Riseup vpn is a free, donations based VPN, that doesn’t require an account and has no logs policey. They doesn’t have lots of serves like Protonvpn for example but they’re running for years and support P2P, so if someone is too short for paying for a VPN, I think its a pretty good for some use cases.
Seems like a few people here have clearly never heard of Riseup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riseup
It’s a volunteer and donation run anarchist collective that has been around since 1999. They have fought a number of legal battles against governments to varying degrees of success.
The people involved have close ties to basically everyone involved in Tor and should be regarded with the same level of trust (what ever that means for you). There’s also a lot of overlap with some core Debian contributors.
That said, I wouldn’t use them for P2P other than occasional use. Or if you do, consider making a substantial monthly donation. It’s a lot of resources to pull from a small organisation at the expense of people who need their services for political organizing, which is their primary focus.
Yeah that’s fair, I hope people realize I meant that you don’t have to pay to use the service, and not that I’m discouraging donations in any way. They deserve every penny!
What’s the catch?
Technically you should be donating if you get value out of it
Fair!
The catch is that free services like this are run for people who need them, not people who want to save money. In my opinion it is very scabby to use something like RiseUp for potentially data intensive tasks like torrenting if you can afford a paid VPN service. Leave it for those who genuinely need it.
Very nice and seems fast
In the next weeks I’ll go in an authoritarian country so I can test if it works good
Seems trustworthy even if free, but if using for p2p it’s a bit abusing them, maybe donate a bit via liberapay
authoritarian country
How authoritarian we talking? China?
Yes, so I am preparing a collection of VPN…
I don’t understand what they’re thinking.
In the beginning it was just blocking Facebook& Twitter so it wasn’t a big issue. Now it’s almost completely isolated.
At this level is just self harm, as a VPN is no more optional but is mandatory for everyone.
Even the director of the gfw program was spotted with some VPN icons on his desktop during a PowerPoint presentation from his laptop
This allows for easy supply chain attacks to companies because when employees need to download huge packages from the internet like xcode, they a presented with a choice: download from official website at 5 kb/s and finish next week or download an hacked version laced with malware from a shady website at 5 megabytes/s? Even Tencent was hacked in this way…
From Riseup: “Due to Thanksgiving and other deadlines, our lawyers were not available to advise us on what we can and cannot say,” the collective member told me. “So in the interest of adopting a precautionary principle, we couldn’t say anything. Now that we have talked to [counsel], we can clearly say that since our beginning, and as of this writing, riseup has not received a NSL, a FISA order/directive, or any other national security order/directive, foreign or domestic.”
Intercept article: “And yet, when I asked if riseup had received any request for user data since August 16, the collective did not comment. Clearly, something happened, but riseup isn’t able to talk about it publicly. The riseup collective is currently having internal discussions about when it will be able to update its warrant canary.”
That’s a point worth following. Thanks.
How could one be invited to their email service? I don’t think I know anyone who’s in there.
People don’t like this answer, but buying invites. Theyre cheap, but don’t know where to get them anymore. Be careful for scams.
Don’t trust “free” services.
Riseup is free because it is made by people who want the internet to be better. The same way tor is free.
But you should be donating if you find it useful. And I could nearly guarantee that a service that is used for censorship resistance that gets used for P2P will go from nice and fast to ungodly slow
Kinda remember there being similar discussions about people should not use TOR for P2P and for similar reasons.
Anyway, I thought I read something awhile back that P2P and torrenting were eyeing I2P for future anonymousness. Is thhat still a work in progress or am I remembering wrong?
I2P still has torrenting. They have an I2P tracker as well iirc. The problem is that it’s not as “simple” as the standard vpn+torrnet. As you need an i2p aware torrent client, proxy the torrent client, and then actually get good enough peers. For popular content sure, but the amount of people using realdebrid or other ‘streaming’ services are insane now.
Understood, and I don’t think anyone should be trusting Tor either, at least not in the US.
Not sure why you’re being down voted. You’re absolutely right. I wouldn’t go anywhere near a free VPN.
