VPNs?

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Ah, but it's the principle of the thing. If it moves, download a personal copy before some bastard removes it from cyberspace. I've got complete collections of things I don't even like. But I'm rather proud of a clip of Captain Pugwash saying "I most certainly do, Master Bate." Can't find that on the Web any more, though it's the funniest thing Pugwash ever said IMHO.

The three country limit might just be their free VPN offerings.

I have a Proton Visionary Account that includes everything Proton offers.

The countries their VPN currently covers are:
1. Afghanistan
2. Albania
3. Algeria
4. Angola
5. Argentina
6. Australia
7. Austria
8. Azerbajian
9. Bahrain
10. Bangladesh
11. Belarus
12. Belgium
13. Bhutan
14. Bosnia and Herzegovina
15. Brazil
16. Bulgaria
17. Cambodia
18. Canada
19. Chad
20. Chile
21. Columbia
22. Comoros
23. Costa Rica
24. Croatia
25. Cyprus
26. Czech Republic
27. Denmark
28. Ecuador
29. Egypt
30. El Salvador
31. Eritrea
32. Estonia
33. Ethiopia
34. Finland
35. France
36. Georgia
37. Germany
38. Ghana
39. Greece
40. Hong Kong
41. Hungary
42. Iceland
43. India
44. Iraq
45. Ireland
46. Israel
47. Italy
48. Ivory Coast
49. Japan
50. Jordan
51. Kazakhstan
52. Kenya
53. Kuwait
54. Latvia
55. Libya
56. Lithuania
57. Luxembourg
58. Macedonia
59. Malaysia
60. Malta
61. Mauritania
62. Mauritius
63. Mexico
64. Moldova
65. Montenegro
66. Morocco
67. Mozambique
68. Myammar
69. Nepal
70. Netherlands
71. New Zealand
72. Nigeria
73. Norway
74. Oman
75. Pakistan
76. Peru
77. Philippines
78. Poland
79. Portugal
80. Puerto Rico
81. Qatar
82. Romania
83. Russia
84. Rwanda
85. Saudi Arabia
86. Senegal
87. Serbia
88. Singapore
89. Slovakia
90. Slovenia
91. Somalia
92. South Africa
93. South Korea
94. South Sudan
95. Spain
96. Sri Lanka
97. Sudan
98. Sweden
99. Switzerland
100. Syria
101. Taiwan
102. Tajikistan
103. Tanzania
104. Thailand
105. Togo
106. Tunisia
107. Turkey
108. Turkmenistan
109. Ukraine
110. United Arab Emirates
111. United Kingdom
112. United States
113. Uzbekistan
114. Venezuela
115. Vietnam
116. Yemen

Hopefully, I didn't miss any.

For a few of those, you can bounce through two sites. For example, just for fun one night to connect from my office to the computer room about 25 feet away, using the VPN I routed the traffic through both Sweden and Japan. My cell phone is nearly always connected over the VPN with hops in the US and in Iceland.

I think that all of those allow P2P/Bit torrent. Some countries such as Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, and Angola use something called "Smart Routing", but I don't know what that is.

They also have tor VPN nodes, too. I haven't tried them, though.

Last edited by kokopelli on 11 Jan 2025, 7:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

^
Yes that includes the UK so it would be possible to access the BBC material that's restricted to UK IP addresses, assuming the BBC doesn't see through the trick. You're right that the 3 (or whatever) servers in the free version of Proton are the available countries they'll let you have for nothing. So it may be a matter of spending the money

I'll have to try that to see if I can pick up the BBC. How does that work?

I understand that Opera has a free VPN built in for that browser. But since Opera is now owned by the Chinese, I don't know if I would trust that free VPN at all.

I connected to the UK but https://whatismyipaddress.com shows me in Ireland on UK#600. I tried again on UK#680 and it was in Ireland, too. These might have been Northern Ireland since Northern Ireland is part of the UK.

So I dropped it and connected again but this time selecting UK#3 and it shows me in Feniton, England.

Regarding VPNs, I don't know that they actually increase your security. If anything, mine probably decreases it since my computer is behind two firewalls, the first of which is very solid. For this reason, I don't use it much from my desktop.

One thing that VPNs do is to hide your connections from your service provider, thus increasing your privacy.

But as for security, it really depends on how your security compares to your VPN provider's security.

I have two firewalls. The outer firewall blocks all connections that do not originate from within our network unless that traffic is specifically permitted and then only to the individual computers within the network to which it is permitted. The second firewall is a more conventional home firewall unit which basically just does dhcp. In other words, not really a firewall but provides some protection. I would not use it on the Internet without the first firewall to block traffic.

When I am not on the VPN, there is nearly zero chance that someone is going to get through both firewalls to get to my computer. They can't even reach the inner firewall from the Internet. And if they can't reach it, then they can't get through to it. The one exception is if some attacker inside the network installs something that lets them through to their computer from which the attacker can then attack others on the network, but if that happens, the VPN won't help anyway.

