Having a hard time settling on a VPN (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by DonnieDarkmode@lemm.ee to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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I torrent (on the same PC that I run a Plex server from), but also auto connect on my devices whenever I’m on public wifi, so speed and avoiding blocks/captchas is also important. From what I understand having port forwarding will make a big difference in my torrent transfer speeds and ability to connect to peers.

I’m currently using Nord, but I’d like to make the switch to a company with a better privacy track record. I’m still really drawn to PIA because of the speeds and port forwarding, but I know their ownership is pretty sketchy, even if there’s nothing to point to there (yet). Mullvad dropped port forwarding, which seems to leave ProtonVPN. But now I’m hearing that the influx of Russian users post-invasion has increased the number of sites and services that block PVPN servers?

It seems like despite the huge amount of choices, nothing checks all the boxes except PIA. Am I missing something, or misinformed?

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[-] aldalire@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not recommending a VPN here. But there are many open-source anonymizing networks out there that need more attention. I know speed and avoiding blocks and captcha's are important to you, so this answer is not geared toward your use case, but for those looking for a free alternatives to VPN's and don't care about the speed and want to help out the network, there are

lokinet: (https://github.com/oxen-io/lokinet) (Based on the LLARP, low-latency anonymizing protocol, basically tor 2.0).

(My personal favorite): i2p. A network within a network. Downsides are you can only download torrents within the network, but the upside is there is a solid community and there are more and more torrents that exist. Mental Outlaw has a great video about i2p

There are some VPN's you can trust, but in the end of the day, I trust encryption and the decentralized network better than any centralized corp.

[-] Kuro@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago

Can you give a little more input in i2p? Where to start and what to use? Would be nice :)

[-] aldalire@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago

Sure thing matey! I am happy to chart a course as you sail through these waters.

In short, i2p is a network within a network. Think of it as being it's own seedy town within the larger city of the internet. Any information that enters this town is end-to-end encrypted. Now, in this town, to preserve anonymity, people pass along information in paper notes. Each person accepts notes from different sources, encrypts a bundle of it, and passes it along in a chain. (hence the name "garlic routing". When it hits your "inbound tunnel," or a set of (usually 2-3) people that have been assigned to pass messages to you, they incrementally un-bundle that message until it hits you, and since you have the private key you can unencrypt the message.

Information that stays within this network are automatically anonymous. These people in your inbound tunnel do not know that the messages are being sent to you, nor do they know any information about the source. They only know that they're passing these messages along.

One way companies figure out that you've been torrenting is that they would torrent a public pirated movie file. Then, they would target the ip addresses that would actually send them that information, because they know they are seeders. These companies cannot do that in i2p, because everybody in i2p is just passing along information!

There are different options for installing i2p:

For windows, there's the i2p easy install bundle that bundles a firefox profile and automatically installs the i2p router. This uses the java implementation of i2p.

For linux, there's a java (i2p) or c++ (i2pd) implementation of the i2p router. Basically the same program but in different languages, and i2p routers can still communicate with i2pd routers and vice versa. I recommend starting with java i2p, and after trying it for a while try i2pd. There's more GUI in the java implementation, but the i2pd version is faster because cryptographic functions run faster in c++. Mental Outlaw has a good video on running i2pd on linux