u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)
I like computers, trains, space, radio-related everything and a bunch of other tech related stuff. User of GNU+Linux.
I am also dumb and worthless.
My laptop is HP 255 G7 running Manjaro and Linux Mint.
I own RTL-SDRv3 and RSP1 clone.
SDF Unix shell username: user224
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Except the 5 device limit. With OVPN it means 5 connected devices, with WG it means 5 registered public keys.
Say you use the official Mullvad app and also setup some 3rd party WG client on your phone. That’s now taking up 2 devices. Or perhaps you do have 6 devices, but you never have more than 2 of them running at once. With WG, that’s still 6 devices regardless of them being connected or not, while with OVPN it will indeed be just 2 devices.
Just look at where their servers are.
Kind of… al around the place? What do you mean?
Also, in the mail you don’t send the account number, just a payment token. So the postman won’t be stealing your account, just your cash at most.
Vouchers are probably the safest, but I actually like sending mail, and this is basically my only opportunity to do so nowadays.
Cisco used to not be that selective.
They used to give out free Meraki APs to everyone just for attending their webinars.
The catch with those devices was licensing. You’ve got some limited-time free license, and then you either paid or kept a paperweight.
At least officially. Some of them were later supported by OpenWRT, but newer ones are more locked down.
It technologically can’t. With Wireguard, you need to upload each device’s public key to Mullvad, thus registering each device separately. With OpenVPN you login with username and password. Or in this case just the username.
Theoretically speaking, you could have the same private key on 2 devices that won’t be connected simultaneously though.
Mullvad is cheaper, and probably a bit more trusted, but Proton has port forwarding. Currently I use Mullvad. I don’t like the Mullvad’s 5 device limit on Wireguard clients though. You can only have 5 devices added to the account, no matter if just 1 or all 5 are currently connected. And after using Wireguard once, I don’t want to use OpenVPN again where wg can fully replace it.
Both support cash payments, though Proton makes me feel like they expect it for larger sums of cash:
We cannot be responsible for lost shipments, so we strongly recommend sending your payment using a service that provides a tracking number so you can track the shipment. It’s also helpful to notify us that you’re sending us cash in the mail, so we know to expect it.
While Mullvad asks you not to use registered mail nor send larger amounts of cash. I feel like the latter is implied by asking to notify them. I suppose “Hey, I am sending you 10 bucks via mail.” is not what’s expected here.
What I absolutely like is the fair pricing. It’s same price no matter how much time you buy, whether it’s 1 month, a year or two. Even their direct competitor IVPN does this crap (and so does Proton). I value that quite a bit.
So currently Mullvad is winning for me.
Oh, I searched it up and indeed that seems what it does.
I thought it normally just forwarded all the traffic. I wouldn’t think people would just let someone else see all traffic between their servers and their users.
I thought it was more like public SSH jump servers.
Right, how else would the CF interstitial page work.
I thought it was done just for the Quick Tunnels which don’t even require an account. I’ve used those a few times, but only in cases where plain HTTP would be OK.
Yup. Boot time and loading of system apps. 8.1 was basically instant while XP and Mint had slight delay. Not a big deal though, just something interesting for being Windows. After all, it was made for tablets.
I also put Windows 11 on it despite being unsupported. That was slower, but still OK-ish with SSD. Definitely nowhere near Linux Mint though. The background processes were just killing the CPU. Thankfully, thanks to being made in 2007 the cooler could easily take 100% CPU usage. However, it would hover around just 6% with network disconnected. Hmmm…
The CPU was Core 2 Duo T7500 upgraded from T7100. I got it on AliExpress for €1. It seems some people were using them for… making keychains? Anyway, they were sold as functional.
I wish laptop CPUs and GPUs were still upgradable. The GPU was GeForce 8600M.
