Use to use PIA, which was a decent service before it was bought out by an Israeli ISP that also bought out 3 other ones. Yeah, not using that any more. Current one I use is Mullvad, company is Sweden based but accounts are only traced by numbers, so if you pay by bitcoin or a service like that it can be completely anon.
You can toss some cash in an envelope along with your account number, leave off the return address, and mail it to Mullvad for payment, too.
If you've got a day or two to kill throw on a mask, fake beard (or shave your current beard), hitchhike to another state, and drop it off at some street side mailbox. Be sure to leave your phone at home.
If you don't want the trouble of a virtual machine, go into torrent client options and set it to only use the VPN network interface instead of any interface. This way if you accidentally open qBittorrent when not on VPN it won't connect anywhere.
If you also want a VPN for privacy, set up a second browser to clear everything on exit (history, cookies, cache) and use that one on VPN. If you're not using Brave as your main browser, use it as your VPN browser since it has anti-fingerprinting. The ad industry supercookies have gotten so good that if you use your normal browser and open a private window you'll get a cookie clickthrough, but actually they still know who you are.
Proton was fine except their business model. They only have a subscription and if you prepay and just let it lapse when you come back they charge you for the unused time. Example, you pay a month, let it lapse, come back after skipping a month -- they want you to pay for 3 months. If you have any other Proton services you pay for they hold these hostage to make you pay for your 'delinquent' VPN time. You have to log in and cancel to stop it accruing 'delinquent' time.
Mullvad on the other hand your account is just a random number. You can pay with credit, cash, crypto and any number of months at a time.
Performance-wise they were about the same, max ~10-30 MiB torrent on gigabit, both can be used on multiple devices at once. Proton had more servers in more countries, which was occasionally useful because some countries like S Korea seem to commonly have region blocks (peers that won't
connect outside of KR).
I've used Nordvpn for coming up on three years now. It's worked. I like that they have servers all over the place and they support OpenVPN. I don't necessarily want to give a glowing review because I've not exactly gone out of my way recently to see what politics they support or if there's any security issues. I don't really use for illicit stuff at least not often. I just prefer to not give my ISP access to log everything along with the occasional use to break a geo-restriction. My three years I paid for is up later this year though, so I'll at least look into options at that point.
This thread in AskWin had some good answers.
Use to use PIA, which was a decent service before it was bought out by an Israeli ISP that also bought out 3 other ones. Yeah, not using that any more. Current one I use is Mullvad, company is Sweden based but accounts are only traced by numbers, so if you pay by bitcoin or a service like that it can be completely anon.
All bitcoin transactions are public.
You can toss some cash in an envelope along with your account number, leave off the return address, and mail it to Mullvad for payment, too.
If you've got a day or two to kill throw on a mask, fake beard (or shave your current beard), hitchhike to another state, and drop it off at some street side mailbox. Be sure to leave your phone at home.
8ch moe talks about Mullvad.
If you don't want the trouble of a virtual machine, go into torrent client options and set it to only use the VPN network interface instead of any interface. This way if you accidentally open qBittorrent when not on VPN it won't connect anywhere.
If you also want a VPN for privacy, set up a second browser to clear everything on exit (history, cookies, cache) and use that one on VPN. If you're not using Brave as your main browser, use it as your VPN browser since it has anti-fingerprinting. The ad industry supercookies have gotten so good that if you use your normal browser and open a private window you'll get a cookie clickthrough, but actually they still know who you are.
You're saying to set up a VM to make the torrent connections then you download from the VM?
I see, yeah that's probably smart.
I use my gaming machine to execute scary code, lol. That's what i use to type silly messages onto forums, too.
I have a separate LAN for important stuff that's not directly connected to the Internet.
Torguard is pretty good from my experience.
I've used Proton and Mullvad.
Proton was fine except their business model. They only have a subscription and if you prepay and just let it lapse when you come back they charge you for the unused time. Example, you pay a month, let it lapse, come back after skipping a month -- they want you to pay for 3 months. If you have any other Proton services you pay for they hold these hostage to make you pay for your 'delinquent' VPN time. You have to log in and cancel to stop it accruing 'delinquent' time.
Mullvad on the other hand your account is just a random number. You can pay with credit, cash, crypto and any number of months at a time.
Performance-wise they were about the same, max ~10-30 MiB torrent on gigabit, both can be used on multiple devices at once. Proton had more servers in more countries, which was occasionally useful because some countries like S Korea seem to commonly have region blocks (peers that won't connect outside of KR).
Overall I like Mullvad a lot more.
I've used Nordvpn for coming up on three years now. It's worked. I like that they have servers all over the place and they support OpenVPN. I don't necessarily want to give a glowing review because I've not exactly gone out of my way recently to see what politics they support or if there's any security issues. I don't really use for illicit stuff at least not often. I just prefer to not give my ISP access to log everything along with the occasional use to break a geo-restriction. My three years I paid for is up later this year though, so I'll at least look into options at that point.
I use NordVPN to avoid reddit's fuckery. Supposedly not so good for hiding from "them," if that's what you're looking for.
Mullvad, AirVPN, and Proton VPN (protonmail)