IVPN Blog

> It's not clear to me why the VPN people are more trustworthy than ISPs. In my country, the UK, ISPs are legally required to retain logs of customer activity for 12 months. A VPN has no such legal requirement. So while I can't be 100% sure that my VPN is monitoring me, I can be 100% sure my ISP is. Additionally, my VPN has a financial incentive not to log customer data, or at the very least, not to be caught doing it. (I'm currently using IVPN (https://www.ivpn.net/). It's on the more expensive side, though that isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it supports multihop over OpenVPN, and the experimental Wireguard protocol.)

I've been trying out Wireguard with IVPN (https://ivpn.net/) and so far I'm impressed. Very quick tunnel setup (especially important on mobile iOS devices) and great performance afterwards.

IVPN | System and Network Administrator | Remote (UTC-1 to UTC+3) | Full-time | https://www.ivpn.net IVPN is a privacy-focused consumer VPN service in operation since 2010. We have high ethical standards, regular security audits and a stellar reputation among security and privacy analysts. This year we are launching multiple new services to complement our VPN offering. We are looking for a System and Network Administrator with the following responsibilities: - maintaining and ensuring the high availability of our network of hundreds of servers, including VPN gateways - interfacing with ISP's to resolve upstream network issues - provide tier 2 and 3 support to our customer support team for issues relating to infrastructure - consolidating infrastructure, unifying monitoring and aligning operational practices across the business. The position is fully remote with high level of autonomy: maximum freedom, minimum meetings. What we expect: - 5+ years experience managing Linux servers including bare-metal. - Strong understanding of TCP/IP, UDP, SSL/TLS and other related Internet protocols - Experience working with a configuration management tool e.g. Ansible, Puppet, Salt. - 5+ years experience with Python, Go or other scripting languages - Interest in infosec, specifically with regards to public key cryptography, firewalls and Linux server hardening. You can email me if you have any questions about the role: viktor at ivpn.net. If you are ready, you can apply here:…

https://www.ivpn.net/ also generates a random userid and also accepts cash in the mail (only for large purchases unfortunately). I wasn't able to get mullvad's multihop to work on Android, but iVPN Pro does the trick. iVPN also has a nice server status page that helps you optimize for speed (low load server) or anonymity (high load server) as appropriate: https://www.ivpn.net/status/ They have a weird "anti-marketing" homepage which devotes almost equal space to explaining why you should not buy their product :-P Perfect Privacy accepts a gift card (more convenient than mailed cash IMO) and has a nifty "neurorouting" feature which aims to be better than standard multihop (claims of speed, at least, I can attest to). They do ask for an email address, sadly, unlike iVPN/Mullvad. Also I just saw this and it looks a bit worrisome https://www.security.org/privacy-guide/perfect-privacy/ Both iVPN and PP let you block various trackers / MANGA corps at the network level. I like Mullvad but it seems good to support a diversity of providers. Curious if anyone has any dirt on either of those two, or if they can make more recommendations.

https://www.ivpn.net/ see "Do you really need a VPN?" - not affiliated with them, but tell me any other VPN-service that is actually this upfront... most are marketing the hell out of their apparent magic effects... since we're on the topic: how is it still a thing that vpn services are actively pitching content-block/copyright circumvention? Seems weird to pitch something as shady this loud and publicly? Reminds me of how weird I find it that trackers and illegal hosting sites have twitter accounts...

Thank you. I disagree with your assessment of the use cases for a VPN. Just one example: Your IP address is often a great identifier, making a VPN or Tor a useful starting point for online privacy. This is more or less what we say on our website as well. Based on your comment however I think you might find the follwing links to IVPN refreshing: https://www.ivpn.net/blog/why-you-dont-need-a-vpn/ https://www.doineedavpn.com/ https://github.com/ivpn/doineedavpn.com

IVPN | Backend Developer | REMOTE | https://www.ivpn.net At IVPN, we are on a mission to help people resist online surveillance. The internet activity of every human being has become a hot commodity in the 21th century. Help us fight back. Go, PHP For more info https://ivpn.recruitee.com/o/backend-developer Email me at the address on my profile. Please apply for position using link above.

Yes, I have seen that. There are some examples in a guide that I wrote for IVPN.[0] For example, the lowest-rtt probe for an IVPN server in Reykjavik, IS is in Amsterdam, NL.[1] The minrtt for a probe in Iceland is greater. However, I'm just looking at signal velocity for the probe with the smallest minrtt. So probes where routing to the server is less direct will just have greater minrtt for a given geographic separation. That is, lower signal velocity. So that doesn't affect my analysis. 0) https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/how-to-verify-physical-locations-o… 1) https://www.ivpn.net/blog/wp-content/img/IVPN-is1.gw_.ivpn_.net-All-Pr…

VPN - (https://www.ivpn.net/) Music - (https://www.deezer.com) Cloud Service - (https://chunkhost.com/) Lastpass

iVPN. Mainly based on their excellent privacy tutorials: https://www.ivpn.net/blog/privacy-guides Steer clear of PIA. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8982095

The US actually does not have any kind of legally mandated data retention for internet services. If you do not log the data, you cannot be compelled to turn it over. http://www.internetlawyer-blog.com/2013/09/isp-data-retention-policies… https://www.ivpn.net/data-retention-laws/united-states https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/5539/data-retention-and-vpn-logging-in-th…

After some research, I ended up going with IVPN (https://www.ivpn.net/). It's pretty affordable too.

Did you try IVPN? http://www.ivpn.net/ I've just purchased an Asus RT-N66U to run an OpenVPN client so that I can encrypt the traffic from all computers, and as I don't do file-sharing I've focused on choosing a provider obsessed by privacy rather than piracy. IVPN looks like it, but I haven't yet tried it so don't yet know how it will perform.

