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Last time I looked at VPNs, mullvad seemed highly recommended for privacy and security. Sounds like it may still be the case.
I also like that you don't have to give them any private info at all to make an account. You can just send crypto and they'll give you an account code and that's it, you don't even need an email address.
I haven't tried it but apparently you can even mail them cash. You get a payment token and just send cash in an envelope and they'll activate it whenever the money shows up!
I personally use this and it works great. Takes like a week to arrive (sending from europe).
you can also buy physical tokens (scratch cards with activation codes) in a shop, with cash
And which shops sell those tokens?
you can find them here https://mullvad.net/en/help/partnerships-and-resellers/
It's basically the gold standard, audited and proven. I hear good things about IVPN as well.
Be aware that Mullvad recently removed support for port forwarding if that matters to you. They're no longer a preferred option for torrents for that reason. Other than that I enjoy using their service.
Longtime Mullvad user, always been happy. But when Mullvad was still a small service it was unusual to have any problems when browsing the web with their IPs.
Recently, many services can detect you're on a VPN when using Mullvad and block or ban you, which means they've become successful enough that there are countrer-VPN databases including all of their IPs.
Soooooo many captchas. And some websites just pretend to have weird errors which stop the moment I shut off the VPN
It's the same with Nord. I have to pause my VPN any time I want to access Fextralife wikis
Ah, Fextralife. For when you want the top half of the screen taken up by a video advert, and the bottom half taken by a giant consent form.
The day we strayed from GameFAQs was a dark day indeed.
It's pretty awful but it's always the first search result for anything souls related. It's bearable with an adblocker though
This is Bing Chat's killer feature. Search for a specific game question and it'll just spit out the answer with no bullshit.
Pretty sure fextra just rips all their content from other wikis anyway, at least this was definitely my experience in the past. Just try scrolling past the first link in your search engine.
There's a browser extension that suggests (and optionally redirects to) better wikis when your search results include a Fandom/Fextralife link. I think it's called Indie Wiki Buddy.
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Should I be happy about that or not.
I've just come to accept that constant captchas are a fact of life for browsing on a VPN. Cost of doing business. Worth it for the privacy though imo (VPNs in general, I haven't used Mullvad).
Some are definitely better than others. I've used new VPN services that get you through every checkpoint just like a home IP address. And some that, as you mention, throw up every captcha known to man.
yeah man prime detects me all the time... rly sad
I wish Mullvad and IVPN kept port forwarding or find a way to bring it back without having too much legal trouble.
People really abused the option. That's why we can't have nice things :/
The result is that the operating system that we boot, prior to being deployed weighs in at just over 200MB. When servers are rebooted or provisioned for the first time, we can be safe in the knowledge that we get a freshly built kernel, no traces of any log files, and a fully patched OS.
But can it run Crysis?
Yes, but you lose your save game every reboot.
Great for speedrunning then!
Just for my understanding when they boot such a server, where does it get it's operating system from? Over the network from a different computer which has a hard drive or some read only ROM on the server or what?
This can be handled a few different ways.
- You can boot from a HDD and then just not ever write data back to it. This would be the most trivial solution, and it's something people do with their Pi's a lot to avoid SD card failure.
- You could network boot, pull the OS from the network at startup. Fun fact, this is how some rockets fly! No onboard persistent storage needed. Everything boots into and runs from ram the whole 10 ish minutes of operation.
- You COULD do a ROM as you suggested, but that's a LOT of ROM. Seems odd to do imho.
16MiB is enough to hold entire Linux distro. Example: OpenWRT
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Click the first link in the article, in the older post they talk about their stboot bootloader. It does what you suspect, loads the OS image from a different computer which has signed base images.
Anyone pro-Mullvad that can explain to me how it's better than PIA?
To my knowledge, which may be wrong, PIA has faster speeds and is also entirely RAM-based.
That said...I'd gladly switch if that's untrue and Mullvad is better. On the outset, it sounds like Mullvad triggers search engine captchas less, which would be a nice win.
edit: Well, you all convinced me. Made the switch.
PIA and Mullvad should have equal speeds because they both have 10gbps servers and wireguard. Both PIA and Mullvad use ram-only servers exclusively. As for search engine captchas, I never get them with Mullvad. The main issue with PIA is that they were bought by a questionable company that previously developed adware. You can read about that here. Personally, I would never use a privacy tool that is owned by an ad company, even if they claim to have changed. I used them up until the acquisition, then switched and have been extremely happy with Mullvad.
PIA is also a US based company
Just a bad juju acronymn.
Pain in the ass, CIA.
You're awesome. Thank you! Appreciate the info and response. I'll give Mullvad a throw.
I used PIA for years and dropped them over this. Am now on Mullvad. So far everything’s great.
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Does it make sense that a privacy VPN has 4 tracking scripts and 5 third party cookies on their website? https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=privateinternetaccess.com&device=mobile&location=us
Mullvad has 0.
https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=mullvad.net&device=mobile&location=us
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You can send Mullvad cash as payment method
Can someone explain to me what this means? I’m technologically inept when it comes to privacy, slowly getting better day-by-day thanks to Lemmy.
What does “without any disks in use” mean?
- If the computer is powered off, moved or confiscated, there is no data to retrieve.
- We get the operational benefits of having fewer breakable parts. Disks are among the components that break often. Therefore, switching away from them makes our infrastructure more reliable.
- The operational tasks of setting up and upgrading package versions on servers become faster and easier.
- Running the system in RAM does not prevent the possibility of logging. It does however minimise the risk of accidentally storing something that can later be retrieved.
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/1/12/diskless-infrastructure-beta-system-transparency-stboot/
While mostly true, there are ways to preserve ram if the device is confiscated.
Your local PD likely couldn’t pull it off, but if one of the larger abbreviation agencies were to get involved, data on RAM isn’t a huge hurdle. Assuming no one flips the power switch, at least.
Yeah, freezing and dumping RAM is a well known attack, even happening at some airports with laptops. But it still requires very recently powered ram, basically still in operation before extraction. It's a big step toward security at least.
I guess it's going to stop any standard agencies with a warrant. Confiscating the machine for it to sit in a warehouse until some forensic techs get their hands on it.
There are devices that allow moving and confiscating computers without powering them off.
The rest are true.
That's assuming those computers weren't already powered off first.
Sure, but how often does that happen to servers running 24/7? They'd have to set up some sort of dead man's switch, movement sensors, or something. It's unlikely they'd get a day's notice that the servers are going to be confiscated for forensic analysis.
How long do you think it takes to broadcast a network wide shutdown command over the management network?
How long do you think would you have? Also, any manual action on your part would be obstruction, while an automated system could be defended as anti-theft protection.
I hope IVPN and others starts using RAM only servers in the future.
PIA have been doing this for years, are there any others doing this already?
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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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