Interested to hear opinions about various VPNs.

[engineer_comp_geek]

Moderator Note

@Bear_Nenno

I’m not looking to do anything nefarious or illegal, and I’m not looking to bypass any government censorship or blocked content. I merely want to access all of the same YouTube, ROKU and Netflix stuff that I’ve come accosted to.

While you claim that you are not looking to do anything illegal, some of these things are illegal. Netflix for example has various agreements in place about what can be shown in what country, as does Youtube. You are technically violating those agreements by spoofing your country location.

@Mahaloth

• They keep no records of your internet usage.

The primary purpose of this feature by VPN services is to protect their customers who are engaging in illegal file and content sharing. Discussions of illegal file sharing are strictly forbidden here.

The primary use of VPNs these days is to engage in illegal file sharing without getting caught. Secondary is spamming. Things like trolling, ban evasion, and online harassment are also common uses. There are legal uses for VPNs, such as for security concerns or to access private networks (I use a VPN to access my work network from home, for example), but legal and legitimate users of VPNs are a very small minority these days.

We have been a bit inconsistent in the moderation of VPN topics. Since the primary use of all of the VPN services listed is illegal file sharing, I tend not to allow much discussion at all about them. Other moderators want to allow the legal discussions of VPNs, but as this thread shows, it is difficult to keep everyone on the legal side of the line. The main feature of aiding illegal file sharing has already been mentioned, and I suspect that most of the VPN services listed are used more for illegal file sharing than any other purpose.

This is the appropriate section of the rules/FAQ:

Copyright violations: Are NOT OK, under any circumstances. For copyright rules, see Post #3 in this thread… and see the Registration Agreement for “illegal acts.” We consider that discussions of P2P and file-sharing are pretty much discussions of how to evade copyright laws. The excuse “I just want to download public domain movies and Linux distributions” is lame. Very.

Many of the services that used to operate illegally/without paying royalties are now in compliance and so discussion of these services would be allowed, they’re legitimate. But we do not want to see recommendations of companies and programs still remaining that operate in violation of copyright law.

How to get around the law: Discussions about legal methods (avoidance) are acceptable; discussions about illegal methods (evasion) are not. Again, see the Registration Agreement.

The OP is trying to keep this legal, so in that spirit, I am going to allow this thread to continue. Let’s not mention VPN services that advertise among their primary features that they do not keep records. Let’s also avoid mentioning VPN services that advertise multiple and constantly changing destination IPs, as the primary use of that feature is spamming.

Keep everything on the legal side of the line. Otherwise I am going to be forced to send this thread to the cornfield.

Also, for those that are considering accessing the SDMB from a VPN, many spammers and trolls have used VPN services to avoid bans, and as a result, many VPN IP addresses are permanently blocked here. Depending on what VPN service you choose, you might not be able to access the SDMB while using it.