I must be crazy to share these on a site full of dev and hardcore techies 🥸 feel free to point out is there any mistakes or what other fun I am missing.

Nice tips and hacks here, I also use proton and mullvad in different occasions (personal and work).

Another thing that VPNs are very usefull in my opinion are the protection from ISPs and Govs spying and meta data collection. Of course it will be wise to use VPNs with private browsing and only login at services (mail / social etc) and latter log-off when the job is done. Having cookies from logged accounts while surfing the web is not reccomended for privacy.

Excellent work here.

Very nice article right here 👌

I’ve found a fair amount of services don’t work when I’m on Mullvad. Some of them I don’t care about, but others are more important. I wonder if changing locations might help with this.

Regarding streaming services like Netflix, doesn’t it change the content you receive if you use a VPN to access from a different country? I guess that could be good or bad depending on what you’re looking to access, but I don’t think it’s just a cheaper bill with no other changes?

Great post!, thanks for sharing those tips!

Nice work, I'll bookmark this

Great tips!

I just switched to proton from mullvad :) It was mostly due to the fact of needing a new email provider combined with Mullvad ditching their port forwarding support. I miss the ability to pay in BTC but bitrefill kinda makes up for that.

BTW- does anyone know how to do clearnet lnd with proton vpn?

As I travel and ran into problems to subscribe to services which required me to switch my IP address just to access it, it's hard for me to disagree that VPN services are convenient. Yet when I see "VPN is a Must" I can't resist answering to say that a VPN is just a tool to connect distant networks. So without using a leased line, for 2 networks to be connected securely, VPN is the traditional way to access for example the local network of a company.

I think the most exciting things for privacy against digital surveillance networks like Tor, i2p, and probably others.

I think when using the WiFi of others the most important thing to do rather than connect to a VPN service is to shutdown all local services like samba or others which share data. When I was at the university, people using macbooks had a sharing service running by default (I guess) so I was listening music on their computers and could look at their holidays pictures.

That being said I use VPN services myself so my grain of salt: it is just connecting 2 networks together and I don't think that just changing our IP address is the best way to get privacy. For example users can be tracked with an account, cookies, fingerprint of the browser, etc.

"I used to use Proton VPN, but I was getting a bit annoyed that they are trying to do EVERYTHING."

What's the problem? lol

Hello friend, I found this because I was searching SN for posts about buying tickets with bitcoin. What do you use for booking flights? Skyscanner? Expedia? I'm interested to know. I'm flying from China -> SF Cal -> Florida -> Paris -> Jakarta -> China I wonder what VPN to use to plug this into skyscanner's multi-city ticket finder. I decided to buy legs of the flight though so that my bitcoin can keep appreciating rather than buy all the tickets at once. It's about $2400 a person though if I use skyscanner multi-city and let it plan the route for me.

P.s But while I'm here, just wanted to mention that the images aren't loading for me...

P.S.S. I use mullvad and love it. Paid in bitcoin

Something to note regarding the suggestion of using alternate locations to get cheaper pricing on things -- yes, it is true that they price things differently for people in other countries; services like Steam for example are well-known for having much cheaper games in places like Argentina versus what they cost in the US.

However, it is not so simple as just changing your location and then purchasing things. First of all, if you already have an account with these services and you login from a weird random location (on an IP address that any business worth their salt is going to immediately recognize as belonging to IPv4 space that is leased to/used by Mullvad or other VPN services) you run the risk of having your account locked for 'security' purposes. I don't necessarily blame any company for doing that, after all, they are just trying to keep your account secured, imagine if it was some random person in another country logging into your account and trying to make a purchase, you'd be glad they did it in that case.

Aside from that, in many cases you will also have to have an actual bank card that is FROM the country you are trying to make the purchase from online, i.e. if you are setting your location to say, Turkey, and trying to buy some online service that has cheaper pricing for Turkish people, you aren't going to be able to just use your American or British (or whatever) debit/credit card information and take advantage of this, the purchase won't go through.

Also you are running the risk of having your card get flagged as being fraudulent use or the information having been stolen because a lot of anti-fraud systems will take the VPN service IP address + foreign credit card info = stolen details and report it back to your issuing bank. Something to be aware of. Also a lot of the cheaper plane flight thing doesn't necessarily work anymore, the airlines have caught on to this kind of thing years ago, it used to work like 5 years ago now you will be lucky to have it work every once in a while.

I think overall VPNs can be useful for some things, especially if you live in a country where the government themselves are restricting access to certain sites, but, they are not a one-size-fits-all solution for people, and too many videos advertising them online for example try to give people the false impression that they protect you from things when in reality they are just masking your IP address between you and the VPN provider. Your ISP can still see what you are connecting to from your computer to the VPN provider, and you have to trust the VPN provider.

Mullvad gets mentioned a lot on here for some reason, and while I don't have any reason to personally distrust them (I have used them before, they were fine), they do operate based out of Sweden which is kind of strange considering that Sweden are a party to the larger consortium of "14 eyes" reporting nations that all give data back to the US government agencies, so for anyone who is doing something even remotely shady you are taking that risk. Not to say that I would trust anything like ProtonVPN over it either, you are taking a risk by putting your trust into any of these companies. Best to learn how to "roll your own" and set up your own VPN, you can install and run Wireguard on a remote VPS very, very easily and have it up and running within a few minutes, for cheaper than what you'd pay monthly at any of these commercial VPN services. Of course, you lose the ability to hop around to different locations, so, these are things you need to take into account.

🟠🟣⚡️📖🫡 🐐

So the cheaper flight thing. Basically the airlines assume that you always have to return to your city of origin, so they tend to price the return ticket higher.

Tor is much better privacy wise than a vpn, but it's still better than nothing.