[ale] Good commercial VPN's

[DJ-Pfulio]

Count me as a PIA user too.  PIA has been hit with FBI search warrants and was
unable to comply more than once.  Think I'm paying $38 for 2 yrs. There's always
a coupon somewhere.

A few years ago, PIA blocked video, but that seems to have ended. I haven't
noticed any issues in at least 2 yrs. No bandwidth issues seen.
I don't torrent.

I take a few extra steps for privacy, like always buying a fixed value Visa gift
card from a non-chain convenience store with cash to use for PIA and PAYGO cell
service.  Register the card using a VPN, while using a new, random, userid,
running inside a firejail --private browser session. The registered name is
someone real, w/ their correct address. That's all that most online purchases
need.  Only use that card for online services that doesn't involve shipping
anything - always through a VPN connection, new userid, new firejail, in
--private mode.

Wait at least 30 days before using the gift card. Thinking is that tiny stores
don't save the video longer than that. Who knows?

If I did something REALLY bad, I'd expect to be caught.  If they ask for an
email address, I create a new protonmail free one ... again, only accessed using
the vpn, new random account, and firejail --private mode.

PIA does have logs, but they are deleted 3 minutes after a connection is closed,
so don't use them 24/7.  Disconnect all your devices (they allowed 3-5
concurrently) daily, long enough for those logs to be removed.  Also, PIA
supports AES-256 encryption, but that takes some manual setup.
Default settings from most VPN providers seem to be ok, but not great. Their
goal is to avoid customer experienced issues, not necessarily to be the most
secure they can.  Think I had to setup something extra to prevent DNS leaks from
the VPN. Sorry, I don't recall those details anymore.

I've never used the PIA client applications. I use the standard openVPN clients
on all my platforms.


On 9/6/19 8:35 AM, Jeffrey Brown via Ale wrote:
> I use Private Internet Access (PIA)