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VPN Comparison Chart
- marklawrutgers 11y agoHere's the link so that the top and left tabs stay while you scroll: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FJTvWT5RHFSYuEoFVpAeQjuQPU4BVzbOigT0xebxTOw https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FJTvWT5RHFSYuEoFVpAe... I guess something about htmlview?sle=true breaks that.
- brillenfux 11y agoBut it always redirects to it ... :/
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pyre 11y agoWhen a Google Doc gets high traffic, they start serving up the HTML version, which doesn't support locked rows/columns.
- dguido 11y agoThis is pretty useless. Put them all under the category of "centralized one-hop VPN." Each of these is a sitting duck for surveillance, law enforcement, hackers, and more! It doesn't even matter who runs it, each one is an attractive enough target for someone to learn how to subvert. And then what? You'll never find out all your data is being scooped up or potentially modified. If you want to protect your network communications, run your own endpoint. Projects like Streisand and Tinfoil's OpenVPN setup scripts let you stand up and tear down VPN endpoints instantly (just remember to ditch Tor from Streisand, see why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10735529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10735529). https://github.com/jlund/streisand https://github.com/jlund/streisand https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/vpn/new https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/vpn/new I would be truly interested if someone developed Ansible scripts that setup an OpenIKED server (http://www.openiked.org/ http://www.openiked.org/) on your choice of cloud providers, and spit out the configuration instructions for your mobile phone. iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 support IKEv2 out of the box now: https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ipsec/current/msg09931.html https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ipsec/current/msg09931...
- chuckit 11y agoYour comment is pretty useless to the majority of people who want to simply protect their internet activity in the most easily accessible way.
- mjs7231 11y agoHis argument is also flawed in that he says you need to roll your own because the VPN service providers can be compromised. Well, where are you going to run your server then? Any endpoint can be compromised by the business that owns it weather it be your ISP, AWS, or whatever else you plan to use.
- bigiain 11y agoAgreed. You need to determine who your adversary is (at least the category of adversary they're in). If your adversary is The NSA, you're probably fucked already - get off the internet. If your adversary is your local drug or anti-terror law enforcement, they're probably getting "hints" from the NSA and likely parallel reconstructing evidence against you based on that. If your adversary is closer to local cops, MPAA/RIAA, your boss, your parents, your ex-wife's lawyer, or your ISP - this list provides a great deal of useful information.
- narrowrail 11y agoWhat if your adversary is the pervasive data collection entities in the business of selling eyeballs (aka ad networks and that related ecosystem)?
- bigiain 11y agoGood question - I guess the quick answer is "the most anonymous and secure VPN in the universe isn't going to help if you browse to pages with Facebook like buttons in the same browser where you've got an actively logged in Facebook session - or even non-logged-in session cookies". (Substitute Twitter/Google/Yahoo/whoever as appropriate) Browser/cookie hygiene is orthogonal to VPN/network hygiene.
- gilrain 11y agoIn addition to its excellent scorecard here, I can report that I've been extremely happy with IVPN. Very easy to deal with, even for detailed, technical support requests. I got an immediate response from an engineer which addressed my complaint in detail (poor port forwarding setup), and even gave me a timeline for when they were going to fix it. And they did fix it! The port forwarding is great, now. Also, since this does matter a lot: I have a 100 Mbps connection, and I get between 50-80 Mbps through almost all of their servers, barring understandably slow countries like Hong Kong. Oh, also, they have multihop, and you select your own entry and exit server from among their pool. I have no relationship with them, just a satisfied customer, relieved to have found a reliable, consumer VPN after many attempts.
- chuckit 11y agoAnother satisfied customer here. I've been using them without issue for just over a year and it has been excellent. As my other comment in this thread would suggest, I just wanted a simple solution with a low barrier to entry.
- newman314 11y agoHave you tried gaming through the VPN perchance?
- newman314 11y agoOne interesting thing that I did learn today is that multiple games use p2p for in-game voice chat thereby leaking IP addresses. https://www.reddit.com/r/thedivision/comments/4adapc/division_voice_chat_shows_your_public_ip_address/ https://www.reddit.com/r/thedivision/comments/4adapc/divisio...?
- ilurkedhere 11y agoOften I forget to disconnect from IVPN while playing low latency games like FPS. I mostly don't notice.
- newman314 11y ago
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dheera 11y ago"Accessibility from China" might be a good column to add.
