Private Internet Access sold to Kape Technologies (a shady company known for bad privacy ethics).

[WarriorX]

Ugh I got a 2 year contract on sale last year. Still have another year. Probably will go with mullvad, heard good things and they were worthy of being a sponser here at one point, so that counts for something.

 

[MavericK]

Yeah, looks like it might be time to move on. Shame because I was getting PIA for $40/year for several years now.

Probably going with Mullvad when my PIA is up in March.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Yeah, looks like it might be time to move on. Shame because I was getting PIA for $40/year for several years now.

Probably going with Mullvad when my PIA is up in March.

I wasn't about to wait. Mine is up in June, and I just abandoned them.

Assuming what they said before was true, that PIA did not keep logs, the history is safe enough. Anything going forward could be questionable though, given the reputation of Kape. Its only a few bucks. I decided it wasn't worth it.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

estions was to speak about their hardware, but tell me it is difficult to predict due to many variables, and sending me a free three day trial account for my testing purposes.

I hope to have enough time to do some testing tonight, and will report back.

Hmm. I was down for a while. I ahve a temporarily working state right now with Mullvad, but not all is well.

I followed their pfsense guide. Despite entering my location as USA - New York, my exit point appears to be in Sweden, which is slowing things down considerably.

There is also something wacky going on with my DNS making many/most sites unreachable.

These things are unlikely to be issues for most people who likely just use the client on their local machines, but running it on my router is a tiny bit more complicated.

I will continue to troubleshoot and report back.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Hmm. I was down for a while. I ahve a temporarily working state right now with Mullvad, but not all is well.

I followed their pfsense guide. Despite entering my location as USA - New York, my exit point appears to be in Sweden, which is slowing things down considerably.

There is also something wacky going on with my DNS making many/most sites unreachable.

These things are unlikely to be issues for most people who likely just use the client on their local machines, but running it on my router is a tiny bit more complicated.

I will continue to troubleshoot and report back.

Alright. So, default pfSense guide on mullvad only lists the Swedish server. You have to change it to the local server of your choice. (us-ny.mullvad.net, for me, you can find yours in one of the conf settings files you download along with the CA as part of their instructions) They should update their instructions.

As for my DNS issues, it turns out that once changing to mullvad, the DNS forwarder in my router stopped working. Everything works well over DHCP, but for manually set IP addresses, I have the habit of just using the gateway IP as the DNS server, and letting the router take care of it. That broke for some reason. Temporarily I have manually set the DNS, but I am trying to figure out why this happens. It's probably an "I screwed up my pfSense settings", not a Mullvad issue.

As for the speed, turns out I didn't need to worry. I actually have improved performance over what I had with PIA. It is unclear to me if I am maxing out the speedtest servers, or if I am maxing out the VPN, but I tried a few different ones, and this is the best result I got:

As an added bonus, with PIA I constantly had various servers block their IP's. Worst was FitBit, but several others would randomly have problems too. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, but thus far Mullvad is not having this issue.

So, I'm giving Mullvad 9/10 right now. They would be 10/10, but their website and documentation could use some improvement.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

As for my DNS issues, it turns out that once changing to mullvad, the DNS forwarder in my router stopped working. Everything workes well over DHCP, but for manually set IP addresses, I have the habit of just using the gateway IP as the DNS server, and letting the router take care of it. That broke for some reason. Temporarily I have manually set the DNS, but I am trying to figure out why this happens. It's probably an "I screwed up my pfSense settings", not a Mullvad issue.

Yeah, so, I can't figure out why pointing to my gateway doesn't work for DNS anymore...

Again, probably not mullvads fault, but still a major pain in the ass.

It seems to work fine on all devices which use DHCP, but everything that has an IP address manually set and points to the gateway for DNS gets no DNS after the change.

I need to either fix this, or go around and manually change the DNS on all of my servers :/

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Yeah, so, I can't figure out why pointing to my gateway doesn't work for DNS anymore...

Again, probably not mullvads fault, but still a major pain in the ass.

It seems to work fine on all devices which use DHCP, but everything that has an IP address manually set and points to the gateway for DNS gets no DNS after the change.

I need to either fix this, or go around and manually change the DNS on all of my servers :/

Update:

Definitely not a Mullvad issue. It was something weird going on on my pfSense. A checkbox on a page I didn't even touch as part of the changes somehow became unchecked.

It's fixed now, and everything is back to working the way it should.

Thanks to Kyle for the Mullvad recommendation. I was apprehensive at first as some reviews had labeled them "very secure, but not as fast as the competition". I have found that not to be true. They are very fast for me, and the security seems to be up there with the best.

Ymmv based on location and route to their servers though.

 

[IdiotInCharge]

Works on Windows and Pixel 3a, Speedtest looks good here.

 

[MavericK]

PIA sent me a lengthy email after I cancelled and said it was because of this. This must really be hurting them, for good reason.

 

[sleepeeg3]

What? NordVPN had a major security breach AND MORE IMPORTANTLY did not reveal it to affected users for a long, long time. Not to mention of course that the name itself is very nearly something of a life - "Nord" VPN is based in Panama.

You're much better off with Mullvad , CryptoStorm, ProtonVPN and a few others. Be wary everyone , like with Kape, lots of VPNs are being absorbed by companies with sketchy backgrounds and in some cases significant connections to intelligence services.

I used PIA. Once they sorted out their software (about a year ago) it was fantastic.

Unfortunately, I switched to NordVPN. Supposed to be one of the best performing, lowest price, Netflix compatible and servers located in a privacy oriented country. However, I don't know if my cable provider (Comcast) is blocking servers, but the servers get disconnected all the time. Not sure what is going on, but service sucks. ...and it's slow compared to PIA. Would not recommend.

 

[IdiotInCharge]

Unfortunately, I switched to NordVPN.

I just switched from NordVPN. Didn't have trouble with speed, however I regularly had trouble getting their clients connected on Android and Windows. We'll see how Mullvad does, for a flat < US$6 / month, I figure it's worth trying.

 

[DogsofJune]

PIA sent me a lengthy email after I cancelled and said it was because of this. This must really be hurting them, for good reason.

Yeah, the same blanket statement. I got one too.

Time will tell what will happen with the company, but they can do so without my support.

 

[xx0xx]

I have been happy with Mullvad. Good performance. Easy to use. Solid company from the research I've done. I may not 100% trust them, but I trust them more than ISPs.

While it doesn't necessarily make a company trustworthy, I think it's a good sign when VPN companies allow you to even anonymize payment and accounts for them as much as possible (Mullvad, CryptoStorm, etc). Mullvad gives many options for payment, and your "account" is a number, no email signup or anything. I think that at least shows some commitment to privacy.

 

[dvsman]

After seeing this, I turned off my auto renew too. Still active until March next year so I'll use it if I absolutely need to (coffee shops, public wifi) but I'll definitely wait and see how the new ownership plays out over the long term.