Mullvad or Proton VPN?
from MrCatCookies@lemm.ee to privacy@lemmy.ml on 12 May 04:03
https://lemm.ee/post/63711132
from MrCatCookies@lemm.ee to privacy@lemmy.ml on 12 May 04:03
https://lemm.ee/post/63711132
Well, just that. Wich is stronger against trackers, hackers and doxxing threats? Proton VPN (I’m using this one actually), or Mullvad VPN?
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Mullvad hasn’t yet shown themselves fed- friendly.
Proton has.
Mullvad is the answer.
When did Proton show themselves fed-friendly? Also what “fed” are we talking about? The Swiss Federation?
I guess he’s referring to this
Proton’s statement from the linked article
Source please, we in the /privacy community genuinely want to learn so when such things do happen, we all benefit from factual information. Please do not assume we all know what you are referring to. It is particularly in this kind of cases when, for example with Signal what was “shared” with authorities is basically irrelevant, cf signal.org/bigbrother/ so we must be precise.
Proton has cooperated with subpoenas on multiple occasions leading to the user’s arrest.
While they may challenge them, the point is that they have cooperated and thus are not reliable. There are no reported cases of Mullvad doing the same.
There are ample links from multiple sources that describe this with a simple search.
To be fair, if your safety depends on whether a particular company cooperates with authorities, you’d better rethink your OPSEC.
My thinking is, if the CIA (or whatever country’s equivalent) is on to you, it’s pretty much jover.
I think it still very much depends on how much they’re onto you. The guy from the most famous Proton case seems like a low-level crook, so if he wasn’t so easy to catch, chances are the agency would’ve just went after an easier prey. If you’re a DNM admin, though… Indeed, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Please do provide a link, especially if it’s very easy to find. I’m not saying anything you say is wrong, only that if it’s not an opinion, then a link from a trusted source helps other understand the situation.
It’s a somewhat convoluted story. Here are some links
The takeaway is when he logged into his Protonmail they logged his IP address which helped track this individual down. But note that Reddit thread I linked. I also cannot find that much information about “what happened next,” or the details of who was arrested and why.
There may be other examples, but this particular case kinda hit the rounds back when it happened.
Excerpts from your third link wired.com/…/protonmail-amends-policy-after-giving…
Proton did not voluntarily log IPs, they were under a lawful court order and were out of appeal options.
Like I said, no one running a service will go to jail for you. None.
Not ProtonVPN, not Mullvad, not IVPN, not Lemmy Instances.
If a legal court order is received, they will conply after they run out of appeals
Imagine you run one of these services, and you received a lawful order in your jurisdiction.
You can choose to turn over data or go to jail for a long time.
Would you go to jail to protect user privacy?
That’s why its not only a company’s privacy practices you need to worry about, but also the jurisdiction. Choose a service that’s is in a privacy friendly jurisdiction.
Also, this is about Protonmail, which is under different laws than ProtonVPN.
That’s because no one running a service will go to jail for you. None.
Not ProtonVPN, not Mullvad, not IVPN, not Lemmy Instances.
Imagine you run one of these, and you received a lawful order in your jurisdiction.
Turn over data or go to jail for a long time.
Would you go to jail to protect user privacy?
The only thing Proton does better is because they are under Swiss Jurisdiction, which has stricter control over when a court order can be issued. But if a court order goes to Proton, they can’t ignore it.
Also: Protonmail =/= ProtonVPN, they are under different laws. In Switzerland, Mail providers have to provide IP addresses upon a subpoena, VPN providers do not. If those users had used ProtonVPN to access their Protonmail, they’d be safe.
Interesting, thanks.
Has Mullvad ever been required to comply for anything though? Or are you saying Mullvad has already, and refused to follow Swedish law?
IVPN imo, just because it offers reverse split tunneling, if you prefer having more countries to choose from you can use Proton.
Mullvad.
Proton has a Trump ass kisser working in their C-suite.
Andy done some bootlicking... I guess whoring for the regime is supposed to print generally but I don't think he understands his user base lol
Imagine
Okay, but how does the political stance of Proton workers affect my privacy?
At the moment, it doesn’t. He could decide to violate Swiss law and turn data over to Trump.
That would certainly affect your privacy.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but he doesn’t have the power to do that. Proton has a board with many members calling the shots.
There are sellouts and traitors.
I prefer Mullvad. Regularly audited, can pay with cash if preferred, everything runs on RAM, and hasn’t had any controversies so far. The only issue for some is no port forwarding. I also like the multi-hop and DAITA features.
Mullvad. Their servers run on RAM, and they don’t have any information about you no email, no username you can even pay with cash. However, Proton has port forwarding, while Mullvad does not.