- chuckit 11y agoHe covers that exact comment in his FAQs. Q: Why don't you have some obvious fields like "Works with Netflix/Hulu", "Works in China", etc? A: Besides the impracticality of testing each of them, these services/governments could use the data I publish to crack down on those that still work.
- dheera 11y agoI suppose. Perhaps if it were a webapp instead of a spreadsheet, people could use a voting system to test and fill in the columns (similar to the coupon code websites). The latter point though I think isn't all that strong. From a government perspective, the entire list is a checklist of what to block, whether or not that column exists. Most of the VPN providers
- daheza 11y agoI have always wondered when I see charts like this that add a column for bitcoin accepted. I would much rather pay with a prepaid gift card / visa which can be purchased with cash. If I even wanted to pay with bitcoin I have no idea how I could get a balance and remain anonymous.
- Veratyr 11y agoThere are plenty of privacy laundering services for Bitcoin. This is the first one that came up in Google: https://bitmixer.io/ https://bitmixer.io/ They're called "mixers".
- Jarwain 11y agoHelix is also a solid and reliable mixer, with the downside that it requires TOR to access
- mirimir 11y agoThe best mixer is Bitcoin Fog: http://foggeddriztrcar2.onion/ http://foggeddriztrcar2.onion/
- getoffmylaw 11y agono!! There have been many MANY reports of bitcoin fog selectively scamming and it would be wise to use another option. Bitblender, sigant, and helix should be much safer options.
- mirimir 11y agoThat's all bullshit. Edit: Consider the Sheep Market thief. They didn't steal his Bitcoin, even though the transaction was so large that it crashed their service. Edit: It seems likely that victims of the Sheep Market theft are behind at least some of the lies about Bitcoin Fog.
- Freak_NL 11y agoThis thread highlights exactly why using Bitcoin for this purpose is tricky for outsiders. Buying a gift card with cash is a process I can understand, but with Bitcoin the amount of knowledge needed to get started safely and anonymously is quite large, and there seems to be a lot of conflicting information going about.
- q4 11y agoThanks for the meticulous efforts, whoever worked on it. However I especially didn't understand why some of the values under Privacy > Traffic / DNS Traffic say "NO" but are still in green. Or why some of the other values under the same Privacy column like "connection" say "Yes" but are in red. Can anyone explain what those mean? Also does empty values there mean "no data available" or something else?
- anuragbiyani 11y agoYou are missing headings in Row 2 & 3. I think you are talking about Column E (Privacy->Logging->Activity->"DNS Requests") ? Since it falls under "Logging", you want it to be Red for YES & Green for NO (you don't want your VPN provider to log DNS Requests, etc). You will notice that everything within the "Logging" columns (Col D-H) follow this color coding, whereas for Col J-M (which are still under "Privacy", but the subsection is "Activism") it's opposite.
- chrisohara 11y agoI think it's referring to the fact that certain details (traffic, DNS requests, timestamps, IP addresses) are logged. Ideally you want a service that does not log anything, that's why "Yes" is red.
- dublinben 11y ago>whoever worked on it This chart was compiled by reddit user ThatOnePrivacyGuy. Those say no and are green because they do not log traffic/DNS, which is good. Very simply, green means good and red means bad.
- a_c 11y agoWhat's the meaning of cell color? Some red cells say "yes" while some say "no"?
- duskwuff 11y agoDesirability. Green=good, red=bad.
- pteredactyl 11y agoWe use NordVPN running on OpenWRT box. Very happy so far
- peeters 11y agoGoogle Docs lets you lock rows so that they always show up. It'd be really helpful if that were done for the headers.
- Fishkins 11y agoThis is addressed in the FAQs. The headers are already frozen, but Google's serving it as static HTML.
- karlshea 11y agomarklawrutgers' link in another comment fixes this: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FJTvWT5RHFSYuEoFVpAeQjuQPU4BVzbOigT0xebxTOw https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FJTvWT5RHFSYuEoFVpAe...
- hackuser 11y agoDoes anyone know of a hosted VPN service that provides a firewall too? It seems like the only effective way to control outbound traffic from my Android phone. These solutions don't work effectively: * Detect and block each outbound connection manually: There are endless holes to close and always new ones; that is playing whack-a-mole. * Software firewall on phone: The firewall would need to operate on a low enough level to block everything. That is a challenge for all software firewalls, and from my sense of Android's outbound data 'features', that seems especially difficult. * Hardware firewall of my own: Because my phone is mobile, it's not always connecting through the same hardware. I could create a VPN back to my personal firewall, but then either I must share all my data with my ISP or I must create a 2nd VPN connection from my firewall to a hosted VPN service, which seems like too much latency and complexity. I can't be the only one who wants this ... ?