*8.1
Due to the optimizations Windows 8.1 is my favorite Windows version. When I compared it to Linux Mint 21 Cinnamon on my old (now dead) laptop, it performed slightly faster. It also somehow beat Windows XP which is what that thing was made for. Although a part of that could have been that half of the drivers only worked in XP, so it had more to load.
Maybe if they properly called it Windows 9, it would have caught on. It was definitely different enough from 8.
If I want to quickly share something from my phone, I use NGINX in Termux with autoindex enabled.
No need for anything else than browser on client-side.
Actually, on Play store there’s also a simple GUI app called “Simple HTTP server”, but NGINX feels fancier.
Just a tip if you want to try this:
By default, error logs are kept. One source of errors is interface suddenly disappearing (i.e. your phone got disconnected from network). This error will be logged as quickly as it can be.
What happened (when this occurred)? I found my phone stuck in bootloop. The error log filled internal storage to the last byte causing Android system to crash and unable to reboot, which it tried again, again, again,… Bootloop. I just found my pocket suddenly feeling unreasonably hot.
In my case, forcing it into recovery, turning it off from there and retrying boot up freed 17MB from somewhere, allowing the phone to boot up.
Alternative to that would be a hard reset.
Sounds crazy, but any app could fill the internal storage like that.
ProtonVPN free (paid is still too expensive for me) and Mullvad.
I find that Mullvad is usually blocked more.
For the past 3 or 4 years I was just on ProtonVPN free tier. For past 15 days I am using Mullvad. I really like that you can choose some custom ports for WireGuard, and also the multihop.
What is unfortunate is that I can’t generate separate credentials for OpenVPN, like with ProtonVPN. It just uses account ID.
I have also tried IVPN for a week. Nicer UI, but a bit more expensive, sort of. They have variable pricing based on subscription length, and that just makes me dislike them enough to stick with Mullvad. €5/month whether it’s 1 month, 6 months, a year or longer.
I don’t remember what specifically it was, but I know I also preferred the Mullvad’s ToS over IVPN, although both are fine.
I also thought of AirVPN because of port forwarding, but for privacy I’ll stick to Mullvad.
What surprised me with Mullvad was the payment processing speed. It only took 4 days from me dropping the envelope with money into mail collection box in Slovakia to me getting the time added. Considering that shipping to Sweden is “3-5 days”, they must have just processed that basically immediately.
But perhaps I was just lucky. I’ll see the next time.
One DoT provider you could choose is… Mullvad: https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls
I use NextDNS, which others have mentioned here.
But Mullvad also has public DNS (DoH and DoT only).
They did have a server seized (physically) in 2015: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/6754830
Though apparently there were no logs.
Interestingly though, that forum post was now deleted from AirVPN site. Strange…
Mullvad browser is basically Tor browser without the Tor part.
DD-WRT is fairly easy to set up and has VPN support. I recommend using Wireguard as opposed to OpenVPN due to efficiency, ESPECIALLY WITH CHEAP WEAK ROUTERS.
I mean, it’s a huge difference from my tests. With OpenVPN I hit 100% CPU usage on my Cisco Linksys WRT160NL at just 5Mbps. With Wireguard I was doing 25Mbps with just around 20% CPU usage (reported by top, not webUI).
You could try Mull browser (not to be confused with Mullvad browser which is desktop-only), it seems to do quite better. It’s a fork of Firefox for Android, similar to Tor Browser on Android, just without the Tor part.
Which is probably why it’s named “Mull” as Mullvad did the same on desktop.
You can see what you’re leaking here: https://www.deviceinfo.me/
It’s so much info that it’s pretty unique.
There’s also !meshtastic@lemmy.ml, but it’s inactive at the moment.
I don’t judge by domain names.
It’s also listed in the top 2 at FMHY: https://fmhy.net/audiopiracyguide#download-sites
And best site at DB0 megathread (!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com): https://rentry.co/megathread-music#free-mp3-download
Unless they’re simultaneously connected you could share the same private key in all of the configs.