If you are a pirate VPN is an essential tool. I am trying to ascertain the popularity of various VPNs in piracy community. In this excerise, I will list several Popular VPNs in the comment if you use one of them just upvote that comment and reply the reason. If you don’t find your VPN listed add a comment with just their name. Reply the reason to it. This make it easier to understand the real life user cases.
P.S: I am only looking for paid VPNs please don’t mention “free vpn”.
You must log in or register to comment.
Mullvad because they don’t need your name, and you can pay by cash anonymously.
They also regularly have independent security audits
and their servers run everything on RAM meaning the second it loses power all data is lost.
Mullvad because https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/
deleted by creator
Mullavad
I used Mullvad, found them great for everything and would be my only VPN if they were big enough to facilitate streaming via other countries. Due to smaller number of servers it isn’t possible to use a lot of streaming services with them…I found this out when o/s and needing to VPN into my home country to access my geo-locked streaming service.
Proton VPN
Same. Since I am a paying Protonmail user I’ve switched to the Proton VPN. It has been fine.
I see that Proton allows payment via PayPal. Is it possible to pay via PayPal anonymously? I don’t use PP much at all so IDK.
I’d be shocked if it were, as I think they zealously honor KYC/AML/OFAC.
AirVPN
Port forwarding, relatively cheap, runs a good Black Friday sale, and I think its log policy is decent from what I remember.
The airvpn client feels pretty outdated compared to something like mullvad. This might not be a big deal for everyone and there are ways around it but I always see airvpn recommended but noone ever mentions this
I use the native wireguard client on Linux
The Wireguard client is good enough. I wouldn’t trust VPN providers’ custom apps to be as secure, privacy-focused or reliable as the official client ones.
Ever since I switched to Linux I don’t really use Eddie as much, but I agree it could be more intuitive. Even on Windows I typically only spent 30 seconds or less with the client, though, so it didn’t bother me.
I also just switched from Mullvad to OpenVPN and I’m very happy with it. I grabbed the 3-year Halloween promo.
Currently proton its decent though I’m thinking of moving to mullvad even though they’ve removed portforwarding.
I did this and found it worked way better in terms of stability. Bonus is that Mullvad has a proper Linux client whereas Proton’s is just a cobbled-together mess that’s not worth using and is no where close to feature parity with the Windows client
And in the case that your Linux distro doesn’t have a client in their repos, you can very easily use Mullvad with wireguard in the terminal.
you can very easily use Mullvad with wireguard in the terminal
To be fair, same with Proton. OpenVPN and WireGuard configurations are available.
I’ve used both and much prefer Proton for sailing the seas. Connecting through France (highest speed + p2p) with port forwarding is the best torrent speed I’ve had on a VPN. The only slight annoyance is it switching the forwarded port every time it reconnects, but I run it 24/7 anyway.
Just skip the “official” client and run it through gluetun. It’s a much better experience.
PIA, just because I’m lazy and it’s been fine for like a decade. If there is something better, happy to hear about it.
PIA was sold to Kape Technologies a few years back and they have somewhat questionable history and that made me switch to Mullvad. Not because I thought it’s better VPN per-se, but because I wanted away from PIA and Mullvad seemed popular.
The issue is who he sold it to – the notorious creator of some pernicious data-huffing ad-ware, Crossrider. The UK-based company was cofounded by an ex-Israeli surveillance agent and a billionaire previously convicted of insider trading who was later named in the Panama Papers. It produced software which previously allowed third-party developers to hijack users’ browsers via malware injection, redirect traffic to advertisers and slurp up private data.
Yeah it’s cheap as shit too
I’m on pia too I have a seed box anyway so it’s just for https queries. The seed box transfers locally via ssh
AirVPN because of port forwarding.
What do you use it for?
The port forwarding? It makes torrenting work better.
Interesting, I haven’t experienced anything like this with regards to torrent failures. I don’t entirely follow what failure means in this context though. I have torrents that have never completed due to lack of seeds and peers. I don’t think I’ve had a torrent fail in thousands over the last few years (data based on my current NAS box, but was true prior to that too)
The link above explains it better than I can, but without port forwarding it’ll still work, but it works better with an open port.
Yeah but the reason to do it is stated as:
If you are OK with your downloads failing in 10% of cases then continue as usual.
Unless I’m missing something, there’s no point in me pursuing it as I don’t have the problem described, because my Torrents aren’t failing.
I have torrents that have never completed due to lack of seeds and peers.
That’s what failing means here. You know how you sometimes see a torrent site list a non-zero number of seeders but when you try to download it, you don’t connect to any of them and it shows 0 seeders in your client? That’s what happens when neither you nor the seeders have port forwarding set up.
AirVPN, limited on details for signing up, can pay in crypto and easy port forwarding.
Good config generator as well
Proton because I have their Unlimited plan.
ProtonVpn
I love seeing these posts because I’ve been pirating for almost 20 years and never once have I paid for or used a VPN. I’ve never received a letter from my ISP about it. If you use a trustworthy private tracker you don’t fucking need it. Downvote me all you want but I’m not wrong.
Do you have any invites? I’m a good seeder.
I do have invites but 2/3 people I’ve invited were banned for HnR so generally I don’t invite people unless I know them. If I invite another user who doesn’t seed I’ll lose my invites completely so I’m understandably wary about handing them out
Makes sense.
Okay so appereantly you have exclusive sources trackers. I would also love to join one and seed but I never do, cause I thought the most illegal thing was the sharing/seeding part. What id you guys thoughts on that?
Someone has to seed. I am willing to risk it for the biscuit.
A true hero indeed.
I think you meant to reply to my post. Yes it’s the exclusive trackers that keep you safe from needing a VPN, seeding is always part of torrenting. You can earn your way into those bigger private trackers by joining an invite forum and contributing enough, once you show good ratios form other sites you’ll get invites to the big ones like TorrentLeech
Well I honestly replied to both of you guys cause I found it interesting how he asked for a invite for the private torrent club.
Thanks for explaining it! Do you perhaps know a forum where I can start, or at least one you can recommend? I want to get a paid VPN once I am not a student anymore.
I used a site called torrent-invites back in the day, now this was like 15 or 20 years ago so sadly I don’t know of a modern one, but I am sure you can find one if you look around. I wouldn’t worry about a VPN unless you are using ThePirateBay or some crap like that
Same but in Austria those letters aren’t a thing.
Come on, don’t waste Tor resources for downloading pirated content. That’s what VPNs are for. Journalists and activists in countries like Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. rely on Tor in order to do their work, just use a VPN for downloading, it’s also much faster.
Tor is for privacy and to circumvent censorship. What OP is asking is privacy…You could help them running a relay or bridge, it is easy, I have a few running.
I run 2 nodes at my house, several nodes (including exit nodes) on different VPS providers and I use the Snowflake addon in all of my browsers. But Tor is meant for people who require anonymity and the ability to circumvent censorship, not for those who don’t want to pay for a VPN.
I was running in the past years 2 guard/middle relays, now I prefer only bridges and snowflake, to help users in a countries with censorship, like Iran or turkmenistan.
That’s great! All parts of the network are important.
Currently testing Windscribe because they had good offer for a yearly subscription and some interesting features like ad block (mostly useful for mobile). Their privacy level is sufficient for what I’m doing currently, but if I ever need I’ll just Mullvad.
Proton VPN since it’s cheaper than ExpressVPN but apparently faster than other paid VPN options, while also having port forwarding to improve torrent connectivity.