- Freak_NL 11y agoYours seems like a valid use case, but the underlying issue appears not being able to trust and administer your own computing device. From what I can tell a local firewall is possible (with iptables), but you need to install a custom Android build and 'root' your phone.
- hackuser 11y ago> the underlying issue appears not being able to trust and administer your own computing device I'm not sure it's wise to trust your phone these days. I can root and install a custom ROM, but that doesn't solve the problem. What ROM do you recommend? Most are forks of Android that change some features or remove bloatware; I don't know one that locks down the fundemental security of the OS. > From what I can tell a local firewall is possible (with iptables) How can you efficiently configure iptables? 1) Run each app in isolation 2) Sniff network traffic 3) Detect and identify every packet heading to an undesirable destination 4) Write a rule to block it 5) Retest until traffic is clean 6) Repeat every time any software is added or updated. That's not practical. Also, some of the leakage is embedded so deeply in the OS that I don't know if iptables (or other software firewalls) are sufficient.
- frenchie4111 11y agoHow would you feel if a review site was using affiliate links only in reviews of VPN companies that they really liked, and were glad to promote?
- SXX 11y agoThere is plenty of such "review sites" on internet already and main problem with them is trust. Overall Joe simply don't need your website since he don't know how VPN works at all and just use some exe installer from website. So he don't need all these geeky details to decide use service or not. For more skilled internet user any affiliate links and weirdly-designed redirections trying to hide them is usually no-go BS.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- SXX 11y agoLooks like so much of work put into list, but I still wonder why on Earth anyone would use 3rd party service especially one based in weird jurisdiction for anything other than torrents download? Likely every service with questionable legal status (e.g all that state there is no logging going) does analyse all bandwidth for it's own needs and clearly going to steal everything they can. Even TOR exit nodes are more secure since you at least know they can't be trusted by default. What advantage is there over own servers that is unlikely monitored by default and still dirt cheap?
- harshreality 11y ago1. Non-unique IP, which, for good no-logging VPNs, means no way to map a connection to a person, even through the legal system. 2. Hiding your activities from your own ISP. And I would guess that the vast majority of VPN customers are simply doing what you said VPNs are good for: hiding copyright-violating activities.
- SXX 11y agoFor hiding IP and bandwidth you don't really need to know even a third of options included in that list. And for "good no-logging VPNs" do you actually belive service like that may even exist for longer than a few years?
- mirimir 11y agoDo check out AirVPN, BolehVPN, Cryptohippie, Insorg, iVPN, Mullvad, etc via https://archive.org/ https://archive.org/ They've been around for more than a few years. Maybe eventually they'll be unable to lease usable servers. It's hard to say.
- rabidrabbit 11y agoMullvad in the recent past had trouble find exit servers in the USA, I think it was reported in their blog.
- SXX 11y agoIf anyone related to list is here here is my suggestion for improvement: add information about year certain service started to operate into the list. May be worth also add information if there some real company behind that service if country of jurisdiction provide way to check it exist. Many clearly wouldn't want to pay for longer periods if service created few months ago and don't have real company behind it.
- wodenokoto 11y agoYou really should publish and share the published version of Google docs unless the users needs to edit the shared version.
- revanx_ 11y agoI use AirVPN, fairly satisfied, the only thing that bothers me is that they affiliate with ipleak.net , which is a website that checks your connection for dns leak among other things. That's great by itself but it's more of a honeypot at this point because the website heavly relies on google scripts so if you happen to have a google normal/evercookie installed in your browser you are instantly identified no matter what VPN you use.
- deanclatworthy 11y agoPIA changed their business model at the turn of the year to not support the circumvention of geo restrictions [1]. Given this was a core selling point prior to this point, I'd say it's pretty clear they have succumbed to the legal problems associated with it and can no longer be trusted. BBC iPlayer has now been broken for months. [1] https://support.privateinternetaccess.com/Knowledgebase/Article/View/143 https://support.privateinternetaccess.com/Knowledgebase/Arti...
- mirimir 11y agoThat is a hard problem for VPN services, generally.
- austerity 11y agoThe wording in that article is pretty telling, but why do you imply they can no longer be trusted? A business that was profitable before became unprofitable due to legal pressure, so they exited it. It doesn't look like they've betrayed anybody's trust in the process.
