i live in a government internet restricted country so a vpn is vital. over the last 10 years ive used several and frankly need several in order to circumvent the firewall. Astrill and nordvpn are good. there are no 100% solution for me though. I also pay for some outfit who have managed to code shadowsocks to work most of the time. Back in the UK i stick to astrill which works fine for torrents.
Use a browser like Firefox that allows you to disable all that tracking BS and you can avoid most of the issues those videos talk about. Sure your VPN provider can throw you under a bus, but that's probably not good business and it wouldn't take long to soil a reputation. I've been using PIA for a number of years and I trust them not to divulge my IP if push comes to shove. Whatever the case I never buy into a video where the narrator can't show his face. If a computer generated voice is doing the narration a video has zero credibility (those sound computer generated, but I can't tell for sure).
One can find info re. logging and other relevant info on VPN providers... One can go to Linux, one can at least have dual boot, with Linux for internet... One can compartmentalise one's browsing between safer browsers... One can use DuckDuckGo and alike and not go to Google... for anything... One can have fully encrypted email account... One can use Tor (incl. the browser), even under Windows... One can set up one's browsers as indicated in that video... One can clean up before rebooting... One can have extra firewall and anti-malware SW even under Linux... One can use one's brains and - regardless of "face/name shown" or not - use the info, check it all out, inform oneself and do what is needed...
I personally prefer Ivacy VPN overall expensive VPNs out there. It's not just affordable but it's packed with all the latest features and is by far the best VPN for streaming and torrenting. Whether you're worried about hackers, malware, or just the steadily increasing access big companies have to your online persona, the time has never been better to hop on a virtual private network. And just for the occasion, you might want to take a look at Ivacy VPN for ultimate Protection and security.
NordVPN seems good but whenever I download something it crawls to a speed close to 0 and essentially stops downloading. What settings do we have to use in order to download properly using NordVPN (using uTorrent)?
ExpressVPN is good and fast. It has many servers. It's KillSwitch is effective. It's fast and secure for torrenting purpose too.
That's what I use since 2 years. I've tried them all, nothing beats this for speed and their superb customer service.
How do you optimize settings for NordVPN to use with uTorrent? Whenever I click on some other country to connect to, the downloads slow to near 0.
Because the Law in America states that if a Company has a server on US soil, no matter where they are based, whether they keep logs or not, the US can at anytime demand to see whatever they demand to see. They can and have had Judges issue gag-orders saying be quiet about this or go to jail. You don't have logs, give us access to your real-time feed. The only VPN I use is the ONLY VPN exempt from the server on US soil Law. ExpressVPN. For whatever reason any VPN registered/based in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) is exempt from the US server/soil Law and there is only one company and because of the way the Laws are structured in the BVI's there won't be another. Why is it that way with the BVI's? I'm guessing that when the deal was struck, the US made a deal granting this exemption to them in exchange for free use for certain US Government Personnel which would keep them free from other US Agency snooping/meddling. The NSA and other top Agencies don't seem to be big on Inter-Agency sharing of much. At least not when this was set up. Things may have loosened up a little since Snowden, maybe not. What does this mean to the American Consumer? The closer you are to a server that you can Torrent on the faster your speed will be. Instead of hopping from the US to Amsterdam to a Torrent site, to get a log free server I pick one of the 8 or 9 in the immediate LA area (70 miles or less) and on a 100 megabit connection I can retain 85% of my original connection speed. They have servers throughout America and across the Globe. A Word of Warning Some people think you are invisible when in a VPN. Not so. Your ISP (where you get your Internet from) can see where/what site you are at, can see you are downloading something, just not what it is. When dealing with the Government anything can change at anytime.
1) The farther you go to get a no log server (say Amsterdam) the SLOOOOWER your speed will be and if the Torrent doesn't have many seeds it won't matter how much speed you have. People don't typically give much high speed when they are seeding public Torrents. I don't know which client you use but if you set your Torrent speeds incorrectly you can slow yourself down. Your client needs a certain amount of upload speed reserved FOR it's download connection to communicate with the other end saying it received each packet in good condition or else a lot of time/bandwidth can be wasted on each end mis-communicating/re-downloading unneeded packets or just waiting for the other end to reply. YMMV
I don't know whether there any truth to this but I heard the governments force all hard drive companies to install a tracking device and to access it requires a special program which the governments only have.
at dude905, It wasn't too many years ago that the NSA (IIRC) coerced, forced, manipulated or maybe just asked Western Digital to install some Monitoring Malware or a Backdoor (something) into the Firmware in a bunch of HDDs destined for Russia for use in the Pootin (intentional) Government. So, there could be a sleeper in the Firmware of every HDD and all the Government would have to do to keep it quiet is have a judge issue a Gag-Order "This is a matter of National Security, if you talk about this you go to Jail". For most of us, we would never know. As a rule we don't have access to HDD Firmware, Optical drives yes. Unless it's our President saying something is true, I can just about believe it could be.
You should use only P2P servers nearest to you, all other servers do not allow torrenting. For that you should install their windows application