Hi! So I have had surfshark for a while and been generally quite satisfied. They do everything I need them to do this far with no fuss and bundle in some handy other services as well.
My annual plan expires in a couple of months and I’m curious what else is out there, as I only started SF because it was heavily discounted at the time. From a new provider, I just need privacy, the ability to torrent totally public domain content, and a static IP. Do you have any suggestions for other options worth considering? I just like to have options. Thanks in advance!
When you torrent totally public domain stuff you most likely want a VPN with enough privacy to not give your IP to authorities. I can’t see that point if you run a VPN on a machine somewhere in the cloud which has your name registered to it.
I do only torrent stuff that won’t warrant the authorities to come to my home. This is in the end r/selfhosted and not r/piracy where you would have more concerns. Also your name is registered to the VPN service too and believe me they will rat you out if it comes to a how down with authorities.
If you truly care about privacy, you can go for a provider that asks for no personal details (not even an email if you so desire) and allows you to pay using an anonymous payment method such as Monero. In this scenario it would be incredibly difficult for Mullvad to rat you out even if they wanted to, assuming you only used the VPN for anything but things that could trace back to you (so no logging into services with firstname.lastname@gmail.com.) True privacy and anonymity is difficult to achieve but it is possible, just requires you to pay attention.
True anonymity and privacy is only offline possible.
If you ignored everything that was just said then yeah, sure. Wonder why Tor exists… Ah well, must be just for show.
Tor has been used to track and arrest people before. It isn’t 100% guaranteed like being offline is.
That is true, but very often when people have been caught like that, it didn’t have anything to do with Tor but just poor opsec, like literally using an email with your full name which kind of makes using Tor pointless anyway. If you can link me any events where people were caught any other way than the perpetrator not exercising good opsec, I’d love to take a look.
I listen to a security researchers podcast, and they mentioned Tor exit nodes being set up by governments to figure out where messages were coming from and track down individuals
There was also this article I found where the FBI exploited a vulnerability to expose the IP of a wanted individual
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/08/349016/a-dark-web-tycoon-pleads-guilty-but-how-was-he-caught/
Keep dreaming little one. You leave traces as soon as you go online even when using Tor and supposedly no logging VPN. In a way those have to log something about you for billing reasons alone.
Your anonymous login data and a “paid until date X” are literally all fields that are necessary for them to have it work. And even if someone can make the connection they can only see that you are using a VPN, not what for because the company doesn’t keep logs about your activity (and besides that doesn’t even have to hand them out). But keep saying “offline is more secure”. Yeah, d’uh, then please do us a favor and stay there.
The question still included this requirement, so don’t suggest solutions that are not applicable then. Good VPN providers offer to pay with various services not linked to your personal data for a reason and they don’t sit in countries like the US. Please just stop spreading information about things you clearly have no clue about.
A this is r/selfhosted and there for the solution is to self host.