Mulvad seems to be a good option.

Seconded. It's Mullvad, tho, not Mulvad ;) I have been a customer since a while and cannot complain. They support wireguard, which is nice, and of course plain OpenVPN connections, but offer apps for various platforms too. They do not pay for reviews, which is nice (and quite telling that other do), they are own by to Swedish guys. Their price is a €5/month (for simultaneous 5 VPN connections, no data caps) and you can pay in cash* or bitcoin if you want.

And no, I am not paid or otherwise compensated to write this, or affiliated with them other then being a customer.

[*] They even say: "Please avoid writing your name or address on the envelope."

> bitcoin

Do they take any other cryptocurrencies, or would I have to convert some other coin into bitcoin to pay them?

OpenVPN is nice, since my OpenWRT router can be a client.

EDIT: I emailed Mullvad and received a reply within 15 minutes! and it answered my questions accurately! I think they win the customer service award for today :D

What was the answer?

Bitcoin or bitcoin cash are accepted payment methods.

They have openvpn instructions for openwrt at https://mullvad.net/en/help/openwrt-routers-and-mullvad-vpn/

And their clients are open source: https://github.com/mullvad/mullvadvpn-app

(sorry for not replying earlier!)

Agreed, this looks really bad. And Mullvad is a good option.

So are AirVPN, Insorg and IVPN.

Edit: For background, see https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252466203/Top-VPNs-secre...

Tunnelbear as well.

I'm not a customer of either, just been researching alternatives since tis news hit earlier this week.

Tunnelbear is owned by McAfee https://www.tunnelbear.com/blog/tunnelbear_joins_mcafee/

IIRC Tunnelbear is known to sell info on the clients. It's not a fringe story to my knowledge, but alas I don't have links on me currently.

Can vouch for Mullvad. A happy customer for years. There customer service is great!

they looked bad long before this. I don't know why this story didn't get me attention:

https://vpnpro.com/blog/confusion-in-the-vpn-industry-is-nor...

someone from PIA's patent company was caught trying to smear other VPN's but forgot to hide his profile image.

> Is NordVPN being defamed?

Any article on the internet that uses a question mark in the headline is either clickbait or dealing in suppositions, not facts.

Can wholeheartedly recommend https://ipredator.se

There are real privacy enthusiaists behind ipredator.

Just cancelled my subscription.

Looking for alternatives now. Is NordVPN any good?

Mozilla is planning something, subscribe for updates:

https://premium.firefox.com/vpn/

Presumably, they'll partner with a vendor that they can audit, but who knows.

Having worked at Mozilla I'm confident lots of individuals would leak if forced to build backdoors :)

Hard to trust an american company, given the track record of the government influence.

Hard to believe any VPN company provides serious protection from the American government. In the highly unlikely event that the company won't cooperate they can just comprise you outside that channel. See everyone who thought Tor was enough to evade the US government.

I trust Mozilla to not cooperate with anyone less powerful than Uncle Sam which is a lot more than most shady fly-by-night VPN operators.

If you're using your VPN as protection against your ISP, wifi provider (internet Cafe, school, workplace, home), or some other MITM you're better off with a service run by a serious company, with a lot to lose from a scandal and a long track record of not lying and being technically competent.

If you're looking to hide your browsing from the US government you should a) give up or b) definitely not use a commercial VPN.

I would not trust Mozilla in 2019, they have proven time and time again they will sell their users, and privacy down the river for Business Gain

That inevitably leads me to ask about your web browser. What are you using and why?

Any examples?

Really? do you not follow the news at all?

1. Their Backdoor of Advertisements Plugins (Ref the USA network Ads for Mr. Robot)

2. Their Forcing DoH through CloudFlare

3. Their change to require OptOut instead of OptIn for most Privacy violating features (like User Telmentary data)

4. Their starting of the Mozilla Ministry of Truth strait out of an Orwell novel

5. Banning of Plugins due to Ideology

6. Their recent push for Online Censorship

That is just a start

NordVPN is a security nightmare. I usually recommend either Mullvad or TunnelBear depending on whether you care more about quality of service or ease of use.