When I am on the VPN, it opens a hole that would allow someone attacking through the VPN end point to get through if the VPN endpoint doesn't block such traffic. That said, I have done a couple of tests to see if I could reach my computer through the VPN and it didn't appear that the Proton VPN was allowing that traffic.

If you use a VPN that doesn't adequately block attacks, then your firewall won't matter because you are going through it with the VPN.

I don't know that a VPN does much of anything from a cell phone except hide your traffic from your provider. The VPN gives you an address and might block incoming traffic through the VPN, but your cell phone still has an address on the cell network. If anything, the VPN opens up two routes two your cell phone instead of just the one. That said, my cell phone IP address shows it has a non-routable address so the cell network will have at least a dhcp service.

Regarding the going through two VPN endpoints, Proton has what they call "Secure Core".

At the moment, I'm connected to CH-US#1. I am connected through to Switzerland but https://whatismyipaddress.com shows me in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Switching to CH-US#2, it now shows me in Atlanta, Georgia.

Switching to IS-US#1, it now shows me in Chicago, Illinois.

Now, from SE-US#1, it now shows me in Washington DC

Oddly enough, SE-US#2 shows me in Paris, France.
Trying SE-US#2 again, it shows me in Salt Lake City, Utah.

I have noticed this from other Secure Core endpoints before. You don't necessarily show up in the country you expect. For that reason, you should probably not use Secure Core on the UK networks if you want to be able to access something restricted to the UK.

Trying from the UK:
CH-UK#1: London, England
IS-UK#1: Madrid, Spain
SE-UK#1: London, England

Note that CH is Switzerland, IS is Iceland, and SE is Sweden.

One other thing worth noting is that with Proton, some VPN endpoints handle both IPv4 and IPv6 while some others handle only IPv4.

If you go here without a VPN:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/curat ... 9/m0026l4m
then you should be able to play that from anywhere in the world.
But if you go here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live: ... orts_extra
then it will only play if you're in the UK.
Some of these "BBC sounds" items are restricted like that, and the BBC is quite good at detecting VPNs and other location-spoofing strategies. So if a particular VPN can fool them, then it's probably a good one that could fool almost anybody. Most free VPNs used to be able to do the trick, but you'd be very lucky to find one that could these days.
https://www.reviewsfire.com/vpn/how-to- ... io-abroad/
Not that the content is the kind of thing the OP is likely to be interested in. It's just an example for use as a litmus test to see how effective a VPN is at spoofing a location. You could also one of those websites that tell you where they think you are. I tried a few when I was testing a free VPN a few years ago, some of them saw right through the VPN so I concluded it wasn't a very good one.

For a few years now circa 2021 I have been using Mullvad and had good experiences. My only gripe is I am not a big fan of their pricing model. $73 just for one year!? I also heard they don't do any sales iirc. Regardless, I don't use a VPN very often so $6 for one month is fine enough for me.

With free VPNs I'd ask myself who is paying for this?—if it's not you as the customer, then assume you're the product and someone else is the actual customer.

So, what's the actual product, for the actual customer? At the very least, your data.

^
True, it's always suspicious when somebody appears to be giving something away, but there are free VPNs that don't log any user data. According to a number of Web sources, Proton doesn't. But as we've already seen, you don't get much data for free. So it's possible to get a free VPN that doesn't log user data, but it might be rigged to somehow nudge you into buying into the full service. Whether or not any particular individual will take the bait and pay up depends on the individual's needs. If you don't want much data, you could probably stay on the free version of Proton for as long as it's there, though free service providers have been known to do a bait-and-switch job on their offerings, i.e. once you're used to a good service they make it worse. But not necessarily.

The Web has a diverse range of actors. Many are just in it for the profit and will do anything they think they can get away with to fleece the punters. Some are remarkably philanthropic, others are somewhere between the two extremes. Others are after profit but aren't smart enough to get it. And the greedy ones can be so clever with the masquerade that it can be very hard to tell the difference. But the individual can also be clever at fighting back, and it's sometimes possible to win.

Talking of fighting back, I wonder whether Proton's data limit could be effectively increased by having multiple accounts with them, either on different computers or on different user accounts on the same machine? They might see straight through the ruse though, or it might turn out to be so much hassle switching between accounts every few video downloads that it would be more cost-effective to pay up.

But paying up also has its own privacy vulnerability. The provider has to know your bank details, at least for as long as required to get the money. I've heard that some of them delete the bank details immediately after the payment has been made. And I guess the only info that could get leaked would be the fact that you used a VPN. I presume what you used it for would still be as hidden as it ever was.

It's a shame that we never get to test these privacy matters for ourselves, and have to take somebody else's word for it. How do we know which reviews to trust? Maybe in the end it's a matter of faith. And I don't trust faith.

They shouldn't see the bank details at all if you are using https for the connection. The best they might know is that you are connected to the vendor and the payment processor.

Some VPNs allow people to pay with bitcoin to potentially have more anonymity. Another option would be paying with a prepaid debit card thing.