- deanclatworthy 11y agoThey have betrayed my trust. They actively marketed their product up until recently as being able to circumvent geo-restrictions, and actively helped users who had problems. That for me was the big sell. Whilst I understand that it's a cat and mouse game now between content providers and VPN providers, they have built up a large customer base - based upon this premise.
- baldfat 11y agoHow is it betrayal when I am certain they would prefer to not be your geo circumvent VPN. Betrayal would be they actively made the bait and switch when they certainly know their business model is falling all around them for legal reasons beyond their control?
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- Johnwbh 11y agoHello from China. Lantern https://getlantern.org/ https://getlantern.org/ is a fairly reliable free option maade by a non-profit. It's slower that the paid options here, but works well enough for gmail, facebook, etc. Also, the more people outside China who have it the better, so if you wouldn't mind installing that would be great
- whyever 11y agoI'm not sure this is good advise. It seems to be peer-to-peer, so if someone does something illegal using my internet access, I get into trouble.
- roddux 11y agoTOR runs on the same principle. I suppose the trouble you could get into depends on how well plausible deniability holds up in court. I personally wouldn't risk it, being in the UK with our ever increasingly draconian rules. A sad state of affairs.
- zyxley 11y agoOne thing I'm curious about is if there's any VPN services out there that will do virtual LAN functionality, a la Hamachi but with the same focus on privacy mentioned in the threads here.
- NetStrikeForce 11y agoWe[1] do! Our service is similar to Hamachi in that we offer you an L2 network. We also provide DHCP by default on the 100.64.0.0/24 subnet. We don't offer Internet access, but if you add your own proxy (proxies? :)) or router to the Virtual LAN, you're all set. We've started our service recently, so any feedback is more than welcome. [1]: https://wormhole.network https://wormhole.network
- zyxley 11y ago"Try it for free" - but what's the actual pricing?
- NetStrikeForce 11y agoHey! Thanks for your feedback! :) This has been a common complaint and we're looking to change it. Once you sign up, you get a page with pricing and the option to just move on with the free account. We will change it soon.
- zielmicha 11y agoI'm working on a service [1] that will have virtual (L3) LAN with quite advanced routing rules. [1]: https://multilink.link https://multilink.link
- gmac 11y agoAnother option is to run your own. I guess it's swings and roundabouts concerning privacy, traceability and so on. I have a script to automate setup of an IKEv2 server on Ubuntu, which seems nice for a balance of security and the availability of built-in clients. I was inspired to set this up by the awful proposed Investigatory Powers Bill going through in the UK. https://github.com/jawj/IKEv2-setup https://github.com/jawj/IKEv2-setup
- akerro 11y agoNot really. shared public IP for dozens of users make them harder to track and their network traffic is mixed. Own VPN hides your traffic from one point, and 100% exposes in another.
- maze-le 11y agoThat kind of depends on what you want to do with your VPN. A self-hosted VPN is perfectly valid when it comes to circumvent the ISP-restrictions just one country. Example: You want to evade the censorship of lets say Turkey, and use a french VPS-hoster to host a self-configured VPN. I don't see anything wrong with it. You are not very likeley to have problems with authorities in Turkey (they don't see what is going on on the wire) or France (they know you by name, but as long you dont do anything illigal with your VPN...).
- txutxu 11y agoIn that case, tunnel your VPN inside of a public VPN. Trusting a remote VPN service not under your control, defeats the purpose of communication channel encryption. Calling it "VPN service" makes it look appealing, without realize that you are breaking the "P" in "VPN". If you want the "P", the master keys and certificates, and the systems where they live (client/server) should be under your control. Dot.
- FiloSottile 11y agoSecurity is not binary. (I'm becoming boring, most of my comments start like this.) The question is what are you trying to protect against? If you are trying to protect against the local network, any VPN does the job. If you are trying to protect against tracking, ONLY a public VPN does the job (having a static private IP is a disaster in this scenario). If you are trying to protect against any organization seeing your traffic, then your argument might make sense. However, unless you can run that "private" server on metal you own on a network you own, there will still be a VPS provider and an ISP that can see your traffic as much as the VPN provider would. So you might want Tor a at this point.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- kmfrk 11y agoHmm, Cloak is not there. I really like the people behind it, and they truly care about privacy and security. The iOS app is sorta wonky and turns on and off when it shouldn’t, though.
