Since IVPN and Mullvad are both phasing out port forwarding, are there any alternatives? I am not looking for something like NordVPN which is a privacy nightmare. AirVPN is also not private enough considering I’ve seen reports online of ISPs sending out DMCA letters of gold to its users.
AzireVPN added port forwarding, it’s also sweden based but lags the audits
AirVPN! Been a customer for 7-8 years.
Edit: I see AirVPN was mentioned by op in its post. Regarding it being “not private enough” and reports of users receiving DMCA notices: I highly doubt these reports are correct, and even it they were, I don’t think it would be the fault of AirVPN. From a technical perspective AirVPN is excellent. They offer every feature you can imagine and allow you to work with native WireGuard, OpenVPN or their own client.
But this technical freedom might lead to some misconfigurations out there, like DNS leaking due to not enforcing changes to resolv.conf etc. if you’re not that technical, use their official client.
Honestly i don’t really use port forwarding at all but it sucks its being removed, we need more privacy in this day and age.
I switched to protonvpn recently and it seems pretty good, I was getting a lot of websites blocking me when I was using PIA and that seems to not be a problem with proton.
Personally I don’t trust Proton. I know I’m paranoid, but can’t be too sure about anything these days. To my knowledge MV and IVPN are the only ones with a nice privacy reputation. Shame they are cutting port forwarding
Proton only started logging his IP after they were legally forced to do so, just like any other law abiding company would have to do.
Proton offers an onion site of Protonmail which the activist should have been using since he allegedly committed
theft and property damage, crimes - the latter two - that enable surveillance
this is a case of user error and bad opsec, not a company bending over backwards to share their users information. If you’re going to do things that are likely going to get you arrested, no matter how noble the cause, make sure you have excellent OpSec
Is AirVPN out of the question? They’ve still got port forwarding
No public audits - I don’t trust. Italy is also not exactly a privacy (and personal rights) haven.
I suspect ProtonVPN will remove port forwarding soon enough. Mullvad had valid concerns with removing port forwarding, and I expect the industry to agree. I’m not sure what the answer to this problem is.
I saw someone say that Proton implemented their port forwarding in a different way than Mullvad that negates a lot of the issues that caused them to axe it
Hi, I looked into this and from what I can gather, ProtonVPN gives out temporary ports for port forwarding. I’m not 100% how long these ports are leased for, but as long as you run a script like this to move your torrent client’s port around to match ProtonVPN’s, I can see how this would work. It’s not perfect, but it’s workable. I wonder if Mullvad will implement something like this to achieve parity.
I moved from mullvad to ivpn and now again on the lookout. I guess i2p is “the future” but right now I’m not sure how that works with private trackers.
Whilst you can still torrent without port forwarding I don’t think seeding works right?
Seeding still works without port forwarding but uploading your owns torrents is not possible
That’s not entirely true- you can upload your own, but you can only seed to users that do have port forwarding. On many trackers, that initial seed is all going to seed boxes with an autograb script enabled anyway, and those do have port forwarding.
Torguard supports port forwarding. I’m not sure how it ranks in privacy though.
I bought 2 years from them a while ago but was required to:
- enter an email
- use my address to purchase
Good product though. Horrible SOCKS5 proxies though, almost 90% downtime. Not to foremention the horrible support from the admins - the normal support was amazing though.
Really up to you if you want the compromises, though there are better VPNs for privacy out there.
PIA have port forwarding.
I know they’ve been one of the top recommendations from TF for years.
they are owned by a umbrella company which owns multiple big name VPN providers so I wouldnt really trust them anymore https://embed.kumu.io/9ced55e897e74fd807be51990b26b415#vpn-company-relationships/private-internet-access
Which also used to spread adware through their applications (search Cross Rider I believe, now names Kape)
