VPN-addon,extension,service ?

[dougal]

I have been using the free VPN function within Opera browser until the latest update which has diminished the menu for choosing countries or origin, particularly for USA and Canada.... wondering what folks could recommend ? 

[Jason]

If you go to the top level of the forums (the main page, in other words) and do a search, there are a number of discussions related to VPNs. Bill and I both use PIA (Private Internet Access) and never had any problem with them (been with them more than year). I don't believe Bill has, either. I originally got them so I could do torrents and access US netflix. Well, the second option fell through but the first is still a good reason to use it and now I just like the privacy aspect of it.

If you get a year in advance, it's only about $40 USD for unlimited bandwidth (or $70 USD for two years) though you can get a month-to-month for considerably more (about $7 USD/month). They accept pretty much every payment system you can think of, including Bitcoin for the truly paranoid and gift cards.

They have clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS and you can use up to 5 simultaneous connections at a time.

They are also the only VPN that I know of that was subpoenaed by the FBI and was able to declare to them that they don't keep logs and had nothing to turn over.

And they have servers in over 28+ countries around the world. They recently pulled their South Korea VPN server when the government announced they were going to mirror it (even though there was no user data to mirror). That's how dedicated they are.

There are others, including free ones, though the free ones are limited in bandwidth (probably be fine for just web browsing, though). But I don't trust free servers when you're putting any of your Internet traffic through them. How do they keep their service going? I'd expect a good answer to that question before I ever used one on a regular basis.

They also support the Linux community and may other good causes like EFF, etc.

[bobf]

In that vein, I will want to talk with you further about this, Jason; I got my first copyright-infringement(/abuse?) notification thingy the other day, and should probably get this done... Didn't you have quite a number of them before you thought it necessary to set up PIA as your VPN?

See you tonight! <^8#

[Jason]

Yep, Bob, as we discussed earlier, I have received a few of the copyright infringement notices. Searched my email archive and could only locate three of them but I suspect I might have deleted a couple more. That was my main reason for getting a VPN though to be honest, good luck for media companies trying to get blood out of this stone.

You can try VPN month-to-month to make sure you're happy with the service than I highly recommend you take the annual option or biannual option.

Interestingly enough, I was really short of cash in the bank near my renewal date and though PIA gives 10 days of grace, I knew I wasn't going to have the money even then. So I canceled, they still gave me the grace period (nice!) and then a couple of days after it expired, they send me an email offering me a final chance to re-activate at a 20% discount with a couple code if I did it within 3 days. Got some money the day before it the offer expired and took the annual deal for $32 USD instead of having to pay $40. The discount would have applied to a monthly deal even if I had continued with that but I assume that reduced price would have been just the first month back (normally $6.95 USD/month).

They really want to keep their customers. So I'm not saying to do what I did, but if you did, you might get a deal!  Though maybe that only works with longtime customers (been with them for about 18 months or so). Can't hurt to try, not that you should take advantage like that or anything.

There are quite a few free VPN providers but I don't know of any that don't have some ridiculously low bandwidth limit (like 1-20 GB).