TunnelBear was acquired by McAfee last year.

I use NordVPN, didn't know it had a bad reputation (purchased it because of a promotional offer). Care to elaborate?

The problem with NordVPN isn't that they had a breach and their keys were leaked (ok, well that is huge fucking problem) due to a forgotten KVM but that they didn't fess up till 18 months later when some independent researcher brought that to light.

Also they spend huge amounts of money on advertisement and their promotions contain lots of misinformation.

Just cancelled too.

Given all the shilling and backstabbing in the online VPN recommendation industry, it’s hard to trust any advice now, not even comments here. God knows who’s a shill.

But those geoblocks and the occasional need to anonymize activities... Really hard to solve. (I know Tor. Tor is too damn slow.)

Actually, far worse than the shills are the cancelling virtue signallers who have nothing better to do than 1) quit a service because someone tells them to; 2) go running to that forum looking for approval by telling them "I cancelled!"

Oh look, you're one of them. (pat on head)

Buy a pre paid Visa card in cash and rent a box from a cloud/VPS. Install OpenVPN etc and set up auto updates.

How many countries are left where you can buy an anonymous credit card in exchange for cash? That is, over the counter in a physical store?

Don't the Know Your Customer laws banks have to adhere to mean that anonymous cards are essentially a thing of the past?

In the UK you can buy a "travel card" with cash at any Post Office counter, they are just regular MasterCard cards and can be used like any other debit card, including online purchases. They are even reloadable and contactless too.

Post Office travel cards are not anonymous. They have to be activated and photo id is required to buy them over the counter [1].

[1] https://www.postoffice.co.uk/travel-money/card

It might be far easier to buy crypto via an ATM. Sure, it will cost a bit more but you will have some anonymity.

https://coinatmradar.com/

Very common in almost many stores in the US, Large companies like Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, sell them

Plus in many places you can bring in Change to a CoinStar can convert your coins to a Visa Gift card

Nord is good - at marketing.

Get ProtonVPN. Same owners as ProtonMail.

I don't recommend ProtonVPN - tried it and if you're torrenting they throttle you to 20Mbps. Shady past connection to NordVPN / Tesonet also a concern.

I’ve never had any throttling occur. Are you using a free plan or paid?

Paid "Plus" plan and connecting to their dedicated P2P servers in Switzerland and Sweden. Definitely getting throttled by them to ~20Mbps while torrenting. Tried a competitor VPN - no throttling, torrenting at full speed. Glad I only paid for a month - they won't be seeing any more of my money once the month's up.

They've got a black friday special for vpn + mail.

...but sounds like their IMAP is broken from googling. Not sure I can live with that.

Isn’t proton mail a Chinese data collection company?

source? Or am I missing a joke here?

Proton VPN seems to work well, although the privacy advantages of being in Switzerland seem to have eroded over time.

I can vouch for Mullvad. They don't do paid promotions like Nord or Express and enjoy a fairly good reputation. You can actually even pay them cash by mailing a fiver to Sweden with your account number on a note lol.

That's another plus. You don't actually have to register an account with them, but instead their website generates a random number for you that you use to log in. All in all they appear to be very transparent.

I love this one: https://airvpn.org/ "A VPN based on OpenVPN and operated by activists and hacktivists in defence of net neutrality, privacy and against censorship."

Yes, +1 for AirVPN and their client Eddie which is in complete rewrite mode now, so we can expect awesome things. :)

In this space is also https://riseup.net/en/vpn but I dislike they want you to use their custom client, just rubs me wrong.

Cryptostorm.is and ProtonVPN. Mullvad is good too.

So dramatic! I'm sure it is quite a burden on your soul having to tell all your little friends and family to cancel! Oh, the tears!