Mullvad does have split tunneling on Linux and Android. I don’t know about Windows.
I don’t know why I wrote split tunneling, I meant port forwarding. Thanks😀. Windows also has split tunneling.
What’s the different with zego logs alternatives, e.g. openvpn.net/…/tutorial--turn-off-logging.html
If, for some reason, there is any data on the server and a malicious actor pulls it physically out, the data would disappear. There are probably other pros with RAM-only servers that I don’t know.
What data if there is no log?
Mullvad is much friendlier to privacy, but their proxies get blocked by A LOT of stuff, they also have a very small number of proxies. Mullvad collects literally nothing about you, but that’s a double edged sword. not having any way to verify exactly who paid money into which account number means they can’t help you if someone steals your account. I also have it on good authority that mullvad isn’t very reliable at getting past more aggressive censorship firewalls. the one in china for example won’t allow you to use mullvad unless the sim you’re connecting from is a US one.
Proton doesn’t record anything you’re doing with their VPN and they’ve had to prove that many times and their “sentinel” program and the 2FA and double password you can enable make it very hard if not impossible for someone to mootch off your account. I very rarely get blocked by anything when I use proton VPN, if I ever do get blocked I just have to change the proxy I’m on. I don’t even have to change the location most of the time because proton VPN has a huge number of proxies at each location.
Proton also gives you the ability to save recovery phrases and recovery files if you lose your password(s) or your 2FA
ente auth and ageis auth are great for storing your 2FAs and they allow you to back them up to a file if your account with ente fails in some way or if you forget the password to get into your ageis
as for those recovery files and phrases I talked about. save them in text files on a small capacity flash drive that you don’t use for anything else
Who knows how to steal you mull account with out you knowing? This seems over blown atleast from that perspective. I’m sure it’s possible but unless you are incredibly slopping opsec I doubt it’s even on the list of problems. Given all other things you could be doing.
it’s just a string of numbers with no password
How would anyone get the long string though? Realistically speaking. It would be difficult and unlikely.
It’s just numbers, no punctuation marks, no letters, no math symbols. No entropy really.
For most people that’s not an issue, but some people out there can guess them.
one way to mitigate that problem is simply to not load your mullvad account with more than 1 year of time at any given time. If your mullvad account has like…10 years of time then yeah, lots of people are going to mootch if they figure out which number has that
Or even if they don’t mootch, they could just remove the devices on your account and fuck with you
Unless you are willing to do the math, “no entropy really” deserves a [citation needed]
what kind of password has more entropy? one with capital and lowercase letters, numbers, math symbols and puncuation marks?
or the one with only numbers?
Is there really a citation needed for that?
Entropy is calculated from the character set size to the exponent the length of the string: E = log2(R^L). A long string of numbers can have more entropy than a shorter alphanumeric string with special characters. I looked it up and apparently their account number is 16 digits. That’s 53 bits of entropy, which is not guessable. Someone brute forcing would have quadrillions of login attempts to try.
Mullvad also has hidden servers they give access to on request if you can’t access the regular ones. Can help with government censorship etc
Good to know, but how can you safely request them without giving away that you’re using them?
What method does the request go through? What happens when those proxies get blocked by the censorship firewalls too?
I just used email lol, and I don’t think it’s possible to hide that you’re connecting to a certain IP. And if they get blocked too I’ll email them again D:
the ministry of truth in china would be monitoring where those emails are caming and going at minimum.
In developed countries where people don’t get arrested for wrongthink mullvad is great, I’m just saying, be prepared if you plan on going to a place with a censorship firewall
You can sign up for a western email service from within china and use it to communicate. China’s gfw is based on a whitelist so all you have to do is find a relatively obscure provider
.
They still see source of email and meta data.
I am not sure why they would ban account for getting links tho
Tor Browser
Bruh, good luck trying to watch a youtube video, or even just browse a news article.
Tor only works for a small number of sites.
I think you’re exaggerating. Disabling JS breaks way more sites than an exit node’s IP.
Edit: I meant that “small number” of sites is an exaggeration, not that exit node blocking is uncommon.
I haven’t really played around with VPNs to make the comparison. Tor breaks for a significant number of sites, but it’s still a pretty small minority; “only works for a small number of sites” is a comical untruth.
If Tor breaks more sites than VPNs do (which I think is likely), I think it is because Tor is secure. It is easier to do malicious things behind Tor because you have, for all intents and purposes, an unbreakable shield of privacy while you are doing those malicious things. And so, site operators tend to block it more readily than they do VPNs.