- ckorhonen 11y agoLove Cloak, great app (not encountered the wonkyness you speak of). For me I love the OS X and iOS integration, plus feels somewhat less dodgy than alternatives!
- elithrar 11y agoYou should reach out with a bug report: they're pretty responsive. Note that iOS will disconnect the VPN when the phone goes to sleep, however in iOS9+ you can force all traffic over the VPN (unlike earlier versions). The best feature of Cloak (to me) is that I have it auto-connect when on any network other than my home network. Airports, cafes, work; Cloak is default on.
- leejoramo 11y agoI think that you are referring to a known bug that was introduced in iOS 9. They have a blog entry describing this. https://blog.getcloak.com/2015/10/19/feeling-a-little-too-secure/ https://blog.getcloak.com/2015/10/19/feeling-a-little-too-se...
- hathym 11y agoit's best to run your own on a cheap VPS, check this out https://github.com/kylemanna/docker-openvpn https://github.com/kylemanna/docker-openvpn
- juiced 11y agoI'm very surprised there is no mention at all about the safety of the VPN clients. Your biggest problem concerning privacy could be IPv6 leaking and DNS hi-jacking and leaking. You can have a trillion-bits VPN connection for IPv4 traffic, no logging, warrant canaries etc., but if your IPv6 traffic, which most browsers prefer, is not going through this tunnel you can say goodbye to your privacy. The same for DNS leaking, if you are still using your default DNS servers after setting up a VPN connection everybody can see what websites your are visiting or redirect your requests. And to prevent DNS hi-jacking your VPN client should at least use your VPN gateway as a DNS server. I built WifiMask (https://www.wifimask.com https://www.wifimask.com), which is not in the list, and is not vulnerable to any of these.
- juicedtest 11y agoI'm very surprised there is no mention at all about the safety of the VPN clients. Your biggest problem concerning privacy could be IPv6 leaking and DNS hi-jacking and leaking. You can have a trillion-bits VPN connection for IPv4 traffic, no logging, warrant canaries etc., but if your IPv6 traffic, which most browsers prefer, is not going through this tunnel you can say goodbye to your privacy. The same for DNS leaking, if you are still using your default DNS servers after setting up a VPN connection everybody can see what websites your are visiting or redirect your requests. And to prevent DNS hi-jacking your VPN client should at least use your VPN gateway as a DNS server. I built an OSX app for WifiMask (https://www.wifimask.com https://www.wifimask.com), which is not in the list, and is not vulnerable to any of these.
- autarch 11y agoThis would be a lot more useful if the header rows and name column were frozen. Once I scroll I lose all track of what each column means or what row I'm on.
- vehementi 11y agoI copied and pasted everything into a new google Sheets and froze the column/row myself It also might not be possible to freeze columns/rows on the read only web view. You can actually see the thick line below the first row that indicates OP did in fact freeze them.
- yalooze 11y agoFrom the FAQ: Q: Why didn't you freeze the headers/turn on filters? A: The headers ARE frozen, but when the sheet is being viewed by a lot of people, Google sends out the static html version. You can delete everything from /htmlview? to the end of the url for the real version You can also direct download the sheet using the links below, and do whatever you want to the sheet to make it more readable for you. (xlsx or ods formats) .xlsx format https://www.google.com/url?q=https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FJTvWT5RHFSYuEoFVpAeQjuQPU4BVzbOigT0xebxTOw/export?format%3Dxlsx&sa=D&ust=1458146469121000&usg=AFQjCNGlyI6LQJpEfpDwv7RHmg0iyYJUVA https://www.google.com/url?q=https://docs.google.com/spreads... .ods format https://www.google.com/url?q=https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FJTvWT5RHFSYuEoFVpAeQjuQPU4BVzbOigT0xebxTOw/export?format%3Dods&sa=D&ust=1458146469121000&usg=AFQjCNG0lVNk30X06nWgWCYt-KJYS7RE1Q https://www.google.com/url?q=https://docs.google.com/spreads...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- lcfcjs 11y agoWow very cool, could use a column called "BBC Access" since very few of them still work with BBC :(
- Swannie 11y agoCould you change the title to "Privacy VPN Service Comparison Chart"? VPN in of itself is meaningless. This could mean anything from corporate VPN products, through to AWS site to site VPN services.
- mnbappy 11y agoYou can check our vpn service https://www.torrentguard.com/prices/ https://www.torrentguard.com/prices/ for hassle free browsing.