For a long time, ever since i was a little kid, I had always used and trusted Windscribe.
My experience with Windscribe
I was young, it was 2017 and I wanted to circumvent bans and school restrictions. After a bit of looking around for good and cheap VPNs on YouTube, I found the two tempting choices were Tunnelbear and Windscribe but I ultimately picked Windscribe in the end. Windscribe offered a generous free tier, with codes you could enter for permanent cap increases on a free account, I have as of now 50 GBs of free bandwidth total.
Windscribe has a build-a-plan feature, for those who care only to have North American IP addresses, but do want unlimited bandwith. It’s about three bucks each month, so cheap that I stayed with Windscribe. The VPN had worked super well for me, allowing me to bypass all kinds of headaches. I could dodge bans, school restrictions, my ISP, and I could browse and access whatever I wanted.
As time went on, I saw the true use of my VPN. It became my main way to solve sites not working or loading. I’ve had pages load slow without a VPN, that load fast with it on. I’ve had sites slow down, until I changed servers. It is super excellent for circumventing a huge amount of problems. It is a key tool for accessing any content that I want, while keeping my DNS activity obfuscated to any person in the middle.
My best friend, who I suggested Windscribe to, dealt with an issue it seemingly couldn’t fix. His internet router was set up to cut off internet on off hours. I forgot the exact times but it was strict and it forced us to confine our calls and games to set times. One day I was over at his house while his parents were away, I got to see the cutoff, and his PC disconnected, but my devices still remained connected. We thought to try out the DNS spoofing feature the desktop client had. We enabled it and it solved his pesky router situation too. We now both use this service years later.
I picked Windscribe totally blindly back then, off a top ten video on YouTube, I picked whatever was cheap and well received and went with it. I even brought my friend aboard. Did it solve my issues, yes very well, but ultimately it is solely trust. The reputation of Windscribe and my good experience with the product were the main reasons I stuck with it for almost a decade despite it breaking the rule that you should never trust free VPN services. I stuck with it for so long because it worked, for so long and well too. It let me and my friend surf the internet whenever we wanted.
I have no major issues with it as it is still decently reliable. I believe Windscribe is a good product, but the VPN ban talk is making me consider a new candidate and I am looking at Mullvad VPN. While Windscribe was nice for so long, I want the safety of a VPN that operates in a country that doesn’t give a fuck.
Mullvad looks promising, and the APT repo comes with a browser too. Doubt I’ll touch it over Librewolf, however it is a tool I am genuinely considering switching to as my daily driver VPN.
If you’ve used Mullvad for a long time, has it served you well in the long run?
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I’ve been with them almost a decade and have no complaints
Love Mullvad. Used for years and they’ve been raided, twice, by cops. No data was given to the cops and they had to return the hardware. Win win in my book!
I dumped Mullvad once it stopped working in China and support was ‘yeah go fuck yourself. We don’t care about China customers’. And indeed it stopped working for months so I indeed fucked off. Now have a much, much better, working VPN with 99.99% uptime. And so, so much faster than Mullvad ever was.
What do you use now?
Mullvad is sort of like the “Qubes OS” of the VPN world, no port forwarding and no openvpn support while proton is more like the standard Linux experience that allows you to be more flexible.
Choose depending on your threat model, I personally use mullvad because I don’t need the features that they don’t support yet.
Yeah I’m happy with Mullvad. Although like somebody said, make sure wireguard will be OK for you. They dropped OpenVPN. After trying both I like WG better, but some routers or devices won’t support it. Shouldn’t be an issue from phones or lapptops tho.
You can even pay for Mullvad with cash. Well, in some currencies. Someplace, might’ve been Mullvad? dropped rupees recently as a currency you could pay in. Dunno why. But you can pay in €, US$, CAN$, AUS$, and £.
Mullvad is also highly recommended because they accept Monero for payment.
I moved away from it for two reasons:
- They dropped port forwarding which really helps with torrents
- They dropped OpenVPN, I need that because I have a router that has it built in with hardware acceleration, it doesn’t do any wireguard
I moved to proton which still does all these things.
Of course these points might not matter to you but I just wanted to point it out
I have a router that has it built in with hardware acceleration
TIL
is it because you’re piping everything through your vpn?
No, but I have a home lab and that is behind the VPN. With a download server and some other stuff like IRC (IRC can expose your home IP to other users)
The router blocks any requests going around the VPN so that the usual de-anonimisation tricks don’t work.
I wish I had port forwarding but I don’t currently. Not having open VPN support is a deal breaker for me though. A lot of people recently have talked shit about NordVPN but talked up Mullvad. Now that I know Mullvad doesn’t even have that standard feature, I’m even more perplexed that people talk it up so much.
They did have it but they dropped it. Or at least they were dropping it server by server, it wasn’t completely gone. Not sure what the current status is. But proton had an offer so I decided it was a good time to go
I’m a newbie, what is open VPN support?
It’s one of the many VPN protocols. Wireguard is the current favourite.
So in other words, if you don’t specifically need openvpn it won’t matter to you. Wireguard is good too.
The thing is that openvpn has been around a lot longer so it has more support in things like routers. For me that matters because I have a separate vlan that’s connected via a router to my main network.
Gotcha. What does openvpn do?
Just the same as other VPNs, just different protocol.
It’s a regular point to point VPN just like wireguard and ipsec. Based on openssl. So you have a client and it connects to a single server. You can also connect a network to another network but usually you use a dedicated router for it. Only if you connect individual clients would you use an app.
There’s other VPNs these days which are substantially different, called Mesh or Overlay VPN. These are ones like tailscale and zerotier. They are different in usage because each client can talk together independently. This means even on a shared network each client will have the VPN app. It’s used more for personal networks, not really private anonymous access. For those you explicitly don’t want to talk to other clients so the usecase makes for different tech. For this reason anonymous VPN providers never use mesh tech.
I use both myself. OpenVPN for torrents etc. And tailscale for connecting to my home stuff from my phone and laptop.
But OpenVPN is a very classical VPN type.
It’s a protocol used to setup a vpn tunel, the basis of all VPN services. It’s how computer connects to the network, how it negotiates the encryption the tunel uses and what is being sent and rwceived through it.
Other examples are: mentioned wireguard, ipsec and SSL. There’s more, but more obscure ones too.
It’s difficult to trust anyone these days. Even the Swiss.
Mullvad is Swedish…
Edit: even the sweeds
It’s difficult to trust anyone because they are all involved in the global government
Seems you have a typo there, you probably mean “even the sweets”.
That is a valid point you bring up, as it is well known that most soft candies are treated to contain mind-altering nanites since at least the 80s.
It’s the powdery stuff they put on to “avoid sticking”. Sure…
I don’t use VPNs in general, but I did give Mullvad a try for a month because my friend had been talking about it. It’s simple to use and offers pretty much everything you might want from a VPN. They also take privacy VERY seriously. You can literally pay them in cash, if you want literally no digital footprint from your Mullvad purchase. It’s pretty neat.
I’ll have to mention though, I’m not a big VPN expert, but my experience was positive. I’m sure you’ll get more technical answers from other people.
To add to this: unless I’ve missed some, Mullvad seems to be the only VPN provider that doesn’t take your data at account creation. You are assigned a random account number. That’s it. No username, email, birthdate, etc.
I heard an interview once with one of their umm… founders? Tech guys? IDK.
Anyway he said their philiosphy is to collect the minimum amount of data required to provide the service. And no more.
I wish ALL co’s practiced that. Most are the exact opposite. Collect everything even if totally unrelated to the service.
Windscribe has Anonymous Account (Hashed Login)
Oh cool, I was not aware. It’s always nice to have options.
Oh yes true, I forgot about that! That is pretty huge actually.
Yes, I love this.
Everything everybody else has already said. Also, check out my previous post.
Keep in mind: no port forwarding, wireguard only
I have only every used Mullvad. Never looked back. Have their app on my parents’ computers and my phone. Also running an OpenWRT router bound to one of their servers.
Yeah it’s great for privacy, I’ve used it for about two years now
the VPN ban talk
You mean this here? https://privacyradar.com/news/vpn/eu-vpn-crackdown-age-verification-security-backlash/
In this case, keep in mind that Mullvad is Swedish, and thus based in Europe.
I am using it and am also wondering how potential European anti-VPN-initiatives might affect it.
Regarding my experiences with Mullvad:
Generally not bad, comes with a easy-to-use Linux app that appears to be solid.
Usage of P2P works well for me.
Only issue is that some websites (e.g. reddit) detect it and block access to the public part of their service (at least without login).Just stop going to reddit. Problem solved.
I do use StartPage for search, and I have found that clicking the “visit site anonymously” (or whatever it is) link for reddit pages works
Just pick a less common exit, and old.reddit.com works. I just go there for one sub, so I don’t care if it doesn’t anymore.
That’s true, but the main reason I occasionally would like to access reddit, is that sometimes relevant search results point to reddit posts.
It’s just Inconvenient, nothing more, at least for reddit.
