And when a court order requests the provider hand over your information?

That's what the other six VPNs are for, right?

Right, you have multiple personas, which are using branched/nested chains.

No perfect solution, for sure, but you have some reasonably options to mitigate risk. If you can, use one outside the US i.e. with no financial presence of any kind there.

Admittedly that's a high bar, the next best choice is one that claims to keep no logs and has successfully defended such a claim to law enforcement. Not a long list here, but there are some.

Just use ~3 VPNs in a nested chain. So an adversary would need data from all three. Better yet, have the middle one be in a jurisdiction that doesn't cooperate with your adversary's.

Are VPNs legal in China? It would be hilarious to set up a chain of VPN connections that are each in a jurisdiction that will not cooperate with one another.

E.g. one connection each in China, Russia and USA, and three more in the opposite direction of geopolitical allegiance if you’re super paranoid.

I'm not at all familiar with Chinese VPN services. But it's my impression that the Chinese authorities mostly care about domestic VPN use. Citizens are limited to approved VPNs, which are obviously backdoored.

More generally, as long as you're not interacting with domestic Chinese people, authorities don't care much about what you're doing. That's what I've seen providers claim in darknet forums. And that was my experience when I leased VPS in Hong Kong. Once I made it clear that I wouldn't be interacting with domestic Chinese people, all was cool.

I have used one Russian VPN service, Insorg. They're one of the oldest. I've read about others, but don't recall names. And it's my impression that Russian authorities also mostly care about interactions with citizens.

So anyway, I typically start with a mainstream VPN service. Then I chain one or two notoriously hard to coerce ones. And for Mirimir, IVPN is the final one. Because I've written stuff for them, basically, so using IVPN earlier in chains would be stupid.

> Are VPNs legal in China?

No, but their use is extremely common anyway.

You've invented Tor.

Although Tor is better, because the connection reroutes dynamically. And worse, because anyone can volunteer to be an entrypoint or endpoint - this matters because a very well-resourced adversary could conceivably control both your entrypoint and your endpoint, and use a timing correlation attack to de-anonymize you. But I don't know that nested VPNs are immune to that either, given the level of invasive surveillance 5-eyes has over the entire internet.

No, I've copied Tor :)

And re dynamic circuits, I did a crude hack: https://github.com/mirimir/vpnchains

I only use Tor via nested VPN chains. The VPNs mainly provide backup anonymity, in case Tor circuits are compromised. And they also anonymize me vs Tor use, which may avoid attention.

When I don't care so much about anonymity, I just use nested VPN chains. Throughput is 5-10 times that for Tor, latency is lower, and I'm not limited to TCP.

VPN is asking for your financial support