Url is https://www.ivpn.net

So who is this article aimed at? If you intend to torrent, you're not going to roll your own on a VPS that is going to forward DMCA notices right back to you. DO and AWS are not cool with operating as high-transfer seedboxes and will be fairly expensive. If you're trying to remain hidden from a nation-state level actor you're obviously not going to use a VPS, but you also have bigger problems than HideMyAss accidentally leaking your ipv6 address. If you're like most people and don't want to pay $$$ a month for a VPS but want to torrent a bit, you just want a straight up regular VPN recommendation which they never provide. "Choosing a VPN is hard", yeah no shit, that's why I was hoping you would provide some value by doing the work for me. I was in the market recently and ended up going with iVPN for $100/year. Their "18 questions to ask your vpn provider" [1] page is basically a more practical version of this article. Not that I am going to use it, but they also have guides showing you how to created nested and branched chains of tor/pfsense vm clients across countries, if you really did want to hide traffic from a nation state. If putting your trust into a VPN is the issue it's much easier to trust someone that links directly to security forums and openvpn documentation. [1] https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/18-questions-to-ask-your-vpn-servi…

I like iVPN: https://www.ivpn.net/

> That's pretty much all you need to know. Depends on the level of anonymity the end-user desires. That rabbit hole is deep, but not that deep: https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/advanced-privacy-and-anonymity-par… / https://archive.today/9DhtT (by u/mirmir)

Thanks for pointing this out. I wasn't aware of NetFlow. I don't use IVPN, but I found this writeup informative: https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/isp-netflow-surveillance-and-vpn/

Just for completions sake, IVPN takes cash too https://www.ivpn.net/en/pricing/

Mullvad is probably the VPN with the longest track record of not keeping logs. I find it likely that the vast majority of people who hosted immoral content using Mullvad's port forwarding feature solely used Mullvad for this purpose because of their reputation. After Mullvad discontinued port forwarding, IVPN (probably the second most trusted VPN provider) came out a month later and announced that they were also discontinuing port forwarding [1]. According to Mullvads blog [2] the police raid was related to a blackmail attack in Germany. [1]https://www.ivpn.net/blog/gradual-removal-of-port-forwarding [2]https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/2/update-the-swedish-authorities-an…

As ivpn's gateway in Brussels is more often than not 100% [0] during the evenings, I'm looking for an alternative. This wasn't the case until some 6-12 month. Anyone experience with mullvad's [1] throughput in Belgium? [0] https://www.ivpn.net/status/ [1] https://mullvad.net/en/servers

>looking for a provider which still supports port forwarding. They're phasing it out too, not available to new customers and out by September. https://www.ivpn.net/blog/gradual-removal-of-port-forwarding/

Coolest feature is per container socks5 support so each container can send traffic through a different socks 5 server. Any VPN offering socks5 on their gateways should work. I'm using IVPN which expose socks5 on each of their WireGuard servers - there is demo on their blog - https://www.ivpn.net/blog/socks5-proxies-app-based-vpn-tunnels/

IVPN has wireguard multihop since a while I believe: https://www.ivpn.net/knowledgebase/general/what-is-a-multihop-vpn-serv… The iOS app has been more reliable than the mullvad app so far, which is the reason I switched. Additionally, it allows to configure "trusted" and "untrusted" networks, which is quite useful as well. (And yes, this is not a secure feature, as a network can easily be spoofed, but I use IVPN mostly for data privacy and not for safety/security reasons)

Yes, the tor project is very transparent that anonymity is not guaranteed. Bridges and obfuscation tools are simply one possible answer to the "how is [connecting to tor without ISP detection] possible?" question. The linked article tries to imply that Ross Ulbricht's arrest was somehow the result of deanonymized tor traffic, but in reality many (most?) large DNM [1,2] and malware/hacking arrests seem to be the result of poor opsec [3]. [1] https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/online-privacy-through-opsec-and-c… [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaBay#Seizure_and_shutdown [3] https://krebsonsecurity.com/category/breadcrumbs/

That system a) has a paytrail, b) involves companies that can be coerced / hacked with relative ease, c) is a paid system and d) is quite a bit for average user to handle. Also, if you're going to stay anonymous, you need something that is extremely hard to misconfigure. I use wireguard on my Android and I've set the VPN to activate automatically, and I only allow connection via VPN, but I'd never imagine any of the apps I'm running are properly anonymized. Also, since you're apparently working for or affiliated with VPN providers[1], you might want to be more transparent about possible vested interests. [1] https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/what-is-a-vpn

I work at IVPN. WireGuard out of the box indeed have few issues related to privacy which require additional effort to overcome. Forward secrecy is one of them. We created a document where we've described all of the known issues related to privacy when using WireGuard up to date and how we solve them [0]. Talking about forward secrecy specifically, IVPN client apps for all platforms do automatic key rotation every 7 days by default (which can be changed to as often as every day). It makes it impossible to correlate any traffic with customers after keys were rotated. [0] - https://www.ivpn.net/knowledgebase/254/Using-WireGuard-for-Privacy-Pro…

Not true. Good VPN providers accept anonymous payment in cash. E.g. IVPN[1]. [1] https://www.ivpn.net/knowledgebase/91/How-can-I-pay-with-cash.html

iVPN does: https://www.ivpn.net/wireguard PIA (Private Internet Access) is sponsoring Wireguard development: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2018/09/the-current-status-…

Here is a gist how the technique works. https://gist.github.com/hectorguo/672844c319547498dcb569df583f959d And how to disable it in browser. https://www.ivpn.net/knowledgebase/158/My-IP-is-being-leaked-by-WebRTC…