Zenith said: @Cameron
Or you don’t want to get slapped with DMCA notices from your provider.
Sure, if you actually believe they run a zero log policy. I don’t.
people have been saying this like it’s a gotcha for years but, i will tell you that the ONE time i pirated something rawdog (the movie Dunkirk after paying to rent it on youtube and the 24 hour rental expiring during the literal final scene) i got a scary letter from my ISP about it a couple weeks later.
On the other hand i’ve been pulling down terabytes of games apps movies and tv shows for years using a vpn and have never heard a peep from my provider or anyone else. I think the only reason you should be worried about logging is if you’re doing some serious criminal shit on your computer. otherwise it’s whatever.
Note that I am not saying this is necessarily bad. They provided metadata upon request as required by law. It isn’t like the e-mails themselves were provided.
If they were ever required by law to provide whatever data they had on a user of their VPN, then you can expect they would. I doubt there would be much to provide in the first place.
All that said, if you are at the state where you are worrying about metadata and the like, you need more than just a VPN. I’m basically just point this out so that people can set their expectations. Any VPN service will be bound by the laws of the country they are based in.
@Sparrow
According to the same article if they had used protons vpn they would have probably been fine, but even proton advises people to use tor for activists
Im surprised they would go this hard after some protesting greenpeacers instead of actually fixing the climate, crazy.
I used the article to point out that sometimes no logs may not mean everything has been wipes. Metadata can still expose you.
That wouldn’t prevent me from using Proton. They were pretty clear about what the laws where they’re based require and the incident wasn’t swept under the rug.
Every larger VPN service other than Mullvad has had their issues, some just dealt with them better than others.
@Wolf
China is also not other countries. They’ve been jailing VPN providers for a long time now. VPNs pop up and disappear in China with seasons changing.
Most VPNs don’t even work there, which is a bit ironic.
Aren’t most/some significang amount of people using VPNs there? So many Chinese people use Instagram, I have Chinese friends constantly posting on IG from China.
@Cameron
NO. Https will encrypt the contents, but not the destination. That’s why a vpn (serious no logs provider) is useful. Being able to fake source ip is also a nice to have.
@Cameron
As far as I know, the sites you access can see that you are currently using a VPN service (even if they don’t know who you really are), because you are connecting through that service.
So what prevents them from continuing the regional restriction ban by blocking incoming connections through specific VPN services and servers?
@Maddox
a lot of companies do this. I forget the specific one but there’s a big online game that blocks you from connecting from a lot of the big known VPN IP addresses. this is to mitigate the amount of cheaters and folks evading a ban or whatever.
@Cameron
>VPN is this age’s snake oil. (unless you just want to watch region locked content or live in a a country with great censorship. Looking at you, China.)
You seem to have it backwards. By far the biggest selling point VPNs give is overriding georestrictions for streaming content, and I’ve never heard that claim argued against. By contrast, China looks for VPNs and blocks those it can detect, so they only work spotily there. In fact, the more prominent the VPN, the better the chance it will fail, which may be why that’s not a selling point the big ones generally push. If I wanted a VPN in China, I would not by any of those that are big enough to advertise on YouTube.
@Cameron
You cant call something snake oil and then instantly mention at least one of the things they do that work…
Its just being advertised wrong, it does a ton of helpful stuff and can help obfuscate your online activity, but again youre just moving the ball of trust to another company and have to hope they keep their promise.
@Cameron
I use it as an ad blocker. There are cases when I need it to access certain content, as well, but the ad blocking alone is worth the paltry amount I pay once a year.
