Recommend me a VPN

[figmentPez]

For numerous reasons I'm considering using a VPN, does anyone have any suggestions? I don't have any experience using one. What should I know about using a VPN?

 

[GasBandit]

ProtonVPN is the gold standard for privacy. They're independently audited to make sure that nothing you do through them can be traced back to you.

My GF likes NordVPN. They have similar privacy policies to Proton.

NordVPN is faster, ProtonVPN is cheaper. Neither explicitly limit your speed, but the busier your server is the less speed you get.

I myself use a VPN that comes bundled with my seedbox (Seedboxes.CC). It's "fine."

 

[PatrThom]

Not the first time we've discussed the idea on the forum (previously) (also this sorta), but the first thing to discuss (the first thing I always discuss with clients, at least) is WHY you (think you) need a VPN. A VPN only really does three things:

1. Guarantees your network traffic is encrypted directly upstream of your device (so your ISP or the hotel or your school/work or the airport/grocery/coffee shop people can't snoop your traffic).
2. Prevents the above people from knowing who you are actually talking to, because they can see only that you are talking to the VPN people.
3. Prevents the people you are talking TO from knowing exactly where you are located (unless you tell them) because all your traffic looks like it's coming from the VPN people's machine rather than your own.

If any of these specific three things are among your desired goals, then it is appropriate to consider a VPN. A VPN's function is to act as a proxy between you and the rest of the Internet. There are additional value-adds that some VPN people might include (such as ad filtering), but the three things listed above are the ones you can essentially ONLY accomplish by having a VPN.

In other words, you really only need a VPN if you are trying to:

• Hide the content of your traffic (can't hide the traffic itself, obviously) from any device(s) upstream of you (e.g., torrenting, journalism, domestic abuse, surveillance, confidentiality).
• Change the origin of your traffic so the device(s) you are talking to "think" you are somewhere else (e.g., avoid media blackouts/geo lockouts, connect to home/work/school as if you were physically on the LAN, disguise your geographic location when posting on an Internet forum).
• Disguise the destination of your traffic so that everybody between your device and the VPN entry point will not know your ultimate destination (e.g., shop from work, bypass blocked content, make an anonymous tip, plan a divorce).

None of the above are perfect, as there are ways to essentially circumvent all of the above if the adversary you were trying to hide from was, say, the Chinese government, but that brings up something that most VPN ads leave out, which is that you must remember that the VPN provider itself absolutely WILL be able to see everything you are trying to hide--your traffic, your source, your destination--ALL of it. You will also need to remember that using a VPN will increase the computational requirements of your source device, so expect significantly lower battery life on any device that has a VPN active.

As far as which VPN to choose, rather than recommending any specific provider, I will continue to refer everyone over to That One Privacy Site by That One Privacy Guy. TOPG has done far more research than I am able to, and you should be able to winnow his list down to a handful of candidates based on whatever criteria you value most. The VPN landscape is somewhat fluid, with ownership of some providers consolidating/changing hands over time, and not in ways that inspire confidence. That VPN darling from 5 years ago might actually be owned by an arm of the US government now, you never know.

--Patrick

 

[figmentPez]

You will also need to remember that using a VPN will increase the computational requirements of your source device, so expect significantly lower battery life on any device that has a VPN active.

That is something I did not know.

Yet another thing that would have been better to make dedicated silicon for, than the AI bullshit chip makers are currently obsessed with.

 

[PatrThom]

There are algorithms which make use of on-chip acceleration (AES-NI is probably the most common on desktops), but that means additional chip real estate has to be sacrificed in the name of purpose-built hardware "blocks" (example from Apple's current CPUs), real estate which is at a premium in a handheld mobile SoC. Modern mobile processors already have quite a few dedicated blocks for things like SSL/TLS, JPEG, H.264, etc., because these are all things that people are expected to do on their phones A LOT as they browse the WWWeb, watch Netflix, and check their email (the battery life gains are deemed worth the extra die space), but I don't think that VPNs are common enough (on mobile, at least) for mfrs to go including additional specialized hardware to handle VPN coprocessor duties, at least not yet.

Plus there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg debate to solve as to which VPN protocol is "the best" since that will have a strong bearing on which coprocessor(s) everyone decides to include, since if the overall standard ultimately ends up being something different than the block your mfr included, then that device ends up with a power-sucking part of your chip that ultimately does nothing useful. As an example, Apple made a big deal about how quickly their iPhone 12 series could render 4K video "as fast as a desktop," but the reason it can do that is because it shares the same media codec blocks as their desktop chips, so it is really those dedicated blocks doing the work SO LONG AS you are exporting your video in the format the media block understands (H.264 & H.265/HEVC according to Wikipedia). If you try to export your video in some other format, then the chip can't lean on those blocks to do all that work, and so it will have to do it "by hand" (so to speak) and your phone will get a lot hotter...and your battery life will tank. So if the world suddenly decides it is going to move everything to H.266/UHEVC* because file sizes are drastically smaller or some junk, then all that fancy extra single-purpose hardware is useless and suddenly the phone is "nowhere near as fast as it was." I frequently have to explain to people that the reason their 8yr-old Dell laptop suddenly can't stream video/do Zoom as fast as it used to or starts chewing through battery 3x faster after you ran that update is because Zoom probably changed their codec to use something newer than what's built into their laptop's built-in DX11-era iGPU or whatever, and the only way to fix that is to either revert the update (which might mean not being able to join meetings because outdated) or else it's finally time to buy a new computer.

--Patrick
*Not a real codec, at least as far as I know. Just a hypothetical example.