Whether you want to make the tradeoff in favor of convenience or genuine privacy is, of course, up to you. It’s not surprising to me that the Lemmy userbase is more or less unanimous in favor of convenience. Of course it is fine if you want, but you don’t need to misrepresent how things are to make it the only possible choice.
Why isn’t the Tor browser more popular here?
See my other comment; I think the same user contingent that likes VPNs tends to also want maximum convenience, which isn’t Tor. Of course they frame convenience as the only relevant factor, instead of acknowledging that being the tradeoff they’re making.
It's generally slow as fuck
100% Mullvad
Mullvad. It’s cheaper than Proton. But Proton has more servers. Like Proton even provies Indian IPs, but the servers are hosted in Singapore, which may be something people need, as Mullvad do not have any servers with Indian IPs.
You can also try IVPN, it is almost same like Mullvad, no email for account, pay using Monero etc, but you can get a one week subscription for $2.
A VPN is a VPN, having a different IP address is equally effective against those things no matter which IP it is. The issue is whether or not anyone can associate that IP with yours, and what that comes down to is how willing they are to give up their records when the government asks nicely (or, even more importantly: not so nicely.) I’m not familiar enough with either service to be able to speak to that, but everyone else seems to be talking about features, prices, politics, etc when none of those directly address your questions.
False and fake information.
lol, k, I definitely respect the opinion of someone who drops a half-assed comment like that without bothering to offer what they believe to be the correct information.
I can’t presume to know what they meant, specifically, but I think they’re probably referring to the fact that a VPN provider has access to all of the data you’re transmitting through their exit nodes, and a malicious one could harvest and sell it. Or work with LE and hand over all tracking data, all information about your browsing habits for the past year, all of the times you visited PornHub and Grinr, how many times you visited that trans support website… everything LE could get by surveiling your behavior if you weren’t using a VPN.
A VPN is only worth how trustworthy the VPN provider is. Mullvad, for instance, claims to keep no logs, so a search warrant for logged data is useless. This is not true of all VPN providers.
If that’s the case then both of you failed to read the part of my comment where I explicitly addressed that:
I admit I didn’t include the possibility of the VPN operator themselves being malicious, but it seems weird to call me out for not addressing the issue of record security re:governments/LE when pretty much the entire point of my comment was to address that specific issue because no one else was, no?
You start with “a VPN is a VPN.” However you qualify it, it’s not true unless you’re merely stating a tautology, which doesn’t seem constructive or helpful.
You ever notice how it sometimes helps to read the whole sentence to understand what some part of it means in context?
There’s a comma after that second VPN so obviously it’s related to what follows, which is the part where I describe exactly how a VPN is a VPN: in terms of getting a different IP address. This is twice now you’ve gone way out on a limb here trying to back the play of some fucking troll who didn’t bother to explain themselves and I’m not sure if that’s where you want to be. Picking through my comment and taking bits out of context to feed back to me as ‘evidence’ to back up your pedantry and assumption that the rest of the text of that same comment shows you to be wrong about is not a good look. If you’re going to nitpick my shit to death then you should at least try to read the whole thing and understand how each of the parts relate to each other first, otherwise people might mistake you for some fucking troll too (albeit a clearly slightly more intelligent one since you can actually elucidate what your issue is with what I said, regardless of whether or not it’s remotely accurate.)
Wow. You are a capital-D douche.
I hope you’ll understand why I’m not going to take my opinion on douches from the guy trying to pick apart my helpful comment with a flood of pedantic bullshit.
Mullvad of course. Proton is American right?
Proton is Swiss.
Ok. Better.
Exception when gargling orange.
I like Mullvad better
Has anyone used Mullvad vpn with a media server? I’m currently using AirVPN, but it’s not that good speed-wise. I’ve been looking at Mullvad for a while, but they’ve abandoned port forwarding, which I’m not sure how big of an impact that is.
Depending on how you’re accessing this, and how many people you’re trying to set this up for, it would probably be easiest to learn how to deploy your own Wireguard network. In my case, my phone automatically connects to my own Wireguard on my server (an 11 year old laptop) and whenever I’m on the go I have full access to my LAN + PiHole DNS filtering.
So, what’s the point? The point is that you will be able to securely connect to your media server without exposing it directly to the internet, all without paying for a service to do what you can already do yourself, provided your ISP allows you port forward.
I have several people who usually access my media server from abroad. Can you confirm if the WireGuard network you mentioned allows you to “legally torrent” media using it?
So to be perfectly clear, setting up Wireguard is about bridging two LANs (or devices) to make them virtually appear as if they belong on the same network. For every client that connects they would need to be issued a key and every device would have to be set up. But all the traffic between the two “LANs” would be encrypted and secure.
But I don’t think WireGuard is what you’re looking for, because this would require setting up all these other people with WireGuard as well. Or doing a more complex setup where you use a VPS and WireGuard and have that serve an exit point instead of your home connection. Or any other number of more complex setups that would work but require a lot more effort… and it sounds like you were just looking for basic port forwarding.
Mullvad took that feature away a couple of years ago (presumably to combat CSAM dissemination). So if you were hoping to just have a secure path for someone to connect to your media server routed through Mullvad, I don’t believe that’s possible anymore.
Wireguard is just the vpn software, not a service. Most of these services are running wireguard under the hood now because it’s so good. You can also use wireguard yourself to connect your own machines together, (or friends machines, allowing file sharing like a LAN) but that doesn’t help you with torrenting.
I like that you don’t have to provide an email address to mullvad.
You can also send them money in a letter
Same for proton
Isn’t it the same for Proton? I have been using it for so long now that I don’t remember
I love that Proton bots/fanboys always get pretty nervous when someone just points out the facts 🤣
I prefer Mullvad. I’ve found it a lot more reliable. I was a paying Proton customer but still had connectivity issues a non-negligible number of times, whereas I’ve literally never had Mullvad be the cause of connection issues in my years of using it. It’s great that they take cash and have literally only an account hash associated with your account.
I’ve also found that Mullvad customer support are responsive, helpful, and know what they’re talking about. I’ve had experiences with Proton’s customer support that were ok, but occasionally had the typical customer service hiccups along the lines of being assigned a new support agent who doesn’t read back all the conversation (understandable—I had one bug I was dealing with for months) and you have to explain again what the original issue was and what has been done since.
I think both options are perfectly fine, but I definitely prefer Mullvad, and it’s what I recommend to people if they ask me to recommend a VPN service.
If you don’t need proton’s whole suite of tools I say go for mullvad.
You can also just test them both out for yourself. Try mullvad for one month, proton another. The nice thing with mullvad I believe is that it’s way more anonymous in terms of various forms of payment and I believe it has a fixed price.
Mullvad any day. Support is awesome.
If you go with Mullvad look for the gift cards out there that are for 6 or 12 months of service. I grabbed one off Amazon.ca for 12 months at $75. Works out to be cheaper than paying per month with the ever changing exchange rates.
I also like the fact that Mullvad has servers in the city I live in where as Proton has them on the west coast or east coast. Not the greatest for those in the middle of the country.
How does one verify that a gift card bought from Amazon is legit?
Make sure it’s “Sold by Mullvad VPN” and “Shipped from Amazon”.
www.amazon.ca/…/B092M5G1G7
I use Proton currently since it comes with my proton subscription. But I used mullvad for years and prefer it. They’re both good, you can’t go wrong really.
What about NordVPN? I use it and I’m pretty happy.
they log
They are the trackers
Mullvad. Not even a question
Also, the Proton CEO publicly supports Trump
There’d thundermail coming out soon, which will probably have mullvad included. This also funds firefox too which is nice.
Do VPN’s actually protect against any of that? They’re basically only useful if you want to get around your country’s internet filters, log into a website that has blocked your IP, or hide your traffic from the government (and in the latter’s case, Tor is probably a better pick).
I guess it may help with tracking, but there are so many ways in which your tracked, is your IP even one of them?
Precisely this. Consumer VPNs are not tools for security or anonymity. They won’t protect you from most kinds of fingerprinting or tracking beyond IP-based tracking. They have relatively specific uses. I recommend Privacy Guides’ article on them for further reading: www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/vpn-overview/
I have and use both.
Without choosing some sort of dns based ip blacklist (offered by both providers btw), neither one really does what you asked about.
What are you actually trying to prevent? If you don’t know what language to use, just describe the situation.
Maybe try both!! I love both VPNs
Trackers are browser problem, get ublock origin. You can block trackers by changing your dns resolver i recommend Quad9 or adguard.
You don’t really get hacked unless you download and open files or your accounts get recovered by someone sending all your information to customer support pretending to be you.
Doxxing is a low skill level threat its very easy, google your target’s username and find information about them, yeah its that simple. All your user data is linked to your user name and profile picture. What i suggest doing is using the same tools doxxers use (sherlock) to find your long forgotten accounts and then delete them, remember to never use the same username and profile picture.
When a database leaks it will most likely contain your username, email and ip address, this information will be findable by username, email or ip address. If you ever use an account without a vpn using a vpn wont anonymize you from the service. Disable webrtc in your browser it often leaks ip addresses while using vpns also watch out for ip grabbers.
Tldr: dont use same usernames and profile pictures, vpn is 100% secure if used wrong.