Be Excellent To Each Other

Hullo,

My lil' brother has requested recommendation of a VPN provider, as if I might know. I have told him I will ask people more in the know than myself, and that's you guys!

So... Any recommendations? I don't know what the criteria are, but I'd assume robustness, ease of use, etc.

Any help much appreciated x

Re: the above this is for torrenting apparently.

Vypr.

Why does he need one, though? Because his ISP has blocked TPB etc? There are plenty of proxies.

I THINK it's because he's staying with his mother, etc and is just being a bit cautious as he doesn't want any trouble. I think he's only used torrents in his student house and is just being cautious from the sound of it.

This is probably far more in-depth info than you're looking for but it's useful info regardless (especially regarding torrents & anonymity etc.)

Don't use a VPN myself but, if I was planning to, I'd have a thorough read through this first :

(edit : actually, I'd probably just skim through it, that's a lot of text ! Way more than when they started this
annual 'review' a couple of years ago).

https://torrentfreak.com/anonymous-vpn- ... 15-150228/

I played with a pay service a few years ago, I found that once you chose connections in countries a long way from the UK your download speed will drop, if you chose France or Belgium then its ok speed wise

There is always Private trackers, or NG with encryption you will be mostly Ok with these

Thank you for the advice on location to speed, I shall pass that on

Sorry to be a pain, but what is NG?

NG= News Groups there is a bit more to this that say Pirate Bay, you need an account (that costs) and a reader (that costs)

With the NG you can encrypt you connection so only the amount of data not the content can be see

Private trackers are torrent sites where what is downloaded can't generally be seen either at all or as easily as open ones like Pirate Bay, you will need an invite for these and generally you need to share what you download and keep a good ratio of upload\download or they will kick you out. Most have donation schemes where you can pay to download what you want and many have free downloads to help you build your ratios

Thank you: I've passes this on for him to look into

Having gotten two of those "you've been torrenting copyrighted stuff" emails from Sky in the last month I suppose I should look into a VPN; does anyone have any recommendations for a specific company? Or are you guys all still using NewsGroups, or have (gasp!) just gone completely legit.

I am legit now but I used to use Hide My Ass which was pretty good.

Vypr, iVPN or Express VPN.

I've just started using PIA

I try to be legit as much as possible, (BBC Licence Fee, Netflix top-tier sub, Amazon Prime), but to refresh the parts that other beers cannot reach I still use nzbplanet + Newsbin Pro + Tweaknews. None of those are free but all very reasonably priced IMO, and you're not relying on people torrenting things. If it's there, it's available, and retention is proper bonkers these days. (Tweaknews claim 2500 days, which I think is legit considering the upload age of some of the stuff I've snagged.)

Both Newsbin Pro and Tweaknews support SSL if you're worried about that sort of thing.

Hide My Ass because Hide My Ass is Hide My Ass.

I’ve never used Hide My Ass by the way but if I had to use Hide My Ass I would use Hide My Ass because Hide My Ass is Hide My Ass.

NordVPN for me.

I eventually got round to sorting this and signed up with NordVPN. It's a three year deal but it's only $2.99 a month (so ~£2.35 in real money) which is pennies. Got it installed and running in minutes and I'm still downloading at the same speed I would be without it; very impressed indeed.

Black Friday deal? I did the same. About £100 for three years.

I'm not sure, they seems to always have incredible deals doing the rounds so I don't know if it's Black Friday specific. I did cheat a bit by not specifying that I was in the UK so you don't pay VAT on it, but they don't seem to give a shit (the zip field automatically changes to be a post code field as soon as it recognises that your card is a UK format) and the prices are quoted in dollars regardless. I do wonder how these companies can turn a profit when their prices are so low, but I don't really have any idea what costs are involved in running VPN servers admittedly.

Having gone to nord from windscribe (which I got from humble bundle for cheaps) due to afore-mentioned cheapness, my observances:

Bloody hell this is slow.
Bloody hell a lot of sites refuse to allow you to connect.

I only use it for torrenting and connecting to torrent sites; it works brilliantly for those two things if I pick the specific P2P option.