It's trivial to set up a FreeBSD instance with IPSec using StrongSwan on something like a Digital Ocean or Vultr instance in a country that suits (both D.O. and Vultr have regions in US, Europe and Asia/Pac Rim).

But it depends on what you're trying to do. If it's something like get access to shows on Netflix or the BBC iPlayer, then this is a good technique. I think for privacy, it might be OK; while the German or Australian govts. might share data with the US, probably Singapore, Korea, Japan or India doesn't. if you're up to something more nefarious then maybe you need something stronger like Tor.

Part of the point of a VPN service is your IP represents thousands of users and no or very temporary logs are kept. Spinning up a one or dozen user VPN on a data-center IP where they definitely keep logs gives you none of that. Any complaint will immediately be forwarded or linked to your credit card. To see this in action go make one and then bittorrent some hollywood movies. You will get the scare letter emails forwarded to you within a month.

Want to get a data center account that takes crypto only? They are often shady, bad, unreliable and expensive, probably run by another gang that have their own issues.

>and no or very temporary logs are kept

If, and only if, the provider isn't lying

side note: BBC now checks that IPs using iPlayer are coming from a residential IP address in the UK. It won't work from a UK-based VPN endpoint.

Thanks. I have always been wondering how the "hackers" (not in the sense of the way described in "How to be a hacker") managed to protect their traces while hacking other people's computers/networks. For sure many of them are gov entities so natually it's a lot easier to cover their tracks, but many of them are not.

I'm not sure what is currently beeing used, and I guess that really depends on what exactly you are doing. But I know that often infected Computers are used as a VPN or Shadowsocket to cover ones tracks. Combine that with several layers of protection and it gets harder and harder to track one down

Thank you, this makes sense!

>If it's something like get access to shows on Netflix or the BBC iPlayer, then this is a good technique.

Not very true anymore, at least Netflix outright blocks streaming to most ip blocks owned by VPS providers/datacenters.

Not trivial at all for vast majority of the VPN users. You know the people that buy VPN services because they saw it in a Youtube video as a sponsor.

Fair point.

Both Korea and Japan are client states in the U.S. empire, with large US military presences and drastic interventions in their domestic politics. They absolutely collaborate with the US on everything.

So I guess the best thing is to route through say US, Russia, EU and China?

You don't need the EU, they are probably more infiltrated then Japan, just listen to the german/french discussion (Germany believe that Europe can't have it's own army without US support...because of "nuclear"...France is pissed)