Military grade encryption
Also when it comes to data collection you just shift your trust from your ISP to the VPN company
VPNs are overrated.
@inference
If you live in a country like Russia or China, ISP is the least trustworthy entity. VPN company is at least in some developed country's jurisdiction and has zero obvious incentive to do DPI of all your traffic and report your actions directly to the KGB. They might not even know who you are. I can't say for Nord as I hate them, but for other reasons. With Proton you can pay in cash or these Beethoven thingies.
VPNs are still good in certain cases.
@dushman
If I had to I'd use mullvad or set up my own on a vps that doesn't require personal info
@dushman
Mullvad's also good, one of the best!
I chose Proton because I was using their free plan and when they had a sale I just went with them. They have some unique features like this one: https://protonvpn.com/blog/stealth-vpn-protocol/
I haven't inspected it properly yet, but it doesn't look like one of the "military grade" claims 😅
I do live in Russia, here most popular VPN services are blocked, but this Stealth protocol seems to work. Wireguard TCP also seems to work, WG UDP and OpenVPN are filtered.
@inference
> popular VPN services are blocked
If that's the case then setting up your own will probably be the most reliable way in the long run
@dushman
It does have pros and cons: you can't just switch to another exit node, unless you have a handful of VPSes. Also the address range of your VPS is less likely to get blocked/filtered, but if it does — you're in trouble.
Well, it's best to get out of here anyway instead of playing these games 😅
@inference
True but at the same time they boast about 'strict Swiss privacy laws' and how they supposedly don't log IPs
Also this bit is pretty misleading as well. Means nothing as soon as you send an email to a different domain. Only applies if you and your recipient are using pgp.
(It does have pgp integration but they make it seem like it's a thing by default)
i use fedora.email if its for something unimportant like online accts
important i have a pm and inbox.lv
@dushman
From what I know, even without using PGP they have an option to send encrypted e-mails to third parties. You set a password that you have to pass to the destination party using some other channel of communication, the e-mail itself only contains a link in this case, and the password is used as a decryption key so the message can get decrypted in-browser on opening the link.
But of course it's not the default.
@inference @may
@dushman
Here is an article on this feature: https://proton.me/support/open-password-protected-emails
I've never tried it myself, but it does seem legit. Well, if you trust browser-based cryptography 😅
@inference @may
@dushman
Yep, it's a well-known case. If you take a closer look at it, it's not that bad. They are required to retain the connection logs for e-mail to comply with the Swiss law and they've never claimed otherwise. For VPN connections on the other hand — they don't. That guy would be safe if he used some sort of VPN, even their free plan.
Of course no one can guarantee the won't just hand you out to Swiss police on receiving proper request, but this explaination does seem reasonable
@inference
Proton doesn't have the best track record and they do make somewhat misleading claims regarding their email service at least. Also it behaves like a honeypot.
Mullvad is probably the most trustworthy from what I can gather, also they don't market with bullshit claims.