Chapter 5 – VPN’s

Chapter 5 – VPN’s
A vpn is almost solely a privacy tool, and a good one at that. (can also be used get around reign blocked content)
When connecting to a vpn from your house, what is happening is instead of computer > ISP>webpage
you are now doing, computer>ISP>VPN>webpage
You are not hiding the fact that you are connected to the internet but what you are doing on it. The ISP (internet service provider) can see that you have connected to a VPN but can not see anything after that. Your VPN is the one seeing all your online activity now. So if you don’t want your ISP to see what you are doing online you need to make sure you are using a VPN you trust (or Tor), free VPN services cant run without paying their electric bills, wanna guess how they do that? Selling user data, you would be correct. great guess. The hard part about the no logs claim is, it is almost impossible to prove and there are multiple types of logs, so they may not keep logs on usage but on connection or vise versa. What you probably want if you are reading this and not asking google how to watch Hulu in Canada you most likely want a VPN that is trusted, and doesn’t even really have ways to identify users if they did keep logs. This is the part where I talk about Mullvad and only Mullvad

Mullvad – privacy first company, no email, no phone number not even a name to sign up. Has a onion site and if used you can pay with crypto for 10% off. You can also pay by cash via mail. External and internal audits of the service and all features such as payment site, is experimenting with Quantum resistance (still a work in progress) has plenty of locations as well as being only 5 bucks a month, 1 account up to 5 devices here is the onion site for Mullvad
• http://o54hon2e2vj6c7m3aqqu6uyece65by3vgoxxhlqlsvkmacw6a7m7kiad.onion/en
Mullvad uses a 16 digit number as an account number(no email no password, no phone number), which you can generate on their website in a single click, you can make another with another click, that is your account if you choose to use it. You just then need to add time to it and either download their app or download their openvpn file if you are going that route.
Now you may be thinking thats great but all that privacy just for my ISP to see me connect to Mullvad?
Yes, Your ISP can not see what you are doing once connected, and Mullvad can not share any info about you or what you do online as they do not have an email linked to you, a payment linked to you, No full name. The idea is even if your account number is handed over they will say yeah thats an account, they have 4 devices apparently and they have this long left that they pre paid for. Here is a link for more info on their no log policy https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy/
The fact that it is only a number and has no password may also be cause for some worry. Here is Mullvads response on their Blog,
“A newly created Mullvad account number is a 16-digit decimal in the "1000 0000 0000 0000" to "9999 9999 9999 9999" range. This allows for a total of 8.99 quadrilion possible account numbers. Assuming our customers are actively using 100,000 different accounts with us, one would need to guess on average 45 billion times in order to find a working account. This is practically impossible.”
“What if someone were to successfully guess my account number? In short, that person would then be able to use Mullvad VPN for free since an account is allowed to make up to five connections simultaneously. If you suspect this is happening, contact our support team to change your account number. Doing so will make your old account number invalid and anyone else who has it will not be able to connect with it. If you're worried that somebody with your account number will be able to eavesdrop on your traffic through the VPN tunnel, don't be! The encryption key is only available on your device. Apart from this, a stolen account number should have minimal, if any, impact on privacy or otherwise. This is because no personal information is made available by the account number or when you connect to the service. The only details available are the expiry time and which ports are forwarded (if any). This by itself should not pose an issue, but if someone has also obtained other information about you, it could be sensitive. In the average case it should not be a problem, but for the very paranoid (or for those whose threat model says otherwise), not forwarding any ports is an option. The most important think you can do to avoid any of the issues above is to keep your account number secret.” And there is always the option to keep your pre paid time low if it is still a concern for you. As their policy is 5 bucks a month with no bundle options for buying in bulk you don’t loose any money by paying 1 month at a time. That way at anytime you can generate a new account number and have only lost 5 bucks.

Another good option is Proton VPN
Proton VPN is good because if you have an email account with them you have access to their vpn, as well as their proton drive. The VPN is tied to your email which may not be desired depending on your threat model, but a solid choice if you are just wanting to have a bit more of a secure tunnel from your ISP or get around region blocks.