VPNs - Who’s using what?

[Beardy]

My Nord VPN subscription is up for renewal, but before I invoke the +18 months for renewing (only available IF you look at how to cancel your auto renewal. The bastards) I was wondering if anyone else uses a VPN want what your experiences were.

My use case is protection and associated ad blocking and streaming F1 from overseas where the foreigns come from. The VPN is far cheaper than a $ky subscription, although that is mostly because to get F1 you also have to pay for sportball! Which I don’t want.

[Afasoas]

Mullvad.

I used to use two and round robbin traffic between them, but it was more trouble than it was worth. I can't remember the names of them now, but they were both a bit rubish.

[toontra]

I've tried a few.  Nord when in Tenerife to watch my Virgin 2 Go.  Despite their claims, it didn't work & it was a bloody nightmare trying to get the trial month payment refunded.

For day to day UK I've been using VPN Unlimited which I got a few years ago on a 1-off lifetime fee of around £30 (for 5 devices).  Support is amazing - had trouble installing on a new Mac recently & they replied to my ticket in under 2 minutes!

[lissotriton]

Protection from what?

[quixoticgeek]

Protection from what?

Glad someone asked.

I keep wondering this. All it's doing is moving your traffic through to a known end point that can be easily snooped.

The argument for using VPN is getting around geo location issues. Or accessing a network from outside that network.

The "ooh protect me!" thing I'm much less sold on.

J

[Beardy]

My primary reason for using a VPN is so I can watch live F1 coverage on Austrian TV. And added advantage is that it blocks most ad. It also provides some protection to my traffic when I’m using unsecured public access Wi-Fi

[Ham]

I've used Proton when I've needed it, they seem a good organisation (FWIW) and reasonably priced. Speeds were good, and easy to change between endpoints.

Caveat: Only needed it a couple of times over the years, so I wouldn't take it as  wholehearted endorsement, but personally I'd go back to them.

[pcolbeck]

Protection from what?

Glad someone asked.
I keep wondering this. All it's doing is moving your traffic through to a known end point that can be easily snooped.

That's very true. One would hope that a good VPN provider also has in place excellent next gen firewalls and other security stuff to protect your traffic but a VPN in itself just changes the point where your traffic starts interacting with the raw Internet.
Probably better than using open WiFi in cafes and the like though.
If your happy with the security of your home Internet connection and have a reasonable speed in both up and down its pretty easy to setup a VPN to your house and use that. Not much good for beating geo-location blocks though.

[Kim]

Shirley everything that matters (and most things that don't) are using TLS these days, so open WiFi is no worse than the open internet...

Defeating geo-location blocks is a reasonable use for a VPN that I haven't really needed so far, on account of limited interest in telly or sport, and not having travelled to ABROAD since the before times.

Similarly, VPNs are a useful solution to ISPs with horrible CGNAT and the like.  AAISP's L2TP backup service seems to work well, though good BT karma means I've only used it a couple of times.

On the odd occasion I need to move data from one private network to another across the internet, I tend to end up using SSH tunnels because it's simple and works fine for temporary lash-ups.  I arsed about with IPSEC for a project many years ago and am not keen to repeat the experience, though I'm sure it's a lot easier these days.

[Poly Hive]

I invested in Nord for a firestick we use in our MH. I tested it on geo protected sites, one in USA and one in Canada. Despite 4 weeks of to and fro with the "help" people bugger all connectivity. As in zero. Now you techie folks are no doubt chuckling but I guffawed when, given what I've just put they sent me a list of 10 servers to try and solve the issues. Remember Canada and states... all ten in Australia. That's when I realised the money was down the Kent.

Pete

[SoreTween]

I use a VPN the other way round, I connect into home so that I can Netflix & Amazon the same as I can when at home.
PiVPN at home and a GL-inet Slate travels with me.  Or did until I escaped working abroard.

[chrisbainbridge]

I have used nord and express. I take the free month on holiday and then cancel. As others have said it lets us watch acorns and others on holiday.

[HectoJ]

Proton.me offers a free one, not the greatest, but still better than nothing ?

[chrisbainbridge]

I have used nord and express. I take the free month on holiday and then cancel. As others have said it lets us watch acorns and others on holiday.

Used Nordvpn for 1 week and then requested refund.  Money back in the bank

[Afasoas]

Mullvad is less than a fiver a month, depending on the GBP/EUR exchange rate.

It works well nearly all the time - all of my YouTube consumption is done via Mullvad VPN for instance, as the adds bother me far less in foreign.

I use it to protect my privacy - as much as I reasonably can. All of my pocket fondleslab's traffic is routed via Mullvad. I also don't have Google Play (or associated services installed). All the installed apps are opensource, and the only applications that require PII are using endpoints I control (email, Nextcloud). It takes a bit of time invested up front to getting something resembling a modern mobile experience - the point being using a VPN as a privacy tool is kind of pointless unless other measures are employed too.

What I have found is that a lot of commercial websites are becomming increasingly hostile to VPN users, with some sites refusing to serve any content at all and others insisting human interactive proof is re-submitted with every other HTTP request.

And sadly, as I've not excised on-line shopping from my life completely, nor Zuckerberg's walled garden ( ) some of this is fairly futile. Although I've a few different phone numbers and unique email addresses are supplied to each on-line entity^[1] which demands one, which may at least make it harder to munge together data harvested from different sources.

When I'm away, I can VPN into home with all Internet traffic pushed over the VPN connection. This is then in-turn (by default) pushed out via Mullvad.

[1]: When I start receiving unsolicited spam, this makes it easy to see who has leaked my data. It also means assuming the leaker has plugged the whole, I can create a new email alias for them and drop the old one (assuming they allow a change of email address on a user/customer profile)