Free VPN apps on Google Play turned Android phones into proxies : android

[–] [email protected] 51 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If you're using a free proxy, I have some RAM for you to download

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

How much? I need unlimited ram!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Free

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

And your the ram now

[–] [email protected] 36 points 5 months ago

Free "VPN" app: look at me. You're the VPN now.

[+] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (10 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Proton is unfortunately using wireguard and openvpn protocols, both of which can be blocked with relative ease.

I used them before moving to China, and within 3 months of arriving, the service was permanently interrupted, and their support acknowledged the outage, said they can't do anything about it, and ghosted me on the refund request since I had an annual subscription.

Mullvad is generally considered the industry leader btw., though for China there's hardly anyone but Astrill that actually works.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Does this cover Proton's new(ish) Stealth protocol too? They made a big deal about it being unblockable, and I (in my relatively light usage) haven't had any problems with it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

I'm not sure, haven't read about that yet. But I'm testing it as we speak, since they make it available in the free version as well, which is nice.

Will report back after some more testing (Lemmy isn't blocked [yet]).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

So far so good, I have to say. I've got a subscription for Astrill until November, but will keep the free proton running in parallel as a long term test and then consider switching. Thanks a lot!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

@[email protected] @[email protected]
In China there are lot of home brewed solutions like openclash, passwall, vmess...etc. Traditional commercial VPNs are too expensive or suck in China.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah the problem I have with those is that they are mostly run by Chinese, be it on- or offshore, and they can be compromised or extorted. And any service that accepts payment via alipay is sketchy in my books.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's opensource, You can get a vps and run your own, very easy and the speed is enough to watch 4k youtube.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I had a shadowsocks server on a vps, was dead after a few weeks. Hosted on AWS Hong Kong (before China took over). They blacklist IPs very quickly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

@[email protected]
SS on AWS is easy to be found and blocked, try Trojan, Hysteria v2, V2Ray..., I had one of V2Ray on GCP hong kong, and it lasted for a very long time.
Usually GCP and Azure has the best connection to CN.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Interesting, thanks! My astrill subscription is still running for a couple months, but will test it as a fallback.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Unfortunately vpn (and vps) providers are very wary about providing service that specifically target customers in china because when their service inevitable got ip-blocked by the gfw, those customers would immediately issuing chargeback, which is much more expensive to process than refund. The only providers that are still in the market for circumventing gfw now price their service accordingly (i.e. much more expensive than the usual vpn marketrate) to absorb this risk.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You dont know that much about VPNs then

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

And how do you know Proton VPN isn't exactly the same?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

https://protonvpn.com/features/trustworthy

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Ah, they say they are trustworthy so it is totally fine

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

No...? Do you not understand the meaning of "open source" and "independently audited by third parties"? Or maybe you just didn't actually click through to the link I shared (what a surprise).

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

The only 3 good free unlimited options out there are ProtonVPN, RiseupVPN and BrightVPN(only for windows), limited ones Windscribe and PrivadoVPN(10GB per month).

These are the only good free options anything else it's a scam(you are the product) or you have to pay.

Another option maybe could be self-hosting in Oracle Cloud but it will not be anonymous at all, secure maybe but definitely not anonymous.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

ProtonVPN, RiseupVPN and BrightVPN(only for windows), limited ones Windscribe and PrivadoVPN

Where did you get this idea?

Mullvad, IVPN, Perfect Privacy, and a few others have had independent audits of their no-log behavior and in some cases, law enforcement audits. They sure as hell don't proxy your traffic. They all accept Monero and cash. They all have multihop.

Edit: I see you said free. Yeah, I wouldn't trust a free VPN, regardless. If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Yeah I'm talking about free options. 👍👍

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I agree,

However I got to a point that I'm skeptical even with paid, well established products. I don't need VPN but if I did I'd try something based on onion routing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I just entered fake name and paid with crypto for my VPS.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Then you will be OK 👍👍

[+] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I don't know how strong this defense would be when they put you on trial for CSAM.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

"Your honor, I didn't distribute distribute CSAM. That was somebody else." and "Yes, your honor, I did sign that internet service contract agreeing that I am responsible for all activity that originates from my network."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Only if they're stating this upfront, in a giant text. Those apps hide this capability and are thus categorized as malware. Turning the victim's computer into a residential proxy has always been a staple in botnet operations.

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