Is ProtonVPN worth it?
Got reminded of this while reading about ProtonMail. The reason I haven’t gotten into proper #piracy is that I don’t have a VPN for torrenting, and the reason I don’t have a VPN is that I don’t #torrent. So it would be nice if I got a good VPN while #degoogling myself.
Will ProtonVPN rat me out to Comcast? I know some VPNs don’t hide what you’re downloading from your ISP, for reasons I don’t fully understand.
ProtonVPN is a no log VPN according to their privacy policy: https://protonvpn.com/privacy-policy
They have servers specifically for port forwarding and P2P traffic. I use them and I haven’t gotten a DMCA request yet so 🤷🏻♂️
They have servers specifically for port forwarding and P2P traffic
Sadly with Mullvad closing port forwarding, they are one of the only ones you can torrent with. In all honesty, if it’s torrenting setting up a seedbox is really the way to go.
Air vpn too. I had a bit of back and forth swapping between proton and air vpn after Mullvad closing port forwarding. Protons spilt tunnelling is far better than air vpn, but their speeds were appalling so eventually I stuck with air vpn with a script to divert only the torrent traffic through the vpn. Man do I miss Mullvad!
I’ve been enjoying the fact that airvpn let’s you open 5 ports, haven’t had any issues with them after my first few months.
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I’m not the smartest bowl in the… bowl drawer, but wouldn’t removing port forwarding just affect speed? Or would it stop torentting with Mullvad entirely? I just topped my account off lol
PIA has port forwarding and have proven not to log user data too.
Yeah, but PIA also has the issue of being owned by a company known for hiding malware in their programs. Seriously, go google Kape (the parent company for PIA) and you may reconsider using it. Their CEO prior to the buyout had also formerly been convicted for some sort of financial crimes. Off the top of my head, I think it may have been some sort of fraud or embezzlement?
I know this was all a big deal when PIA was taken over, and everybody was afraid PIA would be ruined. But none of that happened. Maybe it’s just a matter of time, who knows.
I think the point they were making was that a shitty person, as evidenced by his list of crimes, will run a company, shittily. The point of a VPN is anonymity. What good is that promise coming from a shitty, shady person?
I know, and I fully understand if you stay far away from PIA for those reasons. But like I said, PIA has proven (in court) that they actually provide anonymity.
Proton is very well known to be the best vpn privacy whise. They went to swiss federal court against the state to not keep network logs for their vpn, i‘d say it‘s very trustworthy
I’ve been torrenting with Proton VPN for years. No problems. Well, one problem when using Linux because the app didn’t support port forwarding but I think they fixed that. Anyway, no issues on Windows.
@akilou good to know about the Linux, I am a Linux user
This is lemmy. That’s a given at this point lol.
Op is actually on mastadon. Still the fediverse, so the Linux rule still applies imo.
The new app only officially supports limited distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora). The CLI isn’t updated to v4 yet. You can still connect to the VPN by downloading the config files (OpenVPN or Wireguard) and connecting through, e.g., wg-quick https://protonvpn.com/support/linux-vpn-setup/
It’s weird, because despite not having port forwarding on Linux I’ve never had any problems torrenting.
@stifle867 interesting. I would prefer to have port-forwarding to cover my ass, though. I personally use Zorin OS, which is based on Debian, so maybe it might work?
Port forwarding is not a cover your ass privacy feature, it’s a compatibility feature.
I just did a quick search and yes, Zorin OS is based on Ubuntu so it will be able to work with all the regular Ubuntu packages such as those provided by Proton VPN.
Last I checked the Flatpak is an old version of Proton VPN. Look up how to get the beta release for your distro to get the latest features.
And in case anyone wonders, it works fine in BSD as well. I have a jail with rTorrent which is locked to the VPN connection and uses a cronjob to keep port forwarding active 🙂.
Try OpenVPN?
If you are using Linux don’t use the GUI app. It will lock up and leak past a killswitch.
The CLI app works ok. It annoyingly has issues reconnecting on reboot without disabling and renabling the killswitch. Sometimes it works, other times not.
You don’t have to use any software from Proton VPN, they will allow you to download openvpn and wireguard config files so you can set up your own client. Takes some more effort to do it right, yes, but its a good option if you’re up for it.
Just make sure to either set the Wireguard profile’s IPv6 to Link-Local or disable IPv6 on your network connection, otherwise you’ll leak data and DNS entries over it. The reason is because Proton’s wireguard implementation does not support ipv6 yet.
That’s good information. I already had a setup for openvpn, so I just plugged in their ovpn files and kept going.
This is how I do it, but since I use KDE I just loaded up the configure file in the connection settings and pasted in my password. Took about 10 seconds.
What i found to work the best is to generate and download a config file, then import it into NetworkManager. There’s a plugin for wireguard here: https://github.com/max-moser/network-manager-wireguard
This way, it’s easy to add routes, autostart, etc. But I don’t think a safe killswitch is possible.
Edit: But since this is a piracy community, i should mention that qbittorrent has a setting for specifying the network interface, so it’s easy to force it to use the vpn connection only, in place of a killswitch.
As far as I know, proton doesn’t allow port forwarding, so makes using it for torrenting suboptimal. If you want to use torrents with a VPN, there’s better options
PF works with proton, I use it. But you have to continuously call it to stay open.
Yeah, it’s a bit annoying and really should be built in to the CLI or GUI apps.
It does allow port forwarding. The Windows app supports it. On Linux, you can do it via a one-liner script: https://protonvpn.com/support/port-forwarding-manual-setup/
Interesting - I haven’t had this issue with the gui. Thanks for the heads up!
I don’t know if this just got initially deleted or whatever, but I use wireguard with a “custom” plan on windscribe, and it’s like $1/month. IPs are shared among hundreds of users and they keep no identifying logs.
I use a split tunnel on the vanilla wireguard client, so I’m not using anything from windscribe software-wise; and I set my torrent client to only use the ethernet device for the tunnel. So no need to worry about kill switches or leaking shit when the VPN drops.
Also – I’ve tested the Wireguard connection on Windscribe and it easily handles 1gb upload/download.
@thantik yeah that was me. I prefer to keep my Mastodon stuff and Lemmy stuff separate. What happened was that I initially posted this from Lemmy, realized I would rather post this from Mastodon, and deleted the first one so there wouldn’t be duplicates. I wasn’t trying to gaslight you and you didn’t do anything wrong.
Just putting out there that AirVPN has been perfect for me for several years now. No issues.
I am pretty happy with them so far.
If you’re getting protonmail anyway the bundle is worth it. You can use their client software or native wireguard. I personally use AirVPN, run by an activist group. Their website isn’t shiny, but the VPN works great and has port forwarding which is really good for torrent connectivity.
I don’t think with the Swiss privacy laws governing Proton you don’t have to worry about them ratting to Comcast
I’ve been using it for torrenting and it works well. I have no complaints. I think it’s less if you buy by the year rather than monthly.
I don’t really pirate anymore, but have been using ProtonMail, Proton Calendar and ProtonVPN for a few years on pure privacy grounds, and generally really like it. Their apps have gotten more stable over time and their bona fides are solid (actually fighting against subpoenas, etc).
They are actively improving things like calendar invites and integration in their suite of apps. Between that and ente for photo storage I’ve mostly degoogled myself over the last couple years.
What do you torrent? I set up real-debrid and usenet and literally do not use any torrent sites anymore whatsoever. Everything I download is downloaded at my max bandwidth. I’d recommend spending the money on that setup instead. VPNs are overpriced for what they offer.
You realize this still exposes the fact you are visiting piracy sites?
ok and?
The whole reason you get a VPN for piracy is to stop you’re ISP from seeing what you are doing. It also allows you to easily unblock indexer websites. What you are suggesting isn’t a replacement for a VPN in anyway and is likeley to lead to you getting caught and potentially banned by you’re ISP.
Your ISP won’t ban you for visiting “piracy sites”. They’ll only care if they get a subpoena, which you’ll only get if you’re distributing copyrighted material.
i.e. seeding
That’s the thing, with usenet and real debrid, you don’t seed. It’s all direct downloads.
Pass.
Yeah I don’t live in America. You can technically be jailed for piracy where I live I believe.
Wait how do you download stuff without torrenting?
you can use a debrid service such as real debrid to basically have them dl the torrent and then send you a direct dl link (simplfied explanation). I mainly use real debrid through stremio or kodi addons for streaming shows or movies without torrenting
Usenet
@MonkCanatella that is actually a really good point. I did not think of this.
For movies and tv, there’s nothing better than usenet. Eweka or easynews as your provider, with nzb.su, nzbgeek, or drunkenslug as your indexer and you’ll never look back. Mix that with radarr/sonarr and it’s the best way to download media. Any of the indexers will be like 20-40 buck for life, and eweka/easynews are bout $40 for the year. real-debrid comes out to about $30 per year. All those sites you see that have rapidgator links and stuff like that, real-debrid turns that into an instant download. You can even use it with jdownloader which makes some of the downloads with like 50 different rapidgator links really easy to download.
I am fairly sure you still need a VPN when using these services. Is there an advantage to this over using torrents and streming piracy sites?
You don’t need a vpn with these. Evidence gathered by wiretapping isn’t permissible in court. They need you to send them copyrighted material to sue. At least in the us
I don’t live in the US
Ah ok check with a lawyer then
If I could afford one of them then I wouldn’t be doing this
I have proton unlimited and it’s well worth it imo. With it you get simplelogin premium for free and all the proton stuff with 500gb e2ee cloud storage (which I haven’t used too much). It’s just a really well put together ecosystem and I’m glad to support them. Also, black friday is coming up and iirc they usually do sales right about then.
From what I’ve heard ProtonVPN isn’t really recommended. Use Mullvad or use AirVPN if you need port forwarding. (Mullvad removed port forwarding a few months ago).
If you are just using a VPN for pirating then I would just spend that VPN money on a seedbox.
From what I’ve heard ProtonVPN isn’t really recommended.
Why? You can’t attack something like that. At least say what you’ve heard.
I’ve never heard about arguments against ProtonVPN. Could you elaborate?
Proton VPN I found not good for streaming sites. Considering the forum we are on, I doubt that is a primary requirement here but it was unstable and regularly detected by the streaming sites. The stream kept getting buffering issues and the only way to fix it was a series of restarting and refreshing different things and trying different servers. Support just pushes you through a flowchart of settings questions when really their service should just work properly
It was a pretty disappointing experience considering I actually forked out money for it (not the free tier)
Works great and supports port forwarding. VPNs don’t rat you out to comcast, they’d lose all their customers.
