The once-niche way to protect your online activity took off, in part, due to massive marketing budgets and influencer collaborations convincing consumers that a VPN’s functionality or privacy features could solve all their security woes.
In other words, secure VPNs work by masking your IP address and the identity of your computer or mobile device on the network and creating an encrypted “tunnel” that prevents your internet service provider (ISP) from accessing data about your browsing history.
“If you’re just worried about somebody sitting there passively and looking at your data then a VPN is great,” Jed Crandall, an associate professor at Arizona State University, told Engadget.
If you travel a lot and rely on public WiFi or hotspots, are looking to browse outside of your home country or want to keep your traffic hidden from your ISP, then investing in a VPN will be useful.
We looked at price, usage limits, effects on internet speed, possible use cases, ease of use, general functionality and additional “extra” VPN features like multihop.
That said, it works on a bunch of devices from smart TVs to game consoles, unlike some other services that lack support beyond the usual suspects like smartphones and laptops.
Very telling that big sites are only promoting VPN services that heavily advertise… i.e. - give commissions on signups.
The list of providers they “tested” aren’t even that complete, they didn’t even bother to pretend to check out ones that won’t give a kickback for promotion.
Totally agree but I’m fine with them choosing protonvpn as the best overall out of that list. I like proton and have used them for years. But, the fact that Mullvad wasn’t in their list at all is suspect.
Agreed with your last point, though Mullvad axing port forwarding means for torrenters they’ve become drastically less useful, so I wouldn’t rate them very highly myself either. Despite liking them a lot.
I wonder why they don’t employ Nat-pmp like Proton does.
I think Mullvad was being used for a lot of CSAM torrenting, and they didn’t like that. They got tired of regular users complaining of being blocked everywhere, and Interpol knocking on their door.
Shocker: All these "Best of" lists are nothing but affiliate marketing pages. They're popular because people do seek them out, since good lists are genuinely useful, so sites capitalise on them as a revenue source.
You can torrent without portforwarding. The only issue is on rare Linux isos. You potentially will have trouble discovering new peers. At least one person will need portforwarding.
It’s more that effective seeding is very hard without a forwarded port. If you only leech, you’ll be fine. But that’s not how the system is envisioned.
I linked a Docker Container elsewhere in this topic that works with Proton’s implementation of port forwarding. Proton’s price is the same as Mullvad too. That would be my recommendation.
Had to leave MV because of this. I went to Proton, though I did need special software to support its form of port forwarding without introducing a regular hassle. All good now, mostly.
I was looking at Proton too but I’m already a customer and the VPN is going to be shared with family members. I worries if they can access my mail if I share my account.
I will have to suggest ovpn. Minus it being slightly more difficult to search issues because it’s too similar to openvpn , I’ve been super happy with it for my use case. I ended up choosing them over mullvad because of the port forwarding issue.
I don’t play online games anymore, but this makes me sadly nostalgic for playing Halo 2 on the Xbox at launch back in my late teens and other games on that console. There was shit talking galore and it was amazing.
Problem is I guess now gaming is open to more people, there’s vastly more chance of those who would take it way too far
I haven’t played online since the 360 days so who knows what the experience is like now. Only have time for single player titles nowadays.
it turned from a bunch of 12-18 year olds screaming “I fucked your mom last night” to a bunch of mid-late 20-30s saying “you stupid n*****” every other sentence…
I have turned off game chat in every game since modern warfare 2019
I miss the 360 era myself, but as someone who enjoys playing competitively in every game, it’s hard to play unless you have a bunch of like minded individuals with you… and I even find that challenging some days
Wow classic was a PERFECT experience for me. Everyone was nice, mild RP on a non RP (but very PvP) server, orderly queues, met some awesome friends, jokes from the mid-2000s. 10/10
Then they did updates and put in MTX and it’s not the same, fuck you WoW classic. It was magical for a year.
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