It’s a paring knife, actually. Just cutting up some ginger for my chicken soup. 
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I signed up today specifically to comment on the poor pay/download/install/start experience.
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No axe to grind. I just investigated what sounded like a possibly good offer and found it wanting. Since the sites FAQ seemed to be ignoring the important point of logging (purposely?), I thought I would mention it. Now I’ll just put my tin foil hat back on and return to my basement.
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If it works, that sounds like a great deal.
Myself, i’ve been using https://www.witopia.net/products/ for a couple of years now (pretty much essential in the UK with all the censorship going on, ironically connecting to the USA gives the best user experience: google searches in english + USA netflix without the the UK cameron firewall censorship)
A lot more expensive, but i’ve never had a problem with it. Can choose to connect to most countries in the world too…
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Private Internet Access. That’s what I use. No logging of traffic or session data at all. You can find out about the good, the bad and the ugly here:
though VPN Unlimited is not included and it is rather difficult to find reviews of it (“rather difficult” defined as "nothing came up on the first Google page so screw it).
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That’s weird. I could forgive them logging information if that’s what Caesar demands in any given country, but trying to polish that turd by saying it’s only so I can be proven innocent of… whatever? That’s just insulting my intelligence.
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I’d forgive them that bit. Most likely it was result of a meeting where somebody asked to make the bad information sound nicer and somebody else complied. Something along the line of “is there anything we can do”, and it went wrong a bit. But there may be users who actually believe it and take it as nice; depending on their proportion it may have actually been a good thing to say.
Public relations can do more spinning than a jet engine.
And sometimes such decisions come not from being cynically manipulative, but from being desperate and having no idea what to do. Imagine a room of tired to exhausted people trying to figure out a million things, minds hazed by caffeine and fatigue, and this being just one of too many problems that have to be addressed, most of them seeming to be more urgent at the moment.
For those who want to do SSH port forwarding it is not difficult if you have an account on an internet routeable Unix/Linux machine or server.
To make a box routeable it needs to have at least one port open to the internet past the NAT on most routers. Then you need to get a free or paid account on a dynamic DNS provider I think no-ip.com still does free accounts, dyndns does not. You will need to run update software on your servor, or if equipped the router so the domain name stays linked to the correct IP address No-IP.com Knowledge Base and Customer Support Center
then using either Putty http://www.putty.org/ or your friendly linux command line do something like this:
ssh -p 1234 -D 5678 username@unicornchaser.no-ip.com
it will prompt for password then you will have a socks5 proxy ready to connect to on your localhost:5678
ssh is the command to start a Secure Socket Host session, it is mostly for getting a command line session started on a remote machine but SSH is a pretty cool swiss army knife tool anymore.
-p 1234 designates the port (arbitrary number 1234) your server is mapped to on unicornchaser.no-ip.com, default is 22 but if your buddy is setting this up for you I bet she is already using 22 for her machine. Some services will redirect port numbers so you can hit default 22 with your domain name yet actually access
-D 5678 (don’t forget capital D)(5678 again I made up an arbitrary number) destination address on your local machine, set your browser or other net aware programs to use a socks5 proxy server at this port on your machine.
unicornchaser.no-ip.com unicornchaser is a made up subdomain use whatever name you choose with your dynamic DNS provider.
Here is something that looks like help for Putty, I dont use windows so cant verify accuracy SSH & SOCKS5 tunnel howto
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I use PIA too and I have no complaints. They don’t log, and while the handshake sometimes takes awhile, the bandwidth is always stellar, and their app gives me some advanced options like using blowfish 448 rather than AES, and offers some protocol hiding features.
It’s not the cheapest service, but is very reasonable, and yet is still very simple to use.
Chief complaint: it’s USA>Vancouver bridge has some bad latency, but that only really matters for gamers. Otherwise the USA>UK bridge actually improves latency for ARMA3 battle Royale servers located in the UK and FR.
Hey All,
Alex from StackSocial here. I see a few complaints about the product/onboarding for this VPN. If you have any issues, or would like a refund, feel free to reach out to us – support@stacksocial.com and mention you’re a boing boing reader. We’ll get you all taken care of.
It’s a great discount, and we like the product, but we want you all to be satisfied no matter what.
Have any more feedback? Feel free to comment below!
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I wish i hadn’t signed up for this service. The mac app is literally a terrible repack of Tunnelblick and the initial profile kept thinking i was on a mobile device. I had to uninstall then re-install Tunnelblick to get my old profile to work again. The website simplexsolutionsinc.com wouldn’t even let me delete my device, it said i had already removed 1 device and had to wait a week to delete another. pathetic.
The mobile experience was ok, and switching between servers was easy. You could also download a global cert, although it was issued by COMODO which i don’t trust.
overall I give this purchase -1 star and seriously regret having made it. I certainly wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who wants this for privacy. It was such a bad experience i created this account just to warn others.
Re: Private Internet Access: Seconded! Absolutely the best VPN service that I have ever used; before this, I had VYPRVpn for about a year; continuous disconnects, and they log everything, so they’re an open book to the snoops.
PIA keepo NO user logs and the price is right (about $6.99 a month if I remember correctly). I would be VERY suspicious of a brand new VPN service provider entering the game at this point in time.
There’s an excellent site comparing almost all the major VPN’s : http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/07/08/is-your-vpn-legit-or-shit/
Check it out before you buy.
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Lesson learned never trust a recommendation from BoingBoing again. I would have expected a VPN recommended by BoingBoing to at least do the bare minimum of at least pretending to not keep logs.
Will be getting a refund and keeping my PIA account. I have had zero issues with them just figured this was recommended and was an order of magnitude cheaper so I jumped on it.
Thanks for the giant headache Mark.
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Logging? Yikes. In that case…
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After a bit of research this is the type of VPN I would expect Corry to write an evil click bait headline about.
Logs traffic. They say they don’t in their terms of use, Unless you break their rules. But how do they know you are breaking the rules since they claim they don’t monitor your traffic.
Tells you it’s a violation of the ToS to use the VPN for copywrite infringement.
So if you stream something from the BBC you just gave up all your rights to privacy under their ToS and they will log your traffic and turn it over to the authorities.
Entire sections of the ToS seem to be there to explain that all privacy is thrown out the window on a whim.
Yep not trusting anything recomended by BoingBoing again.
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Boingboing talks so much about net neutrality, but isnt’t this kind of merchandising another form of making internet less free and reliable? I probably would have signed up for the VPN service if it were not for the “update” section of the post. Would it be so hard to identify affiliate links inside each post and not in some general blog policy no one reads?
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@ringmybeller, is there any financial incentive to keep the records?
While it would be a brave choice I think that you have an opportunity right here and now to change the records policy and lead the industry as well as grab some business. Boingboing might be perceived as a radical bunch but I think other than vanilla secure business users most VPN users would qualify as educated tinfoil hat club members who would appreciate a records deleting provider.
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Seconded. “Affiliate link” = “Advertisement.” It’d be nice to be able to tell the difference more readily between what are basically ads and something more like regular blog posts. Good of Mark to at least come back and update this particular post the way he did. But still.
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Quite. I don’t begrudge BB making some money off the site I read for free, but ads, “sponsored” content and affiliate links should always be conspicuously disclosed. Frankly it didn’t even occur to me that Mark would have posted an affiliate link on this, even though I should now better from past practices on BB. Even Amazon actually requires Amazon Associate affiliate links to be explicit so that people know (though Amazon could take steps on their own end to identify the affiliate on the landing page.)
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