In the wake of the Proton controversy, I’ve been looking towards alternatives towards their services. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find a good alternative to ProtonVPN. I’m looking for the following in a VPN service:
- Port forwarding support
- Open source
- Android app and Firefox extension available
- Relatively cheap, around $3-4 month (okay with annual pricing)
The only options I found were Private Internet Access and Windscribe, but I found issues with them. If I’m cutting ties with Proton based on ideals I disagree with, I should be rejecting alternatives on the same basis.
Based on what I saw in the PIA subreddit, Private Internet Access seems to have some issues with service reliability and concerns about its ownership having ties to Israel, implying Zionist affiliation. Windscribe seems to have better service, but they have had a questionable social media history: edgy marketing including an AI-generated Hitler and a controversy where, according to them, they joked about a guy being mentally ill but their post easily looked like they were saying trans people are mentally ill.
Is there an option I missed? Should I try one of these options despite their faults? I’d like to know your thoughts.
Tbh ODoH sounds like Tor but with much greater chance of collusion between proxy and resolver. I’d still trust it less than a reputable VPN.
And hosting the ODoH on an Oracle VPS doesn’t make it more trustworthy. Oracle has your credit card info. They could report or sell the info, and Cloudflare would now know that the VPS belongs to you, making the setup identical to just sending DoH requests directly to Cloudflare.
Edit: also it seems like ECH only proxies the first packet, and your normal traffic would still go directly between you and the server, or your Oracle VPS and the server. A big part of VPNs is hiding your identity from the server. And VPNs mix the traffic of many customers, unlike a private VPS.
The question is whether Oracle working together with Cloudflare is a more likely scenario or the “trusted” VPN provider literally selling your data anyway.
I think a trusted DNS server and an Oracle proxy is going to be more secure than trusting one provider with all your data
They don’t need to work together, they can just sell the data to the same company (Google, Facebook) or both get subpoena’d by the government.
Their main business is not privacy. If they are caught selling data, they’ll still survive. A VPN provider on the other hand would be staking their entire company.
How would you correlate those two things? Let’s say I access cloudflare DNS from one proxy and the request over the other proxy. How would Google know that they are the same device?