I’m thinking about paying for a VPN, I currently don’t use one.
I’d like to use Mullvad but they don’t seem to have regional prices, while Proton does.
I wonder if Proton is still a reliable option, Proton is 60% cheaper in my country, probably because regional pricing (but I didn’t check if it’s really the case).
If anyone has any other suggestion I’d like to hear it.
I dont use the well known ones, seems to me that those would be the first to have backdoors since people pick them.
I have a vpn that is never mentioned anywhere. Perfect.
Mullvad. Excellent service, never had an issue. Used to use Proton, but their CEO sucks ass
I would recommend mullvad.
the ceo of proton did idicate support of the trump and the republican party and while they backtracked and apologized and all that, is it out that atleast some in the company think like that and i dont trust them anymore.
and trust is number 1 priority for vpn.
I used to have Mullvad and switched to Proton because I use pretty much their entire suite…
If you don’t need port forwarding, I think Mullvad is superior in everything. Such a great service, highly recommend it.
There’s Port Forwarding with Proton VPN too
Yes there’s port forwarding with proton, but not with mullvad they removed it.
Oooh, that’s sad I wanted to switch to Mullvad VPN in the future. For now I’m stuck with Proton since I use their entire setup. Well, mostly mail and VPN.
In the paid plan
Proton had a Black Friday sale and that’s the reason it prevailed over Mulvad. Every penny matters when you’re a pensioner.
Both options are good. I think for the most part it boils down to wanting a single product or suite of products.
While you certainly can get just one proton service, the idea of having an easy entry point into multiple privacy focused solutions is what they are going for.
The pro argument for that is cheaper overall, simpler to get into and mange, etc. The con argument is an eggs in one basket philosophy isn’t ideal because you can have a single point of failure. This is all subjective to your personal threat model.
Mullvad because it accepts cash payments.
FYI, Proton also accepts cash.
Does anyone here regard ivpn as a good vpn as well?
Mullvad.
All you are to them is an account number. that’s it. no name, no email, nothing. you can even pay in cash. while mullvad’s GUI is still meh their CLI is top notch and very quick.
Mullvad is more private but Proton VPN still supports port forwarding.
I personally prefer the Mullvad client since, at least on MacOS, it allows you to exclude specific apps from the VPN, while the ProtonVPN client does not! I still use ProtonVPN instead though, since it’s also significantly cheaper for me.
Proton’s CEO sucks. I canceled my extremely low-priced, grandfathered subscription and moved elsewhere. I had been a user since basically day one, a subscriber since available, and converted family members and friends to it. Not anymore.
Mullvad has been stellar. Fast, anonymous, easy to use. Zero complaints.
Damn, I couldn’t let go of my extremely-low priced grandfathered subscription. I contemplated about it and getting both mullvad and tuta but it ads up more than what I pay proton.
Also, I believe proton ceo apologized or something like that
The apology kind of felt like a “sorry you’re offended”.
I don’t fault anyone for staying but I definitely don’t champion them anymore. I did move to Tuta as well and it is far from as seamless of an experience - it does everything I need (including domain aliases), but it was much less intuitive to configure. The system is way slower with search (it doesn’t index anything for privacy reasons) and in similar vein the mobile app only syncs something when opened. So you’ll get a notification for a new email but when you open it doesn’t load for 2-8 seconds.
I get it all somewhat because they’re only syncing what’s needed at any point in time and decrypting it or whatever, but it does feel janky.
I read this article and it certainly is something to consider.
It talks about how Andy Yen was just pointing out how under Trump’s first admin, they started to actually attack big tech when dems haven’t done anything. Which is true. He praises Gail Slater and Lina Khan (but Lina Khan was recently fired…sooooo).
They clarified how the andy1011000 (andy88) username probably is more about how Andy’s birthday was in 1988 and 88 is a lucky number in Taiwan, unlikely that he’s a white supremacist.
They also traced the money of Proton’s donations and none of the organizations were republican, and pretty much all of the donations align with the practices of Democrat donors.
Andy has a history of posting online supporting Ukraine, being against xenophobia, against racism, supporting women in tech, supporting refugees receive education in Switzerland.
When the Democrat party had proposals for regulatory efforts, Andy supported them.
https://proton.me/blog/congress-antitrust-report
He even made a tweet and blog post talking about the tech surveillance underneath the Trump administration and how people should fear it.
So it seems to be that Andy is more liberal when donating money and publicly acknowledge whoever is in support of anti-trust and anti-surveillance to me.
If it’s the goal of Proton to seem neutral, then they maybe did it a little too well. They convinced people that Andy is a full on fascist when in reality, he seems better than democrat politicians we have nowadays.
Yeah, all the Proton hate we’re seeing are overreactions. But life is easier when you can see everything as black and white when things are actually more nuanced.
From what I gather these are about the IP Logging, deanonymizing user, and having accounts on temporary suspension.
You could search it why on your own or even read the articles you just cited but basically.
- Apparently the user broke swiss law and “Proton must comply with Swiss law. As soon as a crime is committed, privacy protections can be suspended”. However, if the user used VPN, they could’ve gotten away with this tbh. Emails are encrypted so the only thing they got going for them was the IP address, and that was the weak point.
- For the deanonymized user, their recovery email was an iCloud email. You don’t need to use a recovery email, it’s an option that the user chose.
- Proton received an alert from CERT, saying that these users were linked to a North Korean APT group. But they couldn’t verify (as they can’t read encrypted emails), so they did the safe thing and temporary suspended them until they receiver further confirmation.
It seems everything they did was to comply with the laws and 2 of these situations could’ve been easily avoided by the user. The third case just put their accounts in suspension for some further review.
Then why did they take the comments to double and triple and quadruple down after the initial issue?
Unlike Ladybird, which is undeniably shit - I won’t judge someone for using Proton. I realize people’s takeaways from the situation are different. I’ve been fine without it.
Why are you hating on Ladybird when its not even in alpha stage?
I like mullvad because I can pay for it with vouchers and have nothing to tie my payment to my account#
I don’t think any other VPN can do that.
Theres also the fact that mullvad was raided by the (Swedish)police and even though they fully complied, the police ended up walking away with nothing because mullvad had nothing to give them.
Proton on the other hand, will at the very least be storing your email, payment info, and possibly other info in your account that mullvad won’t. I also don’t like how they have aligned themselves with conservative politics.
You can also pay with cash in an envelope
Proton mail has an alias feature that I rather enjoy. Does anyone know an alternative service for that. I was looking to leave the proton ecosystem. Switching to mullvad is easy enough for vpn but im also looking at email etc.
i too miss the alias service, and i dont really know an alternative aswell.
The issue is kinda, that any alias service is basically just forwarding your mails … so it is really hard to trust anyone with that
and a private domain is not really a solution, for privacy
and like tuta does offer 15 or 30 (but 30 is super expensive) permanent aliases… which is like nice but does fill up super quickly if used like how it is used for proton
I chose Mullvad because they don’t ask for any personal details and you can pay anonymously, which means that their service is privacy protecting by design. You don’t have to rely so much on trust.
Proton seems to be a large and rapidly expanding company which looks like it’s trying to be a more privacy respecting competitor to Google’s many services. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, I prefer companies that value stability over rapid expansion. I also don’t like relying on a potential single point of failure for everything. I have a Proton e-mail account but I don’t use any of their other services because I don’t want everything in the same place.
