeds and port forwarding, but I know their ownership is pretty sketchy, even if there’s nothing to point to there (yet). Mullvad dropped port forwarding, which seems to leave ProtonVPN. But now I’m hearing that the influx of Russian users post-invasion has increased the number of sites and services that block PVPN servers?

It seems like despite the huge amount of choices, nothing checks all the boxes except PIA. Am I missing something, or misinformed?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] facow@hexbear.net 7 points 1 year ago

I use PIA because it's cheap as dirt. I don't use their client and I have it setup so exclusively my torrent client uses it. It works for my use case because I'm pretty much just trying to avoid nasty letters from my ISP. I wouldn't trust them with any of my regular traffic because they're sketchy and there's got to be a reason they're so cheap.

Although I would consider what your usecase for a VPN is - ie what attack vectors are you trying to protect against when using it for regular traffic? There's arguably very little a VPN does to protect you on public WiFi and also opens you up to new risks

[-] DonnieDarkmode@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Well my hope was that it would protect against things like packet sniffing and in case I connect to an evil twin (if I’m using that term correctly). But I’ll be the first to admit my knowledge there is incredibly limited, and I wasn’t aware that it would actually create new vulnerabilities. Would you be able to explain a bit?