Not sure if they’ve gone even scummier but in my case, I had always kept auto-renew off, then saw some reports of people finding their accounts auto-renewed even if they’d set it to off, so I checked mine way before auto-renewal and it had turned itself on magically.
I turned it back off and kept monitoring it regularly, it never toggled itself again, so maybe some sort of update on their end triggered it, or they do it regularly to catch people, who knows.
To their credit, they were very nice and gave all teachers 6 months extra free during the height of covid.
What VPN providers would people recommend?
As above, my current recommendations are:
ProtonVPN for all-round use, fast enough for most things, easy-to-use apps on most platforms, many servers round the world, goes through most restrictive networks, p2p is too slow to be of any use.
AirVPN for specialised uses, fast and also beats most restrictive networks but needs manual setting and trying different options to get the right connection for a specific environment. Apps are not the most intuitive. P2P is pleasantly fast.
In the extreme privacy circles I hear iVPN being talked about a lot as the VPN to go for if privacy and anonimity are the primary concerns.
Given Google itself is likely one of the bigger spies out there, do you consider unlimited Google VPN for £1.59pm good value? On top of the 100gb storage etc available?
If you want a simple VPN and additional storage - it’s a good option at £1.59 per month. It depends on how much you like or don’t like Google.
I’ve been on the upgraded-to-2TB-plan-from-the-old-1TB-GDrive-plan (Premium 2TB) for years now and been subscribed to Google One since launch. So VPN, 5h1t loads of storage, 10% back on Google Store purchases, etc. Not for everyone - but still a bargain for me for what I need at £80 per year (£6.66 per month)
Given they logged IP for swiss authorities for email I wouldnt be using them for VPN:
Do you have a reason for this or is it just their marketing?
Private relay isnt too bad but it can be a bit flaky. At least with a full vpn you know its connected and working.
They are really cheap as well but I would wait until black friday or cyber monday and get a deal on one of them. I use PIA as its fast and has actually proven to a court they dont have logs.
One thing you can have a play with is the app 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare) as it lets you have more traditional vpn connection approach or just 1.1.1.1 being set as your DNS lookup.
I believe Private Relay is hosted by CloudFlare as well. The 1.1.1.1 has a faster vpn (the call it Warp in the app) option but to be honest its never been that slow when I tried it when it came out.
Just a thought for something free to have a play with until the sales at the end of Nov although Warp is not privacy orientated like a vpn can be.
It is trivially easy to block as apple designed it that way. 2 DNS records and its off.
Other blocking requires at least ip/hostname blocking and if you want to be fancy and pick up other ones you need some DPI which has a whole host of issues.
Interestingly Private Relay doesnt protect traffic over tethering so you would need a vpn/solution to protect anything connected to your phone if you do that sort of thing.
Basically your phone wont do anything to protect the tethered device via Private Relay, but if the device has the ability to enable Private Relay (such as an iPad) then it would connect directly to Private Relay.
Turning it on in Settings - iCloud would mean it is encrypted I believe when its connected to your phone.
You usually get an alert I thought but I dont use it often as it didnt cope well with poor network signal in my testing. Basically apple designed it to be easy to disable for all the kids in schools by-passing filtering so its really simple to do it in a business. Blocking other providers is harder with actual filtering of some form needing to be in place.
I knew this but I figured ndrw might not. At least with a 3rd party vpn you can use that on the tethered device if private relay isnt an option.
I did like Private Relay but when I tried it when it came out it was so flaky due to poor signal in my area that data would just stall out and I wouldnt know what went wrong until I disabled it.
I dont link to the vpn unless I specifically need to but I do use a custom encrypted DNS provider to lock some bits down.
The can block all traffic from Private Relay but not your traffic specifically although its unlikely they would unless there was a serious issue with traffic from Private Relay users.
I am not sure what iPlayer/Netflix etc make of it but I guess they just ignore it and use other factors like app specific bits behind the scenes given the account sharing and country issues.
I haven’t used it since the early days but you’ve given me the encouragement to try it once again. It used to mess up the Mail app, too, so I hope that has been fixed.
I’m trying to remember what it was - possibly issues with rendering HTML and fetching remote content like images in emails. Something along those lines, anyway.
Yes, that was one of the things I liked about it! Just noticed that I’m connected to community.monzo.com via IPv6 
$ host -t aaaa community.monzo.com
community.monzo.com is an alias for monzo.bydiscourse.com.
monzo.bydiscourse.com has IPv6 address 2602:fd3f:3:ff01::2b
To comply with a court order. You won’t find any VPN hosted by a business that ignores court orders because such a business wouldn’t keep existing for very long.
You might want to consider whether somewhere based in Switzerland is your best bet considering they issued this court order but then, where else is better?
Oh how I wish IPv6 was being better supported, every ipv6 test I have ran on multiple isps has found the routing to be not as fast and speeds are generally poorer, it shouldnt be this way but ISP’s dont care much other than AA where I would expect it to be as good.
I have even seen weirdness with ipv6 in DC over an equiv ipv4 connection to the same server but when Virgin and Talktalk dont support it there will be little caring in the UK.
A lot of VPN providers dont mess with ipv6 simply because of the perceived (wrongly) privacy implications rather than doing it out of laziness especially when there is so little to gain currently.
PIA is one of the more tested one with court orders showing they dont have logs:
But yeah things change.
It is, if not better. Just performed a couple of ping tests to ‘bottomless’ (the first router at the other end of the PPPoE connection). 100 packets each of IPv4 and IPv6 and the average RTT was 6.02ms for IPv4 and 5.79ms for IPv6.
I think you’ve misunderstood the implications of the two articles.
Neither Proton nor PIA keep logs by default. However Proton was ordered to start keeping logs on an individual for the authorities, so it did so just as any IP provider would do. There’s no way to know where this is happening, but it’s probably safe to assume it’s happening at every VPN provider hosted in a country where authorities can make such a request (anywhere in Europe or the US for starters).
The implication is that if your activities mean it’s possible that police / authorities might order a VPN provider to start logging your personal activity then a hosted VPN is not a secure tool for you to use. Most people don’t need to worry about this, those that do need something safer (Tails, Tor with bridges etc).
Not really, are you implying there is no point using vpn’s if anyone civil or gov can get them to turn on logs? I guess it stops the website telling where you are bit that’s not like its accurate and ipv6 can make it trickier with the address changes.
Proton complied with the swiss cops and started logging, it was not a civil matter by the looks of it at least but I wonder what would happen if it were, they said as soon as a crime is committed you lose your right to privacy with them so make of that what you will.
The 3 cases in that article so far PIA has not complied as they state they cant, twice with the FBI and now with movie studios.
I would be curious to find out how/if they could compel a wiretap in the USA as they will state they cant and although the USGov wanted apple to write a backdoor into firmware for the terrorists phone they resisted.
Would apple and cloudflare be compelled to turn on their logging and rewrite the stack? It appears Private Relay is designed to avoid apple knowing anything.
PIA could change their mind and always turn on logging etc, nothing is set in stone but at least they appear far better then the untested vpn providers and the worst, purevpn.
I do think gov’s would find a way (look at some of the crazy legislation to deal with e2e messages) but I am not sure how much they would want it in the public domain, nor in the civil domain.
Wouldnt they have the Proton/Swiss problem as well?
Doh!
They couldnt after that revelation to be honest.