I have a similar case with HMA Pro VPN since yesterday. Impossible to download anything until I switched location to Germany, then all pop up as usually
The problem right now is with Geo Location. When you click on the icon in the taskbar, you are offered around 30 locations to choose. I wnated to watch a program on a german TV channel and chose "Germany" from the list, connected to the TV station, aand was told that this is not available outside Germany..... Some locations work, some do not I have used PIA for four or five years, and "Geo Location change" has always worked perfectly I used many countries. In May it seems the ownership has changed, the support took months and to this day cannot answer the question of Geo Location. Hong KOmng and the Netherlands seem to work fine Now, a problm is a problem, sometimes it takes a lot of time. But if you go to PIA's reddit page, you can see, that they keep making excuses after excuses in their answer, they seriously tell us now that changing Geo Location was an extra present PIA gave us, all we actually pay for is anonymisation. They have a 7day money back offer, which is a bit of a joke, when mpost of the time it takes longer than that to get an answer from support. So it is the lies and BS that I no longer want, and it is not only me, there are many others in several forums that point out that PIA seems to be no longer PIA... as PIA itself admits. I put some of their answers on reddit, but the reddit people there and the comments of their paid ghost writers there speak for themselves The year is 2017, and while it does need to hav any meaning. But is I am told by I pop up from PISA that I am now connected to Germany, and when checking Whois, I see that I am connected, of all places, to the USA. Somewhere a red light starts blinking. The new owners did many many changes and answer NO QUESTION about that.... You decide.
I really want an opinion on NordVPN. I am about to go traveling in Asia and would like to know are hey really that good or should I go for purevpn?
I finally got Protonmail YPN. It works very well, very fast and very simple, just as protonmail. It is switzerland based, where they have strict privacy laws. (If suich a thing exists in the 21. century in another question. Buit Switzerland is a conxervatoive country and it can be assumed, if any country gives a damn about its laws, it would be them.... I have been using their without any problem for a year, while they were setting up their VPN and a few das ago, I finally got my set-up and am so happy that I can hget rid off these horrible PIA people and their lies and their BS, worst experience in 30 years of Internt use... (Very) Fast version can be tested for free, free version is probably slower
As I stated above I am a user of PIA and did go ahead and renew with them as I needed to have the time to read as a lot of this was news to me and felt some VPN was better than nothing - now I am not sure how I feel about that decision but in all honesty if I need to pay for another service, the ~$30 I paid for the year with PIA will not break me and my data security is more important than that although I am not doing anything that needs the level of anonymity that I seek, for me it is more of a principle issue than anything else. I have been a user of ProtonMail for some time, testing it out and am looking more and more to switching over to it completely. I have purposely 'lost' my password and sure enough my old emails were destroyed, at least to me. Thus far their webmail works very well. I went ahead and signed up to be on the list for the free ProtonVPN and am currently on the waiting after all I have read about PIA and what you said is 100% correct, as I finally got around to reading some of the PIA reddit page and was disgusted by what I read. Seems like shell companies, new owners, using a different network, and misleading information. I was able to connect the dots like others and thank you, this post, along with the reddit info to bring this info to light. I would definitely would have like to have stumbled on it earlier, but the time I had issues with PIA, they were great in getting back to me, but their client has not really worked well with Win10. Looking back at my emails w/ PIA, they were in April 2017, must have been right before all this started.
As far as security goes, there simply is NO WAY to find out if a VPN provider keeps logs, or even hand them on when asked/ordered. At this PIA is no different than any other VPN, and torrent freak rates them still very high up. But even they have stopped recommending them outright after all this, something they did before. Now.. I do not know that for sure, but I believe PIA was sold. Because in May when all this started many things were changed at the same time and made worse. Their shown IP and country ALWAYS were correct.... until they changed the system. Might be harmless, I agree, but if you make a major overhaul of a whole set up, why change f.e. the support on the same day? And that on the day you make weird changes when nothing works, and as they actually bragged thousands of peopel needed support. The live chat was also removed, and anyone asking for support could not get the questions answered that they had actually asked. And PIA has always been exceptionally great at support, you wanted a chat support right away, you got it! From May on were lied too, when after waiting for up to six weeks we got answers at all! In the end they literally wrote that PIA is for anonymity only, was never made ot for supplying you with an IP of a particular country, or, that you are actually using a server in the country you asked for and the icon tells you. That they wrote, after I had used it for exactly that purpose for several years. So, I do not know what is going on, maybe they are just a bunch of greedy business people trying to make a fast buck, which may not assure users of their actual securits very much. It feels they have actually never done anything like that before. One more tip for Proton VPN. And by the way, it is many three faster than PIA, but..... The first free week you will NOT be using the free version, which is a lot slower. They have three differnet prices for three different speeds. And they are really expensive! So before signing up for the paid one, make sure the speed that you get is the one you want! But they are swiss, and their country has NO sniffing laws....
I'm using windscribe with a 50 GB monthly allowance. Torrent friendly & no DNS leaks. Thinking about going Pro, not sure yet.
Just received my info from Proton that I am g2g w/ free ProtonVPN, only question I have is do I need to uninstall the PIA client? Reason being is there are a lot or 'Tap-Win32 Adapter OAS" in my Device Manager with as many times I have had to re-install the PIA client. If I install the ProtonVPN Client create and issue w/ the PIA client? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Bob
No need, seems the Tap is the same that PIA uses. So it will ask and you can simply keep that adapter, whichever you prefer, works without a problem. I still have both VPNs installed on my computer, as I am waiting to see how Proton works when the free week is over tomorrow. I always uninstalled all the old TAP, the latest one is V9, so other than the Qualcom there is only one tap. The one thing about proton that I dislike so far is the fact that they actually throttle the speeds to make more money. I am not against making money, but something like that always reminds me of that neo-liberal greed, that rules our world nowadays. I cannot trust people for whom greed is one of the top values in life...
I too went ahead and installed it too and so far so good, but as you point out we are getting either "High" or "Highest" speeds. It will be interesting what "Low" is and like you, would like to know the speed delineations. I wonder if "Low" speed will be useable. I think the fastest I have hit so far is maybe ~40Mb/s max d/l & 10Mb/s up on my 100Mb/s/10Mb/s connection. I wouldn't mind the $50/yr option, completely depending on what "High" speed is.
I may be wrong, but in my experience the free version is not really working, at least for me. You get one server each in Japan, USA and Netherland, but they are either too busy, or seem to be blacklisted… If they work then at reasonable speed 600kbs. And I still have not gotten an answer about the speeds of the other plans they offer…