Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Good choice for privacy, not so much for piracy. They removed their port forwarding feature a while ago.

Their CEO praised Trump/the Republican Party. He got widely criticised for it. Proton released a damage control statement but later deleted it after it made things worse.

People are now moving away from Proton as a result.

The CEO said that Trump chose a great pick and sided with Republicans and there was a firestorm over it, he doubled down on his position through the official Proton channel.

https://archive.ph/2yWGz

Like basically all tech companies, the leadership are libertarian tech bros. It sucks, but whatever. The problem is also that the CEO (?) has been making public statements to try and cozy up to the trump administration over the past few months

Some of that still falls under the LTB effect (These policies benefit the company so fuck everyone else, etc) and it DOES make sense for a company to try and earn themselves an exception for the upcoming hellscape in a market that will REALLY want VPNs. But it still leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

Not in an "I MUST LEAVE PROTON NOW" state since I like the products because they tend to be pretty honest about what they will and won't do when the goons come a knocking and that mostly boils down to "cooperate. So do X Y and Z to protect yourself by preventing us from having the information they want"). But that, plus protonmail being kind of a shitshow if you want to keep offline copies of your emails, is motivation to shop around.

Just FYI, the majority of Proton AG (which includes all Proton services) is owned by a non-profit body called the "Proton Foundation". This are headed by a board of 5 members, including Andy (CEO) and Tim Berners-Lee (the literal father of the internet as we know it).

Proton is fine.

Proton recently closed their masterdon account because of the mutual hostility

The requirement for port forwarding narrows that down to AirVPN and Windscribe, which is an unfortunately small set of choices.

I agree on this with the exception of PIA.

• Marketing is BS like most VPN
• Company is based in the USA
• They do analytics
• You cannot register "anonymously"

It's not the worst VPN you could choose but there is better options.

PIA user here. It gets the job done

I've noticed that the people who get the worse deal tend to be the most prolific and the loudest about it.

I think it's a combination of shills and useful idiots working in tandem to take advantage of people without experience.

See things for yourselves, guys. Don't read some upvoted comment on the internet and immediately assume it's fact.

PIA is such a weird one. They're massive and know what they're doing but ownership and jurisdiction have always been questionable. I have long suspected they cooperate with GHCQ but only on legitimate national security cases not piracy.

Other providers who know what they're doing include cryptostorm.is, PIA, and ipredator.se

Or make your own with a VPS with openvpn or witeguard

Worth noting that Italy (location of airvpn) hates vpns and is constantly fucking around with them, to the point air doesn't even actually operate in Italy to preserve users privacy. Right now, theres no immediate risk, but it' is worth keeping an eye on the political situation in Italy regarding